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RALEIGH North Carolina is building a new pier at Nags Head, but this is not just a simple boardwalk from which to cast a fishing rod.
This pier is essentially an aquarium on pilings, with live animal exhibits, a 16,000-square-foot pier house and wind turbines generating electricity.
The price tag is $25 million.
The project is drawing heat as an example of extravagant state spending at a time when the state doesn't have money to spare. The fact that the pier sits in the district of powerful state Senate leader Marc Basnight, a Manteo Democrat, adds fuel to the political fire.
Liberal and conservative critics are pounding the new pier, trying to transform the project into North Carolina's “bridge to nowhere,” the Alaska construction project that the state's Republican governor, Sarah Palin, boasted of trying to block as wasteful government pork.
Critics have deployed a television ad and mass e-mails bashing the pier, saying it is a luxury the state can't afford when it is handing out pink slips to teachers and shutting down pieces of the state's health care services.
“The right hand is cutting the ability for a grandmother to stay at home and not go into a nursing home and the other hand is funding new construction projects like the pier,” said Tim Rogers, executive director of the Association for Home & Hospice Care of North Carolina.
While the pier looks like an easy target, the facts don't quite make it the glowing example of misplaced spending that critics suggest.
No money from this year's state budget will be used, and large chunks of the funding were earmarked for the pier or similar projects well before the recession kicked in.
John Bone, president and CEO of the Outer Banks Chamber of Commerce, said the pier will create hundreds of construction jobs. He described how it will serve as a platform for ocean research and a live action exhibit that will teach children and adults alike about forms of renewable energy and ways to preserve the environment.
Of course it's expected to draw lots of tourists with money to spend, too.
“It's a tool for education, research, economic development – all of those things,” Bone said, “and is worth no less than anything else the state does.”
Much of the pier pressure is about timing. The state is building it at the same time that lawmakers are writing a budget that is expected to pack more students into classrooms, shut down university programs and make scores of other spending cuts. In many ways, the pier is a vehicle for the larger tussle over balancing the budget: what to cut, what taxes to raise.
The Association for Home Care & Hospice of North Carolina plastered the pier into an ad attacking Sen. Doug Berger, a Franklin County Democrat. The commercial scolds Berger for voting to fund the pier eight days after voting to cut a health care support services program. Berger argues that many of the recipients of that aid don't need it, and the program needs to be weeded of fraud and abuse.
The N.C. Association of Educators sent an e-mail to its 65,000 members two weeks ago encouraging them to tell lawmakers to support education over projects such as the pier.
“Did you run (for office) on the pier or run on education?” said Brian Lewis, the association's lobbyist, describing the message to lawmakers. “They tell us it's a bad year, and it is. They're laying off teachers, and then this stuff pops up.”
Republicans roll out the pier as a standard talking point in criticizing the Democrats who have a controlling majority in the legislature.
“They're telling everybody we're going to have to raise taxes or we run out of money,” said Senate Republican leader Phil Berger of Eden. “If they can go back and find money for the pier, why can't they find money to keep from laying off teachers and do other important things?”
Basnight begins his defense of the pier with a simple point: Not a dime of this year's state budget will be devoted to building the pier.
Large chunks of the funding were designated for the pier, or projects like it, years ago. For example:
$9.5 million comes from admission fees to the state's three aquariums at Pine Knoll Shores, Fort Fisher and Roanoke Island, the one affiliated with the new pier. Legislation in 2007 permitted using that money for construction related to the three aquariums. Plans call for piers at the other two aquariums.
$1.5 million comes from a fund created by a 2007 state budget appropriation to buy waterfront property to improve beach access for the public and commercial fishing boats.
$2.3 million is a 2008 grant from the Clean Water Management Trust Fund that pays for the stormwater collection and reuse system for the pier's parking lot. The trust fund is replenished each year by an appropriation in the budget.
$1 million is a gift from the private, nonprofit N.C. Aquarium Society.
Where lawmakers maneuvered money was $10.5 million from a 2004 stormwater fund created by a state budget appropriation that year to develop new methods to clean the coastal stormwater that otherwise is dumped through huge pipes directly into the ocean. Lawmakers unanimously passed legislation in April, well into the state's fiscal crisis, that converted those funds to construction money. Not a single legislator voted against it.
“It was a mistake,” Berger said, adding that he and others should have given the bill tougher scrutiny.
Schorr Johnson, an aide to Basnight, said the stormwater money could not have been funneled to teachers' paychecks or other areas being cut because only general fund money, the ongoing revenue stream that funds the state budget each year, can be used for ongoing expenses such as teachers' salaries.
Basnight said the investment in the pier has to be viewed through a long-term lens. He said it will draw children and adults alike to features such as a 200-seat meeting room for school field trips, ocean conservation exhibits, and its plumbing, a system that cleans bathroom waste water and uses it to hose down the deck.
“This can be an opportunity to learn and educate the masses as to what our future could and should be, how to treat stormwater, renewable energy,” Basnight said. “We can dispel some of the myths at a place that will outdraw any museum … any state historic park.”
