Administration warns of impact of broad budget cut

WASHINGTON — Widespread flight delays and shuttered airports, off-limit seashores and unprotected parks.

The Obama administration is painting a dire portrait of the many ways the public will feel the effects of automatic federal spending cuts due to begin March 1.

The grim picture is emerging as the White House and lawmakers count down the days until the government is forced to trim $85 billion in domestic and defense spending with hardly any leeway to save some programs from the budget knife.

In detailing the costs of the cuts, President Barack Obama is seeking to raise the public's awareness while also applying pressure on congressional Republicans who oppose his blend of targeted savings and tax increases to tackle federal deficits.

"I've been very clear that these kinds of arbitrary, automatic cuts would have an adverse impact on families, on teachers, on parents who are reliant on Head Start programs, on our military readiness, on mental health services, on medical research," Obama said Friday. "This is not a smart way for us to reduce the deficit."

Just in case those consequences didn't capture the public's attention, the White House also had Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood spell out the impact on travelers: a frequent-flier nightmare of 90-minute airport waits, limited flights and closed regional airports. Republican lawmakers dismissed LaHood's warnings as "exaggerations."

But LaHood said the cuts would require slicing more than $600 million from the Federal Aviation Administration, resulting in furloughs of one day per pay period for a majority of the agency's 47,000 employees.

"Once airlines see the potential impact of these furloughs, we expect that they will change their schedules and cancel flights," LaHood said.

Moreover, he said, the Transportation Department is looking "to likely close" air traffic control towers at 100 airports that have fewer than 150,000 flight operations per year.

"We're talking about places like Boca Raton, Fla.; Joplin, Mo.; Hilton Head, S.C.; and San Marcos, Texas," he said. All in all, nearly two-thirds of the airports are concentrated in three states — California, Florida and Texas.

But in a statement, Airlines for America, an industry group, said the organization, the FAA and airline carriers would be meeting soon to plan for potential cutbacks. "Air transportation is a key driver of our economy, and should not be used as a political football," the statement said.

Paul Rinaldi, the president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said the reductions will not just inconvenience passengers, it will also affect local economies and result in more lost jobs. "The fact that they will not just be furloughing critical FAA personnel but closing air traffic control towers means the system will be even more compromised than anticipated," he added.

Still, top Republicans on congressional transportation and aviation panels accused the administration of unnecessary alarm.

"Before jumping to the conclusion that furloughs must be implemented, the administration and the agency need to sharpen their pencils and consider all the options," the lawmakers said in a joint statement issued by Rep. Bill Shuster, chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure; Sen. John Thune, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation; and Frank LoBiondo, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Aviation.

Throughout the administration, agency heads have been depicting an onerous after-effect to the cuts. The federal government is required to spell out the consequences to federal workers, but the details are also designed to warn lawmakers that the cuts could have a fearsome result: angry constituents. Some of the warnings:

— Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last week said that automatic cuts, known in Washington budget language as a sequester, would harm the readiness of U.S. fighting forces and he said the "vast majority" of the Defense Department's 800,000 civilian workers would have to lose one day of work per week, or 20 percent of their pay, for up to 22 weeks, probably starting in late April. The biggest potential losses, in term of total civilian payroll dollars, would be in Virginia, California, Maryland, Texas and Georgia, according to figures provided by the Pentagon.

— On Friday, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said cuts of more than $300 million to his agency would mean less money to solve outbreaks, fight hospital infections and keep illnesses overseas from making their way here. For instance, Dr. Tom Frieden said, the cuts could limit the agency's investigation of a tuberculosis outbreak in Los Angeles.

— At the National Park Service, employees would be furloughed, hours would be cut and sensitive areas would be blocked off to the public when there are staff shortages, according to a park service memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The giant sequoias at Yosemite National Park in California would go unprotected from visitors who might trample their shallow roots. At Cape Cod National Seashore, large sections of the Great Beach would close to keep eggs from being destroyed if natural resource managers are cut. Programs on the chopping block include invasive species eradication in Yosemite and comfort stations on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi.

Gettysburg would decrease by one-fifth the number of school children who learn about the historic battle that was a turning point in the Civil War. And in Yosemite, park administrators fear that less frequent trash pickup would potentially attract bears into campgrounds.

