Oct 07 2007
Sparta Nixes Teapot Museum
North Carolina and federal taxpayers won’t get the teapot museum they helped pay for.
Organizers of the Sparta Teapot Museum, which received $900,000 in taxpayer-funded grants and a bushel of unwanted publicity, are planning to build a very different museum than first envisioned. It’s expected to be a fraction of the original size and won’t focus exclusively on a donated teapot collection.
The wealthy principal donor plans to take many, though not all, of his teapots elsewhere and has all but abandoned the idea of building a 10,000-square-foot foundation headquarters in the small N.C. mountain town of Sparta.
I have seen a lot of ridiculous waste of tax dollars in the government, but this one goes right at the top. Why in the hell was Washington handing over almost a million dollars to build a teapot museum? The people who pushed through that earmark ought to feel pretty darn stupid right now. Who were they by the way? None other than members of our “fiscally conservative” Republican delegation.
Citizens Against Government Waste, a national organization, gave the museum’s $500,000 federal grant top billing when it publicized its 2006 “Pig Book” of pork barrel waste, which followed a stream of snickering national news stories.
The museum’s backers had hired a Washington lobbying firm with close ties to North Carolina to seek federal funds. Three N.C. lawmakers who helped in that push, Sens. Elizabeth Dole and Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., of Banner Elk, have gotten campaign donations in recent years from the firm.
Organizers hoped the museum would deliver an economic boost to a community battered by plant closings.
Oh yeah. I am sure people from all over the world were going to be clamoring to Sparta to see the world renowned teapot museum.
Share
