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Berger: Give back ACC Hall of Champions Money

So the News & Observer recently did a series titled “The Generous Assembly,” which ripped lawmakers for not getting a handle on spending. One of the stories focused on money given to “pet projects,” and placed the ACC Hall of Fame in the same category as the infamous teapot museum.

There is a larger push and pull here between being good stewards of taxpayer dollars and helping projects important to folks back home succeed. Those projects are, of course, pork barrel spending to many.

Just to be clear: public money should be spent wisely. And you can argue whether the ACC Hall of Champions is a good project. (Click here to read Amanda Lehmert’s update on the project. She says the first phase of the project should be completed by 2011.)

But there is an argument that folks in Greensboro (with the ACC Museum and the Civil Rights Museum) or down in Charlotte (with the NASCAR Hall of Fame and a certain Cooking School) and other areas of the state would make. Raleigh and the Triangle gets plenty of state funding that is parochial but in many respects shielded from the “pork” label. Think about investments in the state fair grounds (which provide a resource year round) the N.C. Symphony and the Green Square project downtown.

Maybe we should fund none of that stuff.

At any rate, Sen. Phil Berger, an Eden Republican who represents much of Guilford County, including parts of Greensboro, targeted the ACC Museum in a news release this morning, characterizing it as “wasteful pork spending.”

Berger is a fiscal (not physical) conservative, so it’s not unusual for him to take a swing at waste. But it is fairly unusual to see a legislator take aim a project that benefits the area they represent.

“We’re just saying that’s money that was appropriated in past years, hasn’t been spent, is sitting there. It’s something that if we truly have the type of crisis where we’re talking about the need, the absolute need to raise taxes in a recession then maybe we need to look and rethink whether it made sense to appropriate those monies in the past,” Berger said.

So, to be clear, would Berger be in favor or reclaiming that money from Greensboro?

“Before I would advocate laying off teachers, I would advocate reclaiming that money. Yes,” Berger said.