Fight against Formosan termites started with an earmark | Local Politics

WASHINGTON — When he read in the newspaper last week that the numbers of Formosan termites are declining, lobbyist Bob Livingston said he first thought of the tunnels chewed through a piece of hardwood cypress tossed on his desk in 1997.

Mostly, though, his thoughts centered on “earmarks,” one of which largely funded a 25-year-old project that slowed the spread of the pests that once threatened to eat the French Quarter.

“It goes to the point that earmarks are not all bad,” Livingston said Thursday about the $5 million he inserted in the $1.7 trillion federal budget for 1998. When Livingston left the U.S. House in 1999, the Metairie Republican, who chaired the House Appropriations Committee, had represented the New Orleans area for 22 years.

A polite term for “pork barrel spending,” earmarks conjure up images of the Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere.” Aggrieved pundits and politicians have been slamming earmarks since President Ronald Reagan launched his “Government is the problem” mantra in the 1980s.

Livingston began work on the earmark after hearing New Orleans-area residents complain about the Formosan pests.  

In 1997, Rick Legendre was sounding off to fellow staffers in Livingston’s district office about the problems he was having in his West Bank home. The exterminator told him that the termites were a new breed for New Orleans.

“I told him I didn’t care what they were, just kill them. He told me there was nothing on the market to do so,” Legendre recalled last week.

Then, French Quarter resident June Kahn arrived at Livingston’s congressional office next to the U.S. Capitol. She began her conversation by tossing on Livingston’s desk a 14-inch piece of hardwood cypress from her garage. The wood should have weighed more than 10 pounds but was only a few ounces, Livingston said. “It was riddled with holes, like a strainer or a hard sponge.”

The “Second Battle of New Orleans” was on.

At the time the federal government only offered financial help to buy pesticides. The 1950s effort to rid the South of fire ants turned out bad because when confronted with pesticides, the ants just moved.

Livingston consulted scientists and became convinced that researching termite biology was necessary before a successful eradication strategy was possible.

But he had to persuade lawmakers, whose go-to response was “spray it,” that research was important.

“That piece of wood from Ms. Kahn was a very effective tool,” recalled Paul Cambon, Livingston’s legislative assistant for 20 years and his lobbying partner for 20 years more. “Bob would whip it out at every meeting.”

President Bill Clinton signed the bill, including the termite earmark, on Nov. 18, 1997.

The Department of Agriculture’s Southern Regional Research Center, which conducts research on agricultural pests in New Orleans, was given the money for an initiative called Operation Full Stop. The federal grant helped pay for research and coordinated, individual treatments in 15 blocks of the French Quarter. Building owners were required to repair roofs and plug water leaks where Formosan termites thrive.

Operation Full Stop also tested new termite killers, especially baits that worker insects took back to the hive and killed off the colony. The USDA worked with the city and shared the learning with officials in Hawaii, Florida, and elsewhere.

But the annual earmark also was a focal point in the “pigs at the public trough” narrative spread by critics in the early 2000s. U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, criticized the expenditure on the Senate floor. And the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation think tank said the earmark’s wording could allow local politicians to distribute funds as they pleased.

The annual funding was dropped from the 2011 federal budget when Congress ended earmarks. But the research had made headway and the USDA’s budget allowed for some shuffling to continue the important parts of the project.

Kahn’s cypress now sits on Cambon’s desk, a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol.

Working on Capitol Hill is a heady experience of influence and power for lawmakers and staffers called upon to handle weighty and far-reaching issues for which government is the solution, Cambon said Thursday.

“But, what I discovered is that the most rewarding part of the job is sitting with a person who has a problem of enormous importance to them and working hard to resolve that person’s problem. That’s what happened with the Formosan termite.”