136th Year... and
still on the job!
Wednesday August 17,
2005
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136th Year... and
still on the job!
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Wednesday August 17,
2005
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FOLLOWERS OF the Peanuts comic strip are familiar with the old football gag.
Lucy Van Pelt holds the football for Charley Brown to kick. He’s dubious, because she always has pulled it away in the past, but she promises that this time things will be different.
Of course, when Charley comes up to kick the ball Lucy pulls it away, and Charley falls on his backside.
Good grief.
And that’s just how people around here feel about the Army and its string of broken promises about Pueblo Chemical Depot. It’s a history of on-again, off-again promises, with the Army seemingly always pulling the football away just as things are set to get going.
It’s that history that has prompted Colorado Sens. Wayne Allard and Ken Salazar to send a warning letter to the Pentagon on Friday, saying they do not want next year to repeat this year’s battle in which they had to force the Army to spend $372 million to clean up mustard agent weapons at chemical weapon depots in Pueblo and Kentucky.
In a harshly worded letter to Undersecretary of Defense Kenneth Krieg, the senators said they have learned the Pentagon is preparing a 2007 budget request of only $33 million for the Pueblo Chemical Depot and the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky, which they correctly dismissed as “caretaker” funding.
The senators wrote they have reason to believe that those in the Defense Department counseling a return to the $33 million funding are the same managers who have so mismanaged the Chemical Demilitarization program that it is one of 22 federal programs to be declared “ineffective” by the Office of Management and Budget.
Sen. Allard, a Republican who serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Sen. Salazar, a freshman Democrat, met with Pentagon officials numerous times last winter trying to persuade them to continue with a $1.5 billion plan to destroy the mustard gas weapons stored at the Pueblo depot. Rep. John Salazar, D-Colo., who represents Pueblo, also participated in the meetings.
All this was reminiscent of our Lucy Van Pelt/Charley Brown misadventure. Pentagon officials would give assurances one month that they were committed to the demilitarization program in Pueblo, only to say on other occasions that they wanted to study moving the weapons to other locations. Sen. Allard got so fed up that, as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, he put language in a spending bill requiring the Army to spend $372 million next year to continue work on building bioneutralization plants here and at Blue Grass Depot in Kentucky.
Sens. Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning, both Kentucky Republicans, are likewise angered by the Pentagon stonewalling, and they joined as signatories of the Coloradans’ letter to the Pentagon.
Colorado’s congressional delegation has spoken out numerous times that the Pueblo depot work needs to get started. When will someone with authority in the administration finally agree?