It lists the bridge, on Stevenson Road in Xenia Twp., under the heading “Another bridge to nowhere.”
The Dayton Daily News previously reported that restoring the Greene County bridge will require a $520,000 federal grant and $130,000 in county money. It was built in 1877 and was closed to traffic in 2003 when a modern concrete bridge was built 100 feet away. The covered bridge is not connected to a park, bike path or road.
Greene County Engineer Bob Geyer vigorously defended restoration of the bridge when contacted Tuesday.
“I think it’s necessary to save history,” he said. “Are we just going to let the Greene County courthouse fall down because it’s old, or are we going to save it?”
Geyer said he hopes to help create a park around the bridge when the restoration is completed.
“This is tourism. People come and look at covered bridges,” he said. “If I hadn’t received the grant, someone else would’ve received the grant.”
Critics include Xenia Twp. Trustee Jim Reed, who in August told the Daily News that the bridge was a “pet project” and complained that it will cost more than the township’s annual roads budget.
Other Ohio spending noted by the Wastebook include money spent under a $1 million National Endowment for the Arts program to encourage book clubs but that funds activities the report says “have little to do with reading.” Some of the funds, for example, went to the library in Massillon to fund a graveyard tour and concert of “haunted acoustic instrumentation” to promote works by Edgar Allen Poe.
At Ohio University, a professor used a $6,000 National Endowment for Humanities stipend to study romantic literature and suicide in Britain. The report singled this out in a section critical of NEH grants totaling $498,000.
Big-ticket spending on the national level criticized in the report includes:
• The Wastebook cites a Daily News investigation into a program that provides free cell phones for low-income people that has been criticized for fraud and abuse. The program cost $1.5 billion last year, subsidized by fees on cell phone bills.
• Professional sports leagues such as the NFL are taxed as non-profits even though they generate billions of dollars annually in profits. The report estimates this loophole costs more than $91 million a year.
• Part of a $325,000 science grant at two universities in California was used to construct a robotic squirrel named “RoboSquirrel” to study the interaction between squirrels and rattlesnakes.
• NASA spends nearly $1 million a year researching a menu to serve astronauts on Mars even though there are no planned manned trips to the red planet.
• A $27 federal million program to improve the economic competitiveness of Morocco relies heavily on a program to teach pottery to Moroccans that fell short of its goals.
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture spent $300,000 last year to promote caviar, one of the world’s most expensive foods.
• PepsiCo, which earned $66 billion in revenues last year, is building a yogurt factory in New York with help from $1.3 million in federal money.
• Purdue University researchers used part of a $350,000 National Science Foundation grant to examine the benefit golfers might gain from using their imaginations, envisioning that the hole is bigger than it actually is.
“The problem in Washington is politicians are very specific about what we should fund but not specific about what we should cut,” Coburn said. “As a result, we are chasing robotic squirrels and countless other low-priority projects over a fiscal cliff.”
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