U.S. HOUSE Spending bill has millions for Pa.

A Senate hopeful criticized the state's allocation as a budget-buster.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House approved a $373 billion spending plan Monday that would pour hundreds of million of dollars in federal funding into Pennsylvania projects over the next year.
The bill, which the Senate will not consider until January, funds federal agencies for the 2004 fiscal year that began Oct. 1. It includes goodies for Pennsylvania ranging from $50,000 to expose Philadelphia high school students to career opportunities in the sports industry to more than $58 million for rail projects and upgrades.
"There are a lot of areas of real need for Pennsylvania," said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who chairs one of the most lucrative appropriations subcommittees in the Senate and personally delivered many of Pennsylvania's projects, including $20 million for schools and $7.1 million in Medicare grants to various hospitals statewide.
"In making these allocations and earmarks, we make an evaluation and make a grant to those which appear to merit it," said Specter, who was praised by Senate Budget Chairman Don Nickles for blocking $24 billion worth of projects -- or $352 billion over a decade -- from the bill. "Many, many requests are not honored."
Criticism
But one lawmaker's funding pool is another's pork. Rep. Pat Toomey, a fiscal hawk from Allentown who is challenging Specter in an April 27 Senate primary, was the only lawmaker in Pennsylvania's 19-member congressional delegation to vote against the spending plan.
The 1,182-page bill, Toomey said, "busts the budget" by nearly $2 billion. "And that, of course, in a year in which we are likely to have a budget deficit of over $500 billion," he said.
A spokeswoman for the Senate Budget Committee confirmed that the spending plan passed by the House exceeds the capped budget "outlay" -- or money being delivered in 2004 -- by $1.8 billion.
Otherwise railing against what he called "egregious pork projects" in the plan -- such as a $2 million plan to teach children in Florida how to golf -- Toomey carefully deflected the issue of whether Pennsylvania projects have bloated the bill.