Over the years, budget threats have inevitably resulted in grim warnings, no matter which administration, about calamitous consequences. Many have been avoided; others have been short-lived. But Obama administration officials say they are not exaggerating or bluffing.

The cuts, with few exceptions, are designed to hit all accounts equally. The law gives Obama little leeway to ease the pain.

Even if granted flexibility to apply the cuts with more discretion — a legislative step Republicans say they might pursue — White House officials say that would still require severe reductions.

"It's essentially rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic," Obama senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said of such a proposal in a recent interview.

LaHood, in response to a question, denied that he was simply describing a worst-case scenario that would scare the public and put pressure on Republican lawmakers.

"What I'm trying to do," he said, "is wake up members of the Congress with the idea that they need to come to the table so we don't have to have this kind of calamity in air services in America."

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Cone reported from Sacramento, Calif. Associated Press writer Joan Lowy and AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard contributed to this report.

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Follow Jim Kuhnhenn on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jkuhnhenn

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Foodie’s feeds need for upscale Southie grocery

Festivities today will formally mark the arrival of the long-awaited Foodie's Urban Market in South Boston.

After quietly opening last month, the 8,000-square-foot store at West Broadway and C streets has been fine-tuning its product mix to the wants and needs of a community that was in need of another grocery.

"So far, so good," general manager David Healy said yesterday. "There's been a few requests and complaints that we tried to take care of. The biggest complaint has been parking, but if you walk up and down the street, we're the only ones who have parking."

Foodie's has nine parking spaces, five checkout lanes and five aisles of food, with produce, butcher, deli, dairy, dessert and prepared food departments.

"(The dessert) and the cheese departments are my two biggest surprises as far as volume," Healy said.

There's also a four-foot section of Irish food. "We are in Southie, after all," Healy said.

"We love it," South Boston's Marie Krohn said after shopping there yesterday. "It has great produce. They have a great selection of cheese. They have the same selection as Whole Foods, only smaller. It definitely beats Stop & Shop."

Southie residents previously had to make do with the Stop & Shop nearly a mile away on East Broadway or travel outside the neighborhood to stock the fridge and pantry.

Foodie's prices match those of its South End store, as they share advertising circulars and weekly sales. The chain has a third location in Duxbury.

"The prices are high — it's Whole Foods prices," Krohn said. "But Stop & Shop has very high prices as well. We make them fit into our budget."

Healy has heard no complaints about pricing, but he's been surprised at the customer mix from the evolving neighborhood, where luxury condos are sprouting up to join new restaurants and, soon, Southie's first Starbucks. "It seems more like the young, yuppie crowd — 30-somethings, upscale," he said.

Boston police officer Jen Grogan stopped in yesterday to pick up lunch from the salad bar. "It's nice because they serve a lot of healthy stuff," she said. "It's nice for the community. The meats and the produce look a lot fresher than they do at Stop & Shop."

Today's grand opening at noon features a ribbon cutting with owners Victor Leon and Mayor Thomas M. Menino, free hot dogs, food samples, free Foodie's reusable bags for the first 100 customers and a chance to win an iPad Mini tablet.

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Governors urge Congress to avoid automatic cuts

WASHINGTON — The nation's governors are becoming prominent voices in the fight to cut the federal deficit, warning that Capitol Hill's latest budget stalemate is radiating fresh waves of uncertainty that threatens economic progress in their states.

Gathered in Washington for the annual meeting of the National Governors Association, Republican and Democratic state leaders joined on Friday to condemn massive spending cuts — known as the "sequester" — set to begin on March 1. White House officials warned that inaction could lead to widespread flight delays, shuttered airports, off-limit seashores and hundreds of thousands of furloughed employees spread across dozens of states.

"It is not helpful when Congress and the president and the administration have such partisan gridlock," said Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican and former member of Congress. "Because their gridlock has real repercussions on the families ... it has real repercussions on our states and our economies."

Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, said the nation "cannot afford to put at risk jobs and the recovery."

"The only thing that's standing in the way of prosperity right now is the games being played by the Republicans in Congress," he said following a meeting between Democratic governors and President Barack Obama.

The governors are scheduled to meet through the weekend, with the discussion expected to turn to jobs and the economy, gun control and the implementation of the president's health care overhaul.

Some Republican governors have blocked the use of Medicaid to expand health insurance coverage for millions of the uninsured, while others have joined Democrats in a wholesale expansion as the new law allows.

