Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Appropriations defense subcommittee, tacked a provision onto the 2008 Pentagon spending bill that could facilitate the transfer of up to $20 million from Navy coffers to the Interior Department for the reconstruction of the USS Arizona visitor center and museum.

An overhaul of Hawaii’s USS Arizona Memorial Museum and Visitor Center, which commemorates the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, is estimated to cost about $52 million. So far, about $32 million has been raised through private and public donations.

The visitor center and museum is the only way to reach the USS Arizona memorial.  Admission to the memorial is free.

Built in 1980, the facility has sustained severe structural damage, according to NPS’s Doug Lentz, the USS Arizona memorial superintendent. The facility was designed to settle over time into its landfill, but has sunk more than 30 inches into Pearl Harbor. Engineers have determined that the life of the facility is short, Lentz said.

The center is overburdened, attracting more than 1.5 million visitors a year (it was built to accommodate about 2,000 daily), and the museum lacks sufficient space to display artifacts and house the atmospheric controls to preserve them.

Inouye included the funding provision in the so-called manager’s package as the defense bill was being marked up in the full Appropriations Committee.

The Arizona Memorial Museum Association, a nonprofit organization authorized by Congress, NPS and Pearl Harbor survivors, set up the Pearl Harbor Memorial Fund to raise money for the construction of a new Pearl Harbor memorial museum and visitor center at the site of the USS Arizona memorial.

Inouye, a highly decorated World War II veteran who witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor, is an honorary chairman of the Pearl Harbor Memorial Fund’s fundraising effort, according to Tom Shaw, the president and chief executive of the Arizona Memorial Museum Association.

Inouye agreed to help the fundraising effort, his spokesman Mike Yuen said. Yuen said the decision to include the provision “came together at the last minute.”

In May, Inouye wrote a letter to the secretary of the Navy requesting support to rebuild the visitor center.

“The senator was asked to get involved and was approached by people behind this effort,” Yuen said.

But the senior appropriator’s move is also garnering criticism.

“He is using his position as the defense appropriations chair to funnel money for his state,” the vice president of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, Steve Ellis, said. “It is an incredible memorial that Sen. Inouye has strong ties to. I am not disparaging the USS Arizona, but it still does not mean you should be earmarking out of the defense budget” for funding the belongs to the Department of the Interior, Ellis added.

Yuen countered that the language in the defense bill does not require the Navy to transfer up to $20 million, but rather leaves it at the Navy’s discretion to do so.

“This is purely up to the Navy to decide what they have to do,” Yuen said. “The senator is a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, and we’d like to think that his involvement in various activities is based on thoughtful consideration.”

Even though the transfer of funds is at the discretion of the Navy, it is unlikely that the service would turn down the chairman of the Appropriations defense panel, Ellis said.

Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for the chief of naval operations, as well as a spokeswoman for the secretary of the Navy, said that the Navy does not comment on pending legislation or discussions with members of Congress.

Inouye’s spokesman said that $20 million of an approximately $33.2 billion Navy operations and maintenance budget is a “small fraction.”

Supporters of the project express an urgency with regard to gathering adequate funds to break ground. A contract award for the new construction is slated for March 2008, according to Shaw.

The NPS administers the memorial and visitor center in an agreement with the Navy, Lentz said. The visitor center occupies Navy property, which the service made available to the NPS by permit and at no cost.

The Navy gets first right of refusal on the contractor selected for the new construction, according to Lentz, who explained that the Navy is the project manager for the new construction and would be selecting the contractors.
The price of construction ballooned over the years due to engineering costs, the need to build a 5-foot-tall tsunami wall on the harbor side of the building and security needs.

The NPS allocated $8 million for the construction of the visitor center and museum. Meanwhile, the Senate appropriated $4.5 million in its version of the 2008 interior appropriations bill and the House included the same amount in its version of the bill.

Meanwhile, the visitor center overhaul is also one of the 201 projects slated by NPS to begin next year as part of the commemoration of NPS’s centennial in 2016. The projects are part of the Bush administration’s Centennial Challenge, an effort to attract private dollars using up to $1 billion in federal matching funds.

Inouye’s request for the $20 million would bring his earmark requests in the 2008 Pentagon-spending bill to more than $200 million.