WASHINGTON – A citizen watchdog group that monitors billions of dollars in pet spending projects approved by Congress has found that Maine lawmakers continue to bring home the bacon – carrying a total price tag of more than $66 million this year.

The so-called pork-barrel projects identified by the group include $5 million for runway repairs at Bangor International Airport, $3 million for the University of Maine’s Northeast Marine Cold Water Aquaculture Research Center, $500,000 for trail and road projects at Acadia National Park, and $400,000 for the Downeast Heritage Center project in Calais.

Each of these Maine projects along with 43 others were approved as “earmarks,” a term first coined by farmers when they notched a pig’s ear to mark it as their own. In this case, when money is earmarked for Maine, it is usually the result of the efforts of its four members in Congress.

“The fact that Maine senators would advocate for projects like these is no surprise,” said Dave Lackey, spokesman for Sen. Olympia Snowe. “These things reflect Maine’s priorities and needs.”

But each state’s bacon turns into a mountain of “pork” when added up with projects from other states, according to the Citizens Against Government Waste, which unveiled its annual Congressional Pig Book on Tuesday with great fanfare in Washington.

As a CAGW employee dressed in a giant pink pig costume stood by, special guest Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he was especially disturbed by the explosion in pork-barrel spending that found its way into the defense funding bills this year. He called the spending “war profiteering.”

“There’s more money because of the war on terrorism and particularly in defense,” McCain said. “Defense appropriations is always the last bill we do before we go out of session. We do that because it has the most pork in it.”

McCain has clashed repeatedly with other senators on the Senate floor over pork spending and publishes his own list of what he believes to be especially egregious spending.

“It’s like any other evil,” he said. “You either check it and eliminate it, or it just gets worse and worse and worse.”

Earmarks for this year have reached their highest level on record, according to the report. Total pork tucked into the 13 federal appropriations bills approved last fall for fiscal year 2002 exceeded $20.1 billion, topping last year’s $18.5 billion total at an increase of 9 percent.

What’s more, according to the report, the number of individual pork projects has nearly quadrupled, from 2,143 to 8,341 over the last three years and the number of projects were up 32 percent in just the last year.

Some of this year’s more eye-popping projects included $50,000 for a tattoo removal program in San Luis Obispo, Calif.; a $2 million grant to refurbish the Vulcan Statue in Birmingham, Ala.; $273,000 for a youth program in Missouri to combat “Goth culture”; and $450,000 to restore chimneys on Cumberland Island, Ga.

“As the nation pays its taxes this month, citizens should look at both parties in Congress with scorn,” said CAGW president, Thomas A. Schatz. “Here we are, a nation at war, and yet Republicans and Democrats pass record levels of pork. Our representatives and senators should be ashamed.”

Sen. Susan Collins, isn’t ashamed of her work, though, according to her spokeswoman Felicia Knight.

“The senator always visits the site where the project is taking place,” Knight said. “She always wants to make sure what it is and if it is something the federal government should pay for.”