But no issue carries the same level of urgency as the budget stalemate.

From their nearby offices on Capitol Hill, congressional leaders have indicated a growing willingness to let the automatic spending cuts take effect and stay in place for weeks if not much longer. The change would trim $85 billion in domestic and defense spending, triggering furloughs for hundreds of thousands of Transportation Department and Defense Department employees, among others. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has warned that the automatic cuts would harm the readiness of U.S. fighting forces.

Obama in recent days has intensified efforts to warn the public of the negative effects, while applying pressure on congressional Republicans who oppose his blend of targeted savings and tax increases to tackle federal deficits.

Republicans in Congress responded sharply to the president's fresh demand to include higher taxes as part of a compromise.

"Spending is the problem, spending must be the focus," said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky declared: "There won't be any easy off-ramps on this one. The days of eleventh-hour negotiations are over."

But governors aren't yet resigned to the worst-case scenario.

"I think there should be limited government, but I don't like random changes. If you look at my budget, I didn't do across the board cuts," said Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican. "I think you should be more strategic."

Indeed, the package of domestic and military cuts now approaching was never supposed to happen. It was designed as a fallback, to take effect only in case a congressional "supercommittee" failed to come up with $1 trillion or more in savings from benefit programs.

While Washington Republicans blame the White House for creating the plan, they joined Democrats in voting it into law.

There was little Obama-bashing from Republican governors on Friday. But there was plenty of frustration.

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6 leaking tanks are Hanford nuke site's latest woe

YAKIMA, Wash. — Federal and state officials say six underground tanks holding a brew of radioactive and toxic waste are leaking at the country's most contaminated nuclear site in south-central Washington, raising concerns about delays for emptying the aging tanks.

The leaking materials at Hanford Nuclear Reservation pose no immediate risk to public safety or the environment because it would take perhaps years for the chemicals to reach groundwater, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said Friday.

But the news has renewed discussion over delays for emptying the tanks, which were installed decades ago and are long past their intended 20-year life span.

"None of these tanks would be acceptable for use today. They are all beyond their design life. None of them should be in service," said Tom Carpenter of Hanford Challenge, a Hanford watchdog group. "And yet, they're holding two-thirds of the nation's high-level nuclear waste."

Just last week, state officials announced that one of Hanford's 177 tanks was leaking 150 to 300 gallons a year, posing a risk to groundwater and rivers. So far, nearby monitoring wells haven't detected higher radioactivity levels.

Inslee then traveled to Washington, D.C., to discuss the problem with federal officials, learning in meetings Friday that six tanks are leaking.

The declining waste levels in the six tanks were missed because only a narrow band of measurements was evaluated, rather than a wider band that would have shown the levels changing over time, Inslee said.

"It's like if you're trying to determine if climate change is happening, only looking at the data for today," he said. "Perhaps human error, the protocol did not call for it. But that's not the most important thing at the moment. The important thing now is to find and address the leakers."

Department of Energy spokeswoman Lindsey Geisler said there was no immediate health risk and that federal officials would work with Washington state to address the matter.

Regardless, Sen. Ron Wyden, the new chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, will ask the Government Accountability Office to investigate Hanford's tank monitoring and maintenance program, said his spokesman, Tom Towslee.

The federal government built the Hanford facility at the height of World War II as part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. The remote site produced plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, and continued supporting the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal for years.

Today, it is the most contaminated nuclear site in the country, still surrounded by sagebrush but with Washington's Tri-Cities of Richland, Kennewick and Pasco several miles downriver.

Several years ago, workers at Hanford completed two of three projects deemed urgent risks to the public and the environment, removing all weapons-grade plutonium from the site and emptying leaky pools that held spent nuclear fuel just 400 yards from the river.

But successes at the site often are overshadowed by delays, budget overruns and technological challenges. Nowhere have those challenges been more apparent than in Hanford's central plateau, home to the site's third most urgent project: emptying the tanks.

Hanford's tanks hold some 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste — enough to fill dozens of Olympic-size swimming pools — and many of those tanks are known to have leaked in the past. An estimated 1 million gallons of radioactive liquid has already leaked there.

