Jack Murtha: Congress’s biggest source of pork and my representative.

There’s a website out there that ranks politicians and their various pork-barrel tendencies entitled Beyond Delay, pointing out a specific 22. I was initially surprised to find my local rep, John Murtha, as amongst the 22. I read through their report preview and found out a lot about the man that I hadn’t known before.

In 2007, Rep. Murtha inserted into the Energy and Water Appropriations bill a $1 million earmark to establish the Center for Instrumented Critical Infrastructure – a subsidiary of Concurrent Technologies Corporation, (CTC) a non-profit technology innovation center in Rep. Murtha’s district that has received hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks in recent years. Contrary to Rep. Murtha claims, the Department of Energy has denied supporting the request for the earmark.

Hey, CTC. Years ago when I was in school to be an engineer I had a job there. Let me tell you, if you’re interested in seeing how government subcontracting works, CTC is a great exemplar. Projects would extend for years that were intended to last months, there would be stretches where we had nothing to do because of holdups elsewhere along the assembly line. Good stuff.

Back on topic, the report seems to be your run of the mill “politician slips earmarks in to funnel money back to his home district” story. Nothing particularly surprising or unique. That is, until the Wall Street Journal points out that Murtha has appropriated more money for his district than any other member of Congress.

Mr. Murtha, too, cut his overall earmarks in the House defense-spending bill, a spokesman says. His earmarks in the current bill are $166.5 million, more than any other House member, Taxpayers for Common Sense says. Mr. Murtha’s spokesman did not dispute this year’s total, but said without providing details that it is down by half from last year.

Sha-zam. Despite a claimed 50% cut in earmarks he’s still the number one offender? And that’s a hell of a lot of money, to cut down to. The Journal estimates over $2 billion (that’s “billion” with a “b”) has made its way back to the district thanks to Jack. An accompanying graphic has the caption “John’s Town” and that’s not something they invented.

Forgive me a moment of nostalgia and/or wistfulness here, but I think you gotta understand a little about Johnstown to understand John’s Town.

With a population that jumps between 25,000 and over 100,000 depending on how many suburbs and boroughs you count, Johnstown is situated in a valley in the Appalachian mountains. Decades ago, Johnstown was a major steel manufacturer for the country as a whole and as I’ve been told, the Nazis had Johnstown in their scope due to this.

While the Journal passes over the “steel mills, most of them unused,” that “still line the river’s banks,” it’s not just a small grouping of buildings on either side of the Conemaugh River. When you stand at the observation deck of the Inclined Plane, a large trolley that travels up the mountain that leads from Greater Johnstown to one of the suburbs, you can see the town at large. The steel mills dominate the view; giant, hollow shells that remind the viewer that there was a time when the city was bustling and important, but they’re long gone.

Some magazine a few years ago designated Johnstown as the most depressing city in America. I can’t find this online, so you’ll just have to trust me on this. Local businesses loved poking fun at this “award”, specifically bars which had signs that read “Depressed? Come in and have a drink!”

When people visit or move into the town, the first thing they say is that it’s like going back in time. It was only recently that Starbucks finally showed up, which always reminds me of the laughter I invited by acting so excited to find a Starbucks while on a trip with some friends while I lived in Florida. I hit culture shock when I saw a McDonald’s that had an LCD sign underneath it, as opposed to back in Johnstown where it was just this past year that they moved away from the plastic letters on a metal sign.

There’s more to Johnstown than just that, of course. There’s the fact that you never have to lock your house or car doors outside of the seedier areas downtown, and that when someone is murdered it’s such an unheard of event that the media is all over it for days, or possibly weeks such as when a local baseball player killed an old man in a hit and run.

Enter Murtha. If there’s another thing that’s impossible to avoid when looking around Johnstown, it’s the name Murtha. If you do a Google search for “murtha center johnstown”, you get a whole slew of results. Cancer centers, educational centers, the Center for Drug Intelligence. Add in CTC and the myriad of companies which repeatedly get federal money and you can imagine the number of people who owe their careers and livelihood to Murtha’s “corruption”. I know my family certainly does, both my parents worked for CTC at one point, and my stepfather still does. The livelihood of Johnstown is largely in part thanks to Murtha’s dogged fight to funnel money back to his district.

You can call it corrupt if you’d like. It certainly doesn’t seem right that the taxpayer should have to put this money out of their own pockets toward someone else’s. But you can’t deny that Murtha isn’t just taking the cash and pocketing it. He’s not going on golf trips or buying Persian rugs the way a Duke Cunningham would. As the Journal points out:

There’s no evidence that Mr. Murtha personally profits from the hometown spending he rams through Congress. He ranked No. 333 in net worth among the 435 members of the House in a 2005 analysis by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. But his campaign coffers have risen since he became chairman of the defense-spending panel. In the first nine months of this year, Mr. Murtha’s campaign committees have reported contributions of more than $1.05 million.

So is Murtha greedy, or is he using a legal, if unpopular, Congressional method to give all he can to the town he calls home?