WEDNESDAY,MAY 5, 2010

KLMNO

THE FED PAGE

No joke: No Joe

AL KAMEN

In the Loop

White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last weekend, there was a recurring, somewhat worrisome question: “Where’s Joe?”

I

By tradition, the president is center stage at the yearly event, and the vice president plays Ed McMahon and grins and claps. But Saturday night, neither Vice

President Biden nor Dr. Jill was

on the stage. Some attendees seemed to recall that the vice president never attends, but that’s not true.

In fact, Al Gore and Dick Cheney,

along with spouses, were often in attendance. But Biden wasn’t there last year or this year. Other attendees guessed that

maybe his absence was a prudent post-9/11 security decision not to have him and Obama at the same event. Wrong again. Well, maybe Biden, who subbed for the boss at the Gridiron Club dinner last year — did a fine job, in fact — and at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner this year, is getting tired of these media extravaganzas? Sure. And Bill Clinton didn’t

like burgers. As it turns out, a decision was made that Biden’s time would be better spent out in Arizona, were he was the keynoter at the Arizona Democratic Party’s Heritage Dinner, its equivalent of the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. The political calculation, we’re hearing, was that Arizona is an important state at an important time. It was a state Obama and Biden could well have carried had it not been the Republican nominee’s home state. Even worse, we were told, the White House decided there was no reason for both Obama and Biden to be at the dinner. Still, Arizona Democrats over the crème de la crème of the national media? Talk about a fall from power.

n the midst of all the glitz, the glitter and the self- congratulatory crowd at the

still have minuscule audience shares, the report said, maybe around 2 percent for Radio Marti. That’s largely because the commies jam the broadcasts and partly because the broadcasts are “offensive and incendiary.” There’s no TV jamming on Friday and Sunday evenings during baseball season, when TV Marti broadcasts games, the report notes. (The Castros try jamming those games and the counter- revolution begins immediately.) Another factor is that Cuban

TV has gotten better, now featuring shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Desperate Housewives” and “The Sopranos.” Finally, about 30 percent of Cubans polled said they watched CNN en Español on Cuban television during the past week, the report notes. If they have DirecTV, they can get Univision and ESPN and the like. All of which raises the question why a government broadcast operation, even if strongly supported by the exile community, is needed when the private sector appears to be doing the job quite well. Well, because they don’t have

Fox, that’s why.

‘Outstanding’!

The anti-tax movement appears to have made some progress at the Department of the Interior. A recent e-mail reminder to all employees said the IRS had “notified the DOI that as of Sept. 30, 2009, 2.36 percent” of its employees “have some sort of outstanding income tax delinquency,” the message read. “The number of DOI employees with a delinquency is increasing each year. In September of 2008, 2.29 percent of DOI employees were delinquent.” It’s expected everyone will pay

up,” the reminder said, “which in turn will . . . foster the public’s confidence in all federal employees.”

And remember, they got Al Capone on a tax rap.

A vacuum to abhor

Despite calls by President

Obama and other good- government types for openness and accountability, seems at least 15 of 73 federal government watchdog jobs, including some of the most important ones, are vacant or filled with temporary folks, according to a report

S

A19

DAMIAN DOVARGANES/ASSOCIATED PRESS

People jog around the Silver Lake Reservoir in Los Angeles. A new policy affects $3.3 billion in federal water-infrastructure funding.

New EPA water policy promotes smart growth

States are supposed

to prioritize upgrades over new projects

by Alec MacGillis

If you build it, they will come. And, if you don’t, they won’t. Such is the thinking behind a

policy released late last month by the Environmental Protection Agency that instructs states to adopt smart-growth principles in allocating the $3.3 billion in water infrastructure funding that the federal government doles out each year. States, it asserts, should pri- oritize projects that upgrade the drinking water and wastewater infrastructure in cities over proj- ects intended to serve new devel- opments on the suburban fringe. The new guidance arguably ar-

rives five years too late — after a home building boom that swal- lowed up vast swaths of land. But building will eventually resume, and EPA officials say the leverage of the federal funding — the Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Fund — could coax states toward a more sustainable form of development. With so many cities contending with aging water pipes and sewer lines, offi- cials say, it makes most sense to address those needs first. “What you have now that we’re

trying to change is that some of the money goes into new [water] collection systems or new treat- ment plants where there are very few people and that can fuel growth,” said Nancy Stoner, the deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Water. “We’re interested in supporting the infra- structure where people already live. It’s a focus on making infra- structure sustainable and reviving those communities, reviving cities as attractive places.” The policy is meeting with criti-

cism. Not surprisingly, the Nation- al Association of Home Builders has “serious concerns,” said its senior vice president, Susan As- mus. “While we recognize the need to repair, replace and up- grade existing infrastructure, this should not be done at the expense of new growth,” she said. The associations in Washington

GARY MARX/CHICAGO TRIBUNE

After 25 years, Radio Marti is still chipping away at the Cuban regime, syllable by syllable. The Castros should be gone any day now.