The cornerstone of emptying the tanks is a treatment plant that will convert the waste into glasslike logs for safe, secure storage. The plant, last estimated to cost more than $12.3 billion, is billions of dollars over budget and behind schedule. It isn't expected to being operating until at least 2019.

Washington state is imposing a "zero-tolerance" policy on radioactive waste leaking into the soil, Inslee said. So given those delays and the apparent deterioration of some of the tanks, the federal government will have to show that there is adequate storage for the waste in the meantime, he said.

"We are not convinced of this," he said. "There will be a robust exchange of information in the coming weeks to get to the bottom of this."

Inslee and Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, both Democrats, have championed building additional tanks to ensure safe storage of the waste until the plant is completed.

Wyden, D-Ore., toured the site earlier this week. He said he shares the governors' concerns about the integrity of the tanks but he wants more scientific information to determine it's the correct way to spend scarce money.

Wyden noted the nation's most contaminated nuclear site — and the challenges associated with ridding it of its toxic legacy — will be a subject of upcoming hearings and a higher priority in Washington, D.C.

The federal government already spends $2 billion each year on Hanford cleanup — one-third of its entire budget for nuclear cleanup nationally. The Energy Department has said it expects funding levels to remain the same for the foreseeable future, but a new Energy Department report released this week calls for annual budgets of as much as $3.5 billion during some years of the cleanup effort.

There are legal, moral and ethical considerations to cleaning up the Hanford site at the national level, Inslee said, adding that he will continue to insist that the Energy Department completely clean up the site.

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Associated Press writer Dina Cappiello in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

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Spanish king's son-in-law makes court appearance

PALMA DE MALLORCA, Spain — Protesters jeered the Spanish king's son-in-law before he was questioned Saturday by a judge about allegations he and a partner funneled away millions of euros through fraudulent deals.

The investigation has deeply embarrassed the monarchy in a country hard hit by a financial crisis and sky-high unemployment. The scandal ranks among the worst public relations mishaps the royal household has experienced in the 37-year reign of King Juan Carlos.

Inaki Urdangarin, who has not been charged with a crime, made his way into a courthouse in Palma de Mallorca amid tense street scenes where a contingent of around 170 police kept noisy protesters away from the building. Urdangarin, married to the 75-year-old king's second daughter, Princess Cristina, has denied any wrongdoing.

Urdangarin, facing his second appearance in court, did not stop to say anything, but wished about 100 journalists accredited to cover the event a curt "good morning" as he walked in, accompanied by his lawyer Mario Pascual Vives.

The Duke of Palma, the title held by Urdangarin, had been called to answer questions at a courthouse on this Mediterranean island about whether he used his high-profile status to secure lucrative deals for a nonprofit foundation he ran and then fraudulently diverted money for personal gain.

But the conservative government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has moved to try and shield the king from potential collateral damage inflicted by the Urdangarin case, emphasizing Juan Carlos' value to the nation.

Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria defended the king's role three times during a news conference following Friday's Cabinet meeting, highlighting how the monarch had worked "for stability and democracy" in Spain.

Judge Jose Castro will question Urdangarin about three alleged offenses against the Treasury, including corporate tax fraud related to his foundation and matters linked to his personal income tax returns.

As stated in the writ of summons, the judge also intends to ask about alleged bank accounts in tax havens such as Andorra, Luxembourg and Switzerland. Carlos Garcia Revenga, Cristina's personal secretary, was also scheduled to answer questions Saturday.

A week ago, Urdangarin's former partner, Diego Torres, faced detailed questioning by Castro and it is reported many potentially damaging documents were handed over to the judge. Urdangarin was summoned by Castro to the same court last February when the duke was quizzed over large contracts he secured from regional governments for his foundation.

He is suspected of then subcontracting the work to private companies he also oversaw, sometimes charging the public purse unrealistically inflated prices and syphoning some of the income to offshore tax havens.

Newspapers have reported that the revenues Urdangarin and associates are suspected of having handled may have exceeded €6 million ($8 million).

The duke's alleged misdeeds took place in 2004-2006. Urdangarin, the princess and their four children moved to Washington in 2009 as the investigation began to heat up. They returned to Spain in August.

The case exploded in the media late 2011 as Spain was buffeted by Europe's debt crisis, its economic growth grinding to a halt and already huge jobless numbers swelling.

Under Spanish law, the court will decide whether the prosecution has adequate evidence to file charges against the duke.

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