WASHINGTON — A sleepy Montana checkpoint along the Canadian border that sees about three travelers a day will get $15 million under President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan. A government priority list ranked the project as marginal, but two powerful Democratic senators persuaded the administration to make it happen.
Despite Obama’s promises that the stimulus plan would be transparent and free of politics, the government is handing out $720 million for border upgrades under a process that is both secretive and susceptible to political influence. This allowed low-priority projects such as the checkpoint in Whitetail, Mont., to skip ahead of more pressing concerns, according to documents revealed to The Associated Press.
A House oversight committee has added the checkpoint projects to its investigation into how the stimulus money is being spent. The top Republican on that committee, California Rep. Darrell Issa, sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Wednesday, questioning why some projects leapfrogged others.
It wasn’t supposed to be that way.
In 2004, Congress ordered Homeland Security to create a list, updated annually, of the most important repairs at checkpoints nationwide.
But the Obama administration continued a Bush administration practice of considering other, more subjective factors when deciding which projects get money.
The results:
• A border station in Napolitano’s home state of Arizona is getting $199 million, five times more than any other station. It was not rated among the neediest projects on the master list.
• A checkpoint in Laredo, Texas, which serves more than 55,000 travelers and 4,200 trucks a day, is rated among the government’s highest priorities but was passed over.
• The Westhope, N.D., checkpoint, which serves about 73 people a day and is among the lowest-priority projects, is set to get nearly $15 million for renovations.
• The Whitetail project — a border station the size and cost of a Hollywood mansion — benefited from two allies, Montana Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester. Both pressed Napolitano to finance projects in their state.
Customs and Border Protection, the Homeland Security agency overseeing border projects, allowed the AP to review the list but will not make it public or explain its justifications for deviating from it.
Customs officials said they wouldn’t release the master list because it was just a starting point and subject to misunderstanding. They acknowledged there’s no way for the public to know whether they are cherry-picking projects.
Some discrepancies between the stimulus plan and the priority list can be attributed to Congress, which set aside separate pools of money for large and small border stations. That guaranteed that a few small, probably lower-rated projects would be chosen ahead of bigger, higher-priority projects.
But it doesn’t explain all the discrepancies, because even within the two pools, Homeland Security sometimes reached way down on the list when selecting projects.
