U.S. senator criticizes Vt. barn census
By Terri Hallenbeck
Burlington Free Press
December 18, 2008
Vermont may want to take stock of its barns, but one U.S. senator says the $150,000 federal grant that helped pay for it is an example of wasteful spending.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., listed Vermont’s barn census as one among 65 examples of “wasteful Washington spending worth more than $1.3 billion” in a report released Wednesday.
Vermont received a $150,000 grant from the federal Preserve America program to conduct a census of barns in the state and their condition. The amount was matched by $20,000 in state money while volunteers did the work, said David Mace, spokesman for the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, which includes the Department of Historic Preservation.
Coburn’s report implies without saying so explicitly that collecting information about barns is not a worthy project.
Mace takes issue with that. The Legislature has been funding barn preservation efforts since 1991, he said. “We can see value in attempting to preserve Vermont’s historic barns,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that’s it’s being compared to a lobstercam.”
One of the other projects Coburn criticizes is $188,000 for the Lobster Institute in Maine, where one of the most popular offerings is said to be the lobstercam, a camera attached to a lobster trap that is updated every two minutes. Another on the list: $9.4 million to the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence Institute in California.
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$9,728,564,142,570.00
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$31,755.16 Per Citizen |
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