The speaker stumbled, trying to find the politically correct terminology.

“I don’t want to call it an earmark,” he said.

The topic was the $2 million in federal funds U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., was seeking for a Skagit County transportation project, and the speaker was Mount Vernon Mayor Bud Norris. The setting was a roundtable discussion about transportation issues back in May.

“It is an earmark,” Larsen cut in, adding, “earmarks would not exist if you did not ask for them.”

And they do ask. Larsen is deluged annually with requests for federal assistance from local government, universities, agricultural interests and defense contractors.

Larsen got more than 140 requests for earmarks — the alterations Congress makes to the budget submitted by the president — for the next fiscal year. Of them he chose 59 totaling nearly $770 million to refer to the Appropriations Committee.

If those earmarks make it out of committee, they must then pass through the full House and Senate before making it back to the president for approval.

For some, earmarks are the essence of congressional excess. Opponents dub it pork barreling, and point to examples such as the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” sought by U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. Another critique is that politicians use the lure of potential earmarks to solicit campaign donations.

But to Larsen, earmark is not a dirty word.

“I wouldn’t call myself pro-earmark or anti-earmark,” Larsen said. “...They can fill an important financial gap that otherwise would not be filled.”

He said his office scrutinizes each earmark request it gets. He points to three questions that staffers ask about each earmark proposal: “Is that project ready to go,” “Does it have approval from the local elected officials,” and “Would these be the final dollars?”

He said projects don’t necessarily have to meet all the criteria in a certain way, but they do have to have a good explanation. And he likes his earmarks distributed throughout his six-county district.

Rick Bart, a Republican seeking Larsen’s 2nd Congressional District seat, is more wary of the process. He does not like that Congress spends billions of dollars on earmarks while the national debt grows.

Bart, who retired as Snohomish County sheriff in 2007, questions Larsen’s earmarks. Bart points to a fiscal year 2008 earmark Larsen pursued for Bellingham-based Aluminum Chambered Boats.

“It does not pass the smell test,” Bart said, because the CEO of the company has contributed to Larsen’s campaign fund.

The earmark began as a $1.5 million request from Larsen to contract with the boat-builder for multimission armored watercraft. As the spending bill went through Congress, it was knocked down to $1.2 million. Eventually, said founder and CEO Larry Wieber, his company’s name was pulled from the legislation, and it is still too soon to tell whether the $1.2 million contract will be awarded to his company or a competitor, such as Zodiac or Boston Whaler.

Wieber, a self-professed fiscally conservative Independent, donated $2,500 to Larsen’s campaign in late 2007. And in April of this year he organized an evening cruise with the congressman, which drew 50 to 60 people and raised $10,900 for Larsen’s 2008 re-election campaign.

“I think that Rick Larsen has done a great job for us,” Wieber said. “My view is that we send too much to Washington, D.C., but the job of our representatives and our senators is to get the money back.”

“Mr. Larsen has been a very strong supporter of Aluminum Boats,” he said.

Larsen said he stands by the earmark and does not regret accepting money from employees of the company.

“It takes about $1.5 million to run a race in a Washington state congressional district,” he said. “... If a member of Congress or any candidate for Congress is going to be able to communicate ... they need to raise that kind of money.”

“I don’t even like that part,” said Larsen. “... I would much rather doorbell my entire district ... And in fact I have to raise the money and doorbell my entire district.”

Wieber’s company is not the only one that has received money either before or after employees donated money to Larsen’s campaign. Employees from three of the five businesses specifically cited in his fiscal year 2009 defense-related earmark requests have also contributed to his campaign.

Those companies are Intermec Technologies, Alliant Techsystems and Electronic Warfare Associates. All three produce products for military applications.

The $6 million earmark Larsen requested for Everett-based Intermec Technologies to revamp the supply chain on Navy hospital ships was preceded by $4,000 in campaign contributions from employees of the company.

Alliant Techsystems, for which Larsen sought $6.2 million to upgrade the Navy’s electronic warfare capabilities, gave Larsen $3,000 through the company’s political action committee.

And employees of McBee Strategic Consulting, a lobbying firm hired by Alliant Techsystems, gave Larsen an additional $4,000 in 2007.

Larsen requested $4.5 million for Electronic Warfare Associates to “supplement joint electronic warfare training efforts at NAS (Naval Air Station) Whidbey,” according to a news release issued by his office in April.

