WASHINGTON – When it comes to bellying-up to the political money trough, the Maine congressional delegation does quite well – and that’s not necessarily a good thing, says a public interest group, Citizens Against Government Waste.

For example, when Congress was putting together the budget for this year, neither the Clinton administration nor the House thought that handing Bangor federal transportation money for new railroad crossing signals or bike and pedestrian trails was a good idea. But the Senate Appropriations Committee had a different idea and by the time President Clinton signed the bill into law, it carried $600,000 for these projects.

Critics call this pork, pure and simple.

In Maine, there are dozens of these congressionally authorized “pork” projects, including $200,000 for the Lewiston Auburn Economic Growth Council to administer economic growth loans; $1 million to install steel bulkheads on the Penobscot River in Bangor; and $150,000 for the Island Explorer experimental bus program on Mount Desert Island. None of the expenditures was sought by the Clinton administration.

Democratic Reps. John E. Baldacci and Tom Allen are among Congresses biggest “porkers,” according to the organization, which awarded them a “hostile to taxpayers” rating. Sen. Susan M. Collins earned a 52 rating, making her “lukewarm to taxpayers,” according to the group. Fellow Republican Sen. Olympia J. Snowe scored a 42 rating. Baldacci and Allen both voted “wrong” on all of the issues monitored by the group.

Maine’s delegation ranked 39th on the “pro-taxpayer” scale. However, tiny Maine hardly makes a blip on the dollar value side of the pork scale, with just $23 million in unnecessary projects – 48th among the states.

Pork’s top politicians were again its political leaders. Alaska led the nation with $480 million in pork-barrel projects. Alaska is represented by Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Ted Stevens, a Republican.

“Appropriators worshipped at the altar of pork-barrel spending like never before” last year, said the public interest group in its just released “Pig Book,” an annual accounting of projects deemed unnecessary. “Just like the apes clawing at the mysterious monolith at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, appropriators saw the mountain of money created by the budget surplus and grabbed so many of the taxpayers’ dollars that they created a new epic, 2001: A Pork Odyssey.”

The 6,333 porcine projects represent a simple tally, not an assessment, of those items which do not have a federal budget request but were tacked on by a member of Congress, usually someone from the home-state of the project. This total is a 46 percent increase over pork-barrel offerings for fiscal year 2000.

The $18.5 billion price tag on the fiscal 2001 items brings to $119 billion the total identified by Citizens Against Government Waste since it launched the exploration of the congressional appropriations bills in 1991.

“Americans everywhere should thank Citizens Against Government Waste for its tireless efforts to terminate waste and pork from the federal budget,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has long waged his own campaign against unnecessary congressional earmarks, as they are often called on Capitol Hill. “The public needs to know that they were obligated to shoulder the burden for $3.5 billion in unrequested, low priority projects last year.”

Congress made it difficult “for opponents of such spending to protest its inclusion in the appropriations bills,” said David E. Williams, vice president for policy at the group. Williams co-authored the report with Kerrie N. Rezac, a research associate. “Some bills were brought to the floor on a limited basis. At other times members had less than 24 hours between the bill’s release from committee and the final vote. These closed-door tactics ensured that appropriators, as leaders of the spending cult in Washington, could logroll their way to a 297 percent increase in pork since 1997.”

“Taxpayers should be outraged that their hard-earned dollars are being spent on projects like the National Automotive Center – to the tune of $12.5 million,” McCain said. One center research activity is a “smart truck.”

“I wonder whether the intellect of this truck will be such that it will not only be capable of heating up a burrito, but will also be able to perform advanced calculus while quoting Kirkegaard,” McCain said.

Other states with a plethora of pork: Hawaii with $391 per capita ($474 million) and Mississippi with $236 per capita ($672 million). Hawaii is represented by Sen. Daniel Inouye, a long-time Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, while Mississippi has as its champion Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a Republican.

“All the talk about meeting national priorities, reducing the debt, Social Security and Medicare reform, and fiscal restraint will mean nothing if the easy choices aren’t made first – eliminating pork-barrel spending,” Williams said. “The false altar of pork must be demolished so fiscal sanity can once again reign in Washington.”