Our plan in Havana

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has a new plan for perennially troubled Radio Marti and TV Marti, the U.S. government media operation set up to topple the Castro regime in Cuba. The committee’s report this week urges that the Office of Cuba Broadcasting be pulled back to Washington from the Cuban exile bastion of Miami and placed under the Voice of America in order to “clean up its operation.” That, however, will accomplish

little to deprive this column of excellent items over the years about cronyism, criminality and bizarre editorial judgment at the two media operations. The real problem, as the report says, is that Radio Marti, after 25 years of broadcasting, and TV Marti, after 20 years — and more than $600 million in U.S. taxpayer money —

Tuesday by the Center for Public Integrity. The posts at several major

agencies — the State Department, the CIA, the Labor Department and the Interior Department, as well as the comptroller general (head of the congressional Government Accountability Office) and the Office of Special Counsel (which investigates whistleblower allegations)— have been vacant pretty much since the administration began or even earlier, and no one has been nominated to fill them. On the other hand, the administration has installed some key IGs, the report said, including at NASA, the Education Department and the Pentagon, while a nominee at the Environmental Protection Agency has been stalled in the Senate.

kamena@washpost.com

that represent state infrastructure officials say smart growth is com- mendable but question using the federal funds as a lever. As it is, they note, the EPA requires that states use 20 percent of their fed- eral funds toward “green” projects such as restoring riparian buffers or reducing impermeable black- top cover. Although sprawl is hardly ideal, they say, failing to ex- pand sewer lines to outer-rim communities could result in over- loaded septic systems that pollute groundwater. “While we want to incorporate these ideas . . . we’re concerned about a prescriptive approach that says so much of the money goes here, so much goes there,” said Rick Farrell, director of the Coun- cil of Infrastructure Financing Au- thorities. “We’d prefer they say, ‘These are things you can do that are good approaches,’ and let the states work it out.” Linda Eichmiller, director of the

Association of State and Interstate Water Pollution Control Adminis- trators, was more blunt. The fed- eral funds are “not a mechanism to accomplish social goals,” she said. “It is not going to be able to manage growth.” Jag Khuman, director of the

A week in the sun

Public Service Recognition Week stresses the importance of the federal workforce. B3

More flexibility needed

Uncle Sam falls short when it comes to helping workers find balance in their lives. B3

Maryland Water Quality Financ- ing Administration, said the guid- ance would have little effect on his state, which, he noted, emphasizes smart growth. But he said it could present challenges in states with less of the aging infrastructure that the EPA wants the funds to go toward. And there are often gray areas, he said: If a town is repair- ing a sewage plant that handles 5million gallons, should it also ex- pand it so it can handle 7million

gallons, or would that only en- courage sprawl? “That’s where you’re going to

get variable answers,” he said. Kevin Ward, executive adminis-

trator of the Texas Water Devel- opment Board, said that in many towns, the authorities that decide how to use water funds have no say in planning and zoning deci- sions and are simply obligated to provide service to a given district. But the EPA seemed “sensitive to these matters,” he said. Paul Marchetti, director of

Pennsylvania’s water infrastruc- ture agency, bristled slightly at the guidance, saying that his state has long allocated funds with the in- put of local governments to dis- courage sprawl. “To the extent we have dictums coming down from on high, it makes it potentially difficult for each of the programs to run things in ways that make sense for each state,” he said. But the guidance’s vague wording reassured him that the judgment would be left at the state and local level. This is why Geoff Anderson, the president of Smart Growth Amer- ica, wishes the new guidance were more specific, to really goad states where sprawl predominates. “The EPA ought to be thinking about how to go further,” he said.

“We’re interested in supporting the infrastructure where people already live. It’s a focus on making infrastructure sustainable and reviving those communities, reviving cities as attractive

places.”

— Nancy Stoner, the deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Water.

But he praised the guidance, re-

jecting the concern about its pre- venting sewer lines from reaching septic-reliant new development. Septic-based developments should be approved, he said, only if they can guarantee that their

septic systems will function over the long term. “The ultimate per- formance of those septics can’t re- ly on the endless extensions of a wastewater system that we can’t even afford now,” he said.

macgillisa@washpost.com

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