House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) is seeking earmarks worth millions of dollars for homeland security projects at the small Mississippi college that he attended, though the school could not explain what the earmarks are for and does not yet appear to have the capacity to provide the services that Thompson wants to fund.
In an earmark request for 2010 appropriations, Thompson’s Web site indicates that he is seeking $23 million for the “National Institute for Education and Training” at Tougaloo College for “an Operational Test and Evaluation Activity (OTEA) in Vicksburg, Mississippi.”
Tougaloo is a historically black college north of Jackson, Miss., with an enrollment of just less than 1,000 students and an annual budget of around $28 million, according to its most recent available tax records. Thompson was on the board of trustees until 2005 and is now listed as a “trustee emeritus.”
Thompson’s chief of staff, Lanier Avant, said the earmark is actually for a consortium of institutions “to develop engineering capacity in the region … for all kinds of engineering,” including civil and electrical engineering. Avant said the request includes Tougaloo, the Army Corps of Engineers facility at Vicksburg, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Jackson State University, Avant’s alma mater. It would be up to the four institutions to divvy up the funding and figure out the roles that each will play in implementing the earmark, he said.
The money would be “an addition to existing programs” at the institutions, Avant said. Tougaloo “has one of the most renowned engineering programs of all the [historically black colleges and universities] in the country. … It’s not like Tougaloo is some kind of new kid on the block,” he said.
Roll Call
4/21/9
Magnolia Tribune
