New Shepherd for Golden Fleece Awards

There was the $2-million patrol car, the $200,000 curriculum for watching television and the study of whether drunken fish are more aggressive than sober fish.

There was the study of why people act rudely on Virginia tennis courts, the Medicaid payments to psychiatrists for attending basketball games and the $1-million tab for preserving a sewer as a historical monument.

Every month for 13 years ending in 1988, then-Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, bestowed his Golden Fleece Award on what he called the “wasteful, ridiculous or ironic use of the taxpayers’ money.”

The award stopped after Proxmire retired in 1989, but the waste, fraud and abuse did not. So Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit group of which Proxmire is honorary chairman, decided to revive the Golden Fleece, this time as a quarterly dubious achievement.

The first of the new generation of fleeces was awarded Wednesday in Tampa, Fla. In a nostalgic fillip, Taxpayers for Common Sense recognized the same agency that received Proxmire’s final Fleece in December 1988: the Federal Aviation Administration.

The taxpayers group accuses the FAA of allowing below-market leases at a 155-acre development near Tampa International Airport. In return for receiving federal funds, airports are supposed to do what they can to be self-sustaining.

FAA spokesman Paul A. Turque said the property is owned by the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority, and the FAA has looked into the rents. “We don’t feel there’s any cause for any further investigation at this time,” he said. Turque said the agency would make sure rents rise as planned as development is completed at the property.

Brenda S. Gohagen, spokeswoman for the Hillsborough authority, said she had no comment because of litigation involving the property.

Proxmire, now 84 and living with Alzheimer’s disease, recently made a videotape at his Washington home that Taxpayers for Common Sense plans to play at its news conference.

“Agency bureaucrats and politicians are relentless in dreaming up ways to waste your money,” he says in the video, according to a transcript. “Now they’re doing it again! The Tampa airport rip-off is a textbook example of why we need the fleece now, more than ever.”

Seemingly Rampant Mismanagement

Sometimes Proxmire’s award was whimsical, such as his allegation that the government was providing “surfing subsidies,” or his complaint that the Agriculture Department had organized a song contest to remind employees “of the team spirit that guides us in our job of protecting U.S. agriculture.”

At times, he drew attention to apparently rampant mismanagement. In 1976, for instance, the Army Corps of Engineers got his award of the year for “the worst record of cost overruns in the entire federal government--47 percent of Corps current projects had cost overruns of 100 percent or more.”

Ralph DeGennaro, co-founder and president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, reeled off projects worthy of awards. He said he hopes to present the awards with public officials and citizens groups outraged about government blunders.

He added with a laugh, “I don’t lay awake at night worrying that I’ll be out of a job.”