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Roadside Attractions: Cheap Targets For Senate Bullies

January 6, 2009

Money is tight at the moment, and U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R) has used the current recession to attack even the thought of federal money going to Las Vegas’s proposed Mob Museum (One Vegas bureaucrat replied indignantly that, “We think our projects are just as important as those of the other local jurisdictions in the nation.”). In the meantime, special interests — wind farms, universities, corporate and industry lobbyists — are vying for federal money that won’t add even one worthwhile attraction to the vacation infrastructure!

Fellow Republican senator Tom Coburn issued a report late last year mocking “outrageous federal spending,” and citing, among other examples:

• $135,000 to re-stuff the world’s largest dead fish in Centerport, New York.

• $200,000 for a proposed Flood Memorial Plaza in Alton, Illinois.

• $9,000 to help repair the airplane gas station in Powell, Tennessee, which Coburn called “an eyesore” and “an airplane that cannot fly and a gas station that has not pumped gas for nearly half a century.”

The airplane gas station folks didn’t take the criticism lying down. And it bears noting that nowhere in Coburn’s report does it mention the $40,000 in federal money earmarked for a Route 66 travel guide in his home state of Oklahoma.

Picking on the poor airplane gas station people does seem petty (and it probably cost at least $9,000 for Coburn’s staff to research the attraction — to make sure it couldn’t fly or pump gas — and devise a media-ready quote assaulting it). There have been genuine boondoggles in the past, but even their ruins make interesting tourist attractions.

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