Frank Roche says he wants some answers about a program at UNC that has little to show for more than $7 million it has received to help deployed soldiers of the National Guard and Army Reserves.

Roche, a Republican challenger to Democratic U.S. Rep. David Price of Chapel Hill, issued a release today questioning the money spent by the Citizen Soldier Support Program. The program was created in 2004 when Price inserted $10 million for it in the federal budget.

Internal audits at UNC have found that the program has produced a lot of paperwork, but few concrete results.

"Where is the oversight?" Roche asked. "It adds insult to injury that this money was intended to help our National Guardsmen and Army Reserve, who leave jobs and families to fight for our freedom."

A federally funded program at UNC-Chapel Hill was supposed to help deployed soldiers of the National Guard and Army Reserves.

Instead, the Citizen Soldier Support Program has produced reams of paperwork but few concrete results, according to an internal review.

"The CSSP is vulnerable to the accusation that it spends too much money on administrative overhead and low-priority 'nice-to-do' actitivities and not enough time on activities directly relevant to its mission," read the review.

The program was created in 2004 when U.S. Rep. David Price, a Chapel Hill Democrat, inserted $10 million into the federal budget.

Since then, the program has spent $7.3 million. One-quarter of the money has gone to the university for overhead. Half of the eight full-time employees are paid more than $100,000 a year, including a deputy director who has been reimbursed $76,000 for food, travel and lodging when she commutes from her home in northern Virginia to North Carolina.

Price said the program is worthy of federal funding and that he still supports its goals.

"If these funds haven't been utilized in the most effective way, we need to correct it," he said. (N&O)

* Members of the Institute for Emerging Issues tax reform panel say the Senate's plan, while different, is headed in the right direction.

* The Dome wraps up all those annoying North Carolina earmark requests posts into one big package and a couple of sidebars.

* Former News & Observer business reporter Jim Barnett has started a blog exploring nonprofit newspapers' business model.

* The state meat industry is fighting a bill from the Humane Society of the United States that it says is a step toward ending meat eating.

N.C. State asked for six fewer earmarks this year.

As noted previously, the university is the top school in North Carolina in earmark requests from members of the House delegation.

A school official said that it has cut back, however. Last year, the school requested 32 earmarks and received 10. This year, it has asked for 26. 

They represent only a sliver of its overall research budget, said Terri Lomax, vice chancellor for research and graduate studies.

During fiscal year 2008, the university received $8 million of federal earmarks for research out of a total of $313 million in total research spending. 

Terri Lomax says researchers sometimes tailor their requests.

N.C. State University's vice chancellor said that a lot of the earmarks the college requests are for orphaned research that does not fit into existing programs through the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health or the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Often, it's because it's not basic research but not yet commercially viable.

But it can also be because there is no federal program that covers the topic, she said, citing a National Textiles Center on campus that looks at new methods and markets for textiles.

"There's not a federal agency with a clear mandate for providing research on textiles," she said.

She said that researchers often look for ways to fit their research into existing programs, such as military research or even the NASA budget. That's how an earmark came about that would study the effects of the Martian atmosphere on plants.

"It has lots of other uses for agriculture, such as understanding how plants to respond to stress conditions in the environment such as drought or global warming," she said.

The head of N.C. State University research says they asked for less than in years past.

Terri Lomax, vice chancellor for research and graduate studies at the Raleigh college, said that she decided to be more choosy about the special appropriations it requested from the state's Congressional delegation.

"I insisted that we be more selective," she said. 

She asked deans at the college to rank their requests, then she and several staffers went through them before presenting them to the chancellor's office and the University of North Carolina's general administration.

The projects were then presented to different members of the delegation, based on their interests. (Reps. Bob Etheridge and Mike McIntyre, for example, were asked to help fund sweet potato research because they have farmers in their districts.)

In all, she said the university asked for 23 earmarks, the same number that members of the House requested for it. From there, they'll then get peer-reviewed at the appropriate agencies and checked by Congressional committees.

"They actually get more thoroughly reviewed than traditional research grants," she said. 

Previously: N.C. State top earmark college in North Carolina.

* Mark Binker culls the best quotes from a legislative debate over officially designating the state's potato festival.

* WUNC's Laura Leslie recalls a time when Sen. Vern Malone rescued another legislator from an interview.

* Paul Woolverton writes that the odds are stacked against a new video poker bill, with legislative leaders in both chambers against it.

* An Asheville Citizen-Times columnist and liberal blogger AshVegas spar over the definition of pork in Rep. Heath Shuler's earmarks.

How much did North Carolina's delegation get in earmarks last year?

Here is a breakdown of the approved earmarks in last year's spending bills, as compiled by Citizens Against Government Waste:

Sen. Elizabeth Dole: 110, $133.6 million

Sen. Richard Burr: 89, $117.1 million

Rep. David Price: 51, $56.8 million

Rep. Robin Hayes: 44, $48.6 million

Rep. Bob Etheridge: 29, $38.3 million

Rep. Mike McIntyre: 31, $37.9 million

Rep. Heath Shuler: 30, $28.8 million

Rep. Mel Watt: 28, $28.5 million

Rep. Sue Myrick: 13, $20.9 million

Rep. Walter Jones: 12, $20.3 million

Rep. Howard Coble: 15, $17.2 million 

Rep. Patrick McHenry: 10, $16.8 million

Rep. G.K. Butterfield: 17, $14.4 million

Rep. Brad Miller: 14, $12.7 million

Rep. Virginia Foxx: 10, $12.4 million

In all, the delegation received 219 earmarks worth a total of $216.4 million.

Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated Jones' earmark total.

U.S. Rep. Walter Jones received 12 earmarks worth $20.3 million last year.

Dome inadvertently reported a much higher amount in a previous post because of a problem with a database created by the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste.

(Long story short: The Farmville Republican's earmarks were lumped in with Ohio Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones.)

The earmarks included money for a dike, dredging, a regional water authority, East Carolina University, two roads and the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras.

The correct figure puts Jones ninth among North Carolina's House members in last year's earmarks, just below U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick of Charlotte.

Dome regrets the error.