Mariachi education included in pork

Benjamin Grove

Monday, Nov. 22, 2004 | 10:51 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Congress approved a $388 billion spending bill during the weekend that included money for a number of Nevada projects, including $25,000 for mariachi music education in Clark County schools.

Lawmakers worked feverishly Saturday to hammer out their final spending measure. It appropriates money for most domestic programs and federal agencies. The lawmakers were praised by some fiscal conservatives for passing a rather austere omnibus budget bill compared with others in recent years.

But pork-project critics howled at some of the earmarks. Taxpayers for Common Sense called the mariachi program one of the 20 most egregious it had found in an initial analysis.

"With the fat lady singing on the 108th Congress, lawmakers have just passed a massive spending bill that virtually no one has read, and no one knows much about," said Keith Ashdown, spokesman for Taxpayers for Common Sense. "This bill is the fattest legislative hog that we have ever seen and despite record deficits, lawmakers are much more concerned with feathering the nests of their favorite parochial interests."

The Clark County School District hosts an International Mariachi Conference and Festival. The district has a fledgling mariachi program that serves about 1,200 students in 12 schools. The program's popularity is growing fast, especially among the district's ever-growing Hispanic student population, said district's fine arts coordinator Marcia Neel.

"This is music that they have grown up with their whole lives, it's in their ears" she said.

Congress in a lame-duck session last week rolled discretionary spending for most federal departments and domestic programs into one big "omnibus" bill.

It included $30 million for a Las Vegas monorail extension and $24 million for Tropicana and Flamingo drainage wash construction.

The bill in total included $71 million for transportation projects in Nevada, according to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.

The bill includes $10 million for ongoing construction on the Hoover Dam bypass bridge project, Reid said. That legislation also officially designates the bridge as the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge. O'Callaghan was a former governor and Sun executive editor who died at age 74 in March; Tillman, 27, was a Phoenix Cardinals wide receiver who enlisted with the U.S. Army Rangers and was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in April.

According to Nevada congressional offices, the bill also included:

The bill also included $1 million for the Nevada Cancer Institute for new cancer treatment and prevention programs; $500,000 to expand the new burn care center at University Medical Center and to buy new equipment for the center; and $500,000 for construction of a 16-bed hospice in Henderson.