Sun Road money absent from bill

Legislation aimed at restoring $50 million for an overhaul of Glacier National Park's Going-to-the-Sun Road has been stripped from an appropriations bill in a Congressional conference committee.

The House-Senate panel concluded negotiations on the emergency supplemental spending bill Tuesday night, aides for both of Montana's senators confirmed Friday.

The bill did not include an amendment proposed by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., that would have made a technical language correction restoring $50 million approved by Congress last year as part of a long-term highway funding bill.

Asked what happened with the amendment, Baucus spokesman Barrett Kaiser responded, "Somebody needs to ask Conrad Burns, because he was on the conference committee and Max Baucus wasn't."

Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., was in Montana most of Tuesday for the primary election, when final negotiations on the bill concluded. But Burns staffers say the conference committee had determined before Tuesday that an array of amendments, including the one from Baucus, would not be included.

"There were so many technical corrections on the House side that they were trying to add in, and unfortunately, it was really weighing down the bill heavily," Burns Communications Director James Pendleton said.

The supplemental spending bill, he explained, was originally intended to provide money for Hurricane Katrina relief and U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Various spending attachments far exceeded an amount that the Bush administration had insisted on.

"The administration had already threatened to veto if the bill wasn't exactly as requested," Pendleton said. "Basically, the house members (on the conference committee) wouldn't compromise on this; they wanted to strip it down to the bare bones, for what the bill was originally intended."

But he stressed that the pursuit of the $50 million isn't finished.

"There are opportunities to get this problem addressed in future legislative vehicles," he said. "I'm sure the entire delegation will try to get this problem resolved. We knew it was going to be a tough sale from the beginning, so we tried to keep it in there, but there was no way, at least not this time."

Kaiser also said the funding can be restored through an amendment to future legislation.

"Obviously, Max is disappointed, but this fight is far from over," Kaiser said. "He's going to do everything he possibly can to get this fixed this year."

The $50 million has been considered a critical down payment on a long-planned Sun Road overhaul that gets underway this year. The project, as planned, was expected to take six to eight years but will take longer without full funding, Glacier officials have said.

The $50 million was considered secured after the highway bill was approved by Congress last year. But the Federal Highway Administration determined that the language in the bill was not adequate to actually provide the funding.

That decision infuriated Baucus, who blames Federal Highway Administration officials who were consulted by his staff in developing the language.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com