When the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved plans to construct a liquefied natural gas facility in Fall River in June, no one was more outraged than the city’s mayor, Edward