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Post-Standard, The (Syracuse, NY)

February 16, 2003
Section: Local
Edition: Final
Page: B6

Federal money is coming to Central New York to clean the waters and fill them with salmon, to study the air indoors and the winds outside, to buy buses and help people ride them to work, to equip police officers and improve the streets they patrol, to see the forests and preserve the trees, and to boost the Destiny USA project and the Borodino Community Center.

"There's a phenomenal amount of good funding," said Rep. James Walsh, who leveraged his position as chairman of a House appropriations committee to stock the new federal budget with more than $67 million for local projects. "It's a happy Valentine's Day," he said Friday as he telephoned local organizations with the good news. "It's great to be a chairman."

The money comes later than expected, as Congress failed to meet its Oct. 1 deadline for enacting a spending plan for fiscal year 2003. And most of the "earmarks," as the local grants are called, were marked down by 10 percent in final negotiations.

But Walsh's list of appropriations, which critics refer to as "pork," provides continuing funding or one-shot boosts for a range of local initiatives.

Many of the grants were announced last fall, before Walsh won election to an eighth two-year term, but some were only made public after the House and Senate approved the final budget on Thursday night.

Inserted into the final plan was a $1.7 million grant to help Destiny USA clean up toxic dirt near the site of the planned Grand Destiny Hotel.

"It's clearly an economic development project," said Walsh, R-Onondaga.

"They can't build the hotel unless they move that soil."

Walsh said he could justify using federal taxpayers' money to help the developer because The Pyramid Cos. were "not the perpetrators of the pollution." Pyramid buried the contaminated soil in a lined containment cell during construction of Carousel Center and has maintained and monitored the soil since then.

"There's pollution all around that lake," Walsh said. "I am committed to cleaning up that lake, and the federal government is going to do its part."

Walsh also obtained $1.4 million to help plan transportation in the vicinity of the Syracuse lakefront and the planned Destiny complex.

Destiny and Pyramid officials were among the most generous contributors to Walsh's last campaign, giving more than $25,000 over a two-year period.

Copyright, 2003, The Herald Company
Purchased for use on the Borodino Bullett.

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