DaytonDailyNews.com

There are, one might say, three views on "earmarks," those federal appropriations for local projects that get added to congressional bills by individual legislators with parochial motives.

• They are awful, an indefensible way of spending taxpayer dollars. The projects are "pork barrel" spending, wholly unrelated to the national interest, and completely unmonitored as to usefulness.

• They are a great way to address the concrete needs of real people and real communities, rather than leaving things to distant bureaucrats who are restrained by rules that might be out of date or irrelevant.

• There's a right way and a wrong way.

As Dayton Daily News Washington correspondent Jessica Wehrman noted on Monday, May 12, the three views are roughly represented by the three Republican members of Congress from the Dayton area: respectively, John Boehner, of West Chester, Dave Hobson, of Springfield, and Mike Turner, of Centerville.

Rep. Turner has it right.

As things stand now, earmarks are a laughingstock. They discredit Congress, being so easy to paint as wasteful acts of political self-indulgence. Let a "bridge to nowhere" be discovered among the earmarks — that is, one pointless project that exists solely because of the power of one legislator — and it becomes a symbol of all that is wrong with Washington.

But laughingstock status is not inevitable. It exists because there are no rules to speak of.

Now Rep. Turner has taken a shot from his Democratic opponent in November, Jane Mitakides, for supporting a proposal to have a commission study how the earmark process might be improved, as Congress observes a moratorium on earmarks.

Rep. Turner's 3rd District, including nearly all of Montgomery County, is a good one for making political hay out of the earmark issue. After all, the region needs all the help it can get. And the district borders Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the largest employer in the area, which gets some projects through earmarks.

And yet voters of the 3rd District are surely as concerned as voters anywhere else about waste in federal spending, and about the prospect of money going elsewhere for bad reasons.

The truth is that, with a more structured — less political — system of earmarks, the Dayton area should do fine. Wright-Patterson is a crucial part of the nation's military defense, not some boondoggle whose well-being depends upon a bad approach to federal spending.

Anyway, the powerful legislator who has mainly looked after Wright-Patterson — Rep. Hobson — is retiring. He'll be replaced by a freshman, probably of the minority party in the House and possibly of the party that doesn't hold the presidency anymore. So preservation of a system built entirely around political power doesn't look so great from Dayton's point of view.

Rep. Turner and former Rep. Tony Hall, a Democrat, combined not long ago on an opinion piece about earmarks that ran in a widely read publication on Capitol Hill. They said that the Dayton area has a process that vets projects, before asking area congressional representatives to get behind them. Having the Dayton Development Coalition and its committees review the projects reduces the possibility that any proposals will be seen as boondoggles or favors for a political contributor. (The credibility of that effort, incidentally, is something the coalition has to jealously protect.)

Writing the piece puts Rep. Turner on the side of reformers in the House. He should stay there.

If an independent commission comes up with a similarly respectable approach for the federal level — an approach that combines an appreciation for the usefulness of many earmarks with an understanding of the downsides of a no-rules system — everybody will be better off, except for those districts that have been getting money for bad projects. Dayton isn't in that category.

True, the effort to pass a moratorium looks like a Republican political gambit to put the Democrats on the spot. The Republicans, far from reforming the system seriously when they were in charge, let earmarks mushroom in number.

Nevertheless, for everybody to take a break at some stage, until a more credible process is in place, couldn't hurt.

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