You have to admit, at least Sen. Tom Coburn is consistent.
The Republican U.S. senator from Oklahoma has targeted the National Park Service’s Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program in his newly published “Oklahoma Waste Report” (pdf document) — his latest salvo against the much-praised Mother Road program.
In one chapter of the report, “Get Your Federal Grants on Route 66,” Coburn writes:
Most recently, NPS has provided federal funding to a number of old gas stations, hotels and gift shops. For instance, $30,000 helped to restore an historic filling station in Bristow for use as an auto body repair business, $30,000 was used to renovate an abandoned gas station and used car lot in Tulsa with a new roof, windows, and utilities, along with a new heating and cooling systems, $10,000 was used to replace the roof at the Park Hill Motel in Vinita, and $23,000 was used to initiate extensive repairs on the Seaba Station, an ― antique, gift, and tourist shop near Chandler.
Obviously, as an advocate for the Mother Road, Route 66 News isn’t going to criticize the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program. In our view, it’s a small program that’s paid big dividends for mom-and-pop businesses along historic 66 for more than a decade. It serves the NPS National Register of Historic Places‘ core function of preserving historic properties. And with its minuscule budget, the corridor program costs less than one penny for every person in the United States.
What Coburn fails to mention is at least three of the mentioned properties which received cost-share grants became the sites of new businesses, or grew more financially viable. In other words, these once-abandoned or marginal buildings turned into small businesses that hired workers and boosted the local economy.
This latest episode shows without a doubt that the Coburn is no friend of Route 66. The senator has made half-baked allegations before about the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program. He also tried to block legislation that would have renewed the program for another 10 years.
Oklahoma Route 66 historian Jim Ross and Tulsa blogger Michael Bates found Coburn’s stance on the Route 66 program so misguided, they wrote rebuttals.
Both Ross and Bates are staunch conservatives, by the way. This wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction by either of them. The fact they departed from Coburn on this issue speaks volumes.
I am appalled and saddened by this.
I’m politically very Conservative, too. I like Tom Coburn and ordinarily I agree with him.
But not on this.
It seems to me that Senator Coburn is being a little penny-wise and pound foolish. If you took the entire amount of federal funds that have been distributed as part of the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program it wouldn’t equal a millisecond of the government’s annual spending spree. That, combined with the amount of tax revenue that has been raised by these refurbished businesses, I’m sure one gets fairly close to offsetting the other, either in direct or indirect revenue.
I’m a conservative too but Mr. Coborn is another Repuke hypocrit whne it coomes to the country’s finances. He calls the NPS Rt 66 perservation program a waste but at the same time he’s ok wasting tax dollars with our continued illegal and immoral presense inside Iraq.
All Mr. Coburn needs to do is to talk to a tourism official in any city or town (Tulsa, OK., and Winslow, AZ. come to mind) that has done any serious preservation and marketing of 66 and ask “what happened?”. The results are: tourism goes up, and redevelopment of often blighted areas begins. Why Coburn would be against that is baffling.