“Electronic Warfare Associates has a lot to do with training men and women in the military” and “with the fight against improvised explosive devices,” he said last week.

Employees from the Virginia-based company have contributed at least $10,000 to Larsen’s campaign fund since 2006.

Included in that total is the $1,000 that Doug Armstrong, president and CEO of the Electronic Warfare Associates subsidiary Government Systems Inc., gave just two days after the House’s earmark request deadline.

“That has got to be total coincidence,” Armstrong said.

Two other employees of the organization also gave Larsen $1,000 that day.

Armstrong said he could not remember the specifics, but that he and others from his company likely made their donations in response to the circulation of a flier or something similar. He added that the contribution was not linked to any earmark, nor to his company.

“They are really not related. My contribution is from me as an individual ... It has nothing to do with the company,” he said.

The newspaper Roll Call, which covers Congress, reported in March that more than a quarter of those who sit on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, which holds substantial earmarking power, held fundraising events just prior to the earmark request deadline.

Roll Call also reported that U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, a Democrat who represents Washington’s 6th Congressional District, and other lawmakers received campaign donations from many or all of their benefactors. Dicks, Roll Call reported, “got political money from every entity for which he sponsored a project.”

“The timeline of holding fundraisers has everything to do with the Federal Elections Commission’s deadline of reporting how much you have raised as opposed to appropriations deadlines,” said Larsen, who is not a member of the Appropriations Committee, nor its Subcommittee on Defense.

He said there would be fundraisers leading up to the Federal Election Commission’s March 31 deadline for reporting campaign contributions even if the final day to submit earmarks request was moved to May.

For fiscal year 2008, Larsen ranked 54th among the 435 members of the House in earmark dollars, according to the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. Out of Washington’s congressional delegation, only Dicks, who chairs two appropriations subcommittees, and Sen. Patty Murray, who chairs a Senate appropriations subcommittee, outspent him.

It is too soon to tell what the rankings will be for fiscal year 2009, because many of Larsen’s earmark requests have not yet passed out of committee.

Among those that have been approved by the House Appropriations Committee are:

- $250,000 for a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to continue the Skagit Flood Control General Investigation Study. Larsen requested $1.3 million for the study.

- $380,000, or $20,000 less than Larsen requested, for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dredge the Swinomish Channel.

- $1 million for a new Snohomish County Emergency Operations Center. Larsen had requested $3.3 million for the project.

- $1.1 million of the $2 million Larsen requested for the Washington State Meth Initiative.

- $50,000, as requested, to purchase new equipment for the Snohomish County Regional Drug Task Force.

- $25,000, as requested, for the Skagit County Drug Enforcement unity.

- $80,000, as requested, for laptops and software for Island County Sheriff’s Office patrol cars.

- $295,000 of the $350,000 he requested to expand and improve information sharing between Whatcom County law enforcement agencies.

- $6.18 million — up from the $3.3 million requested — for a new academic fire instructional facility at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station.

- $80,000 of the $1.5 million Larsen requested for improving safety on Highway 2.

“I have no problem with most of them,” Bart said of Larsen’s fiscal year 2009 earmark requests.

Bart said he agrees that bringing federal dollars back to the district is a good thing. But he says the practice has gotten out of hand.

“When I am elected to Congress I will work very hard to reduce our national debt ... and I am not sure, how do I put this, it is like living on credit cards and sooner later we pay the price,” Bart said.

Larsen is not opposed to scaling back congressional earmarks, and he said he has already started to reduce his own. He also points to recent reforms in the earmarking process, such as a new rule requiring members of the House to declare that they have no financial interest in their earmarks.

And Larsen took the extra step this year of posting all of his earmark requests on his Web site, a level of transparency not required for Congress.

Bart wants Congress to go farther and impose a one-year moratorium on accepting contributions from employees of companies that receive earmarks.

“It opens the door for doubt,” he said of those contributions. “It is one small part of why we don’t trust Congress.”

“I will not take any campaign contributions form beneficiaries of an earmark,” said Bart, who does not yet have any campaign contributions listed on the Federal Elections Commission website.

To which Larsen — who has raised more than $500,000, according to the Federal Elections Commission — countered, “It is easy for Rick Bart to say that because he is not raising any money anyway.”

n Elliott Wilson can be reached at 360-416-2147 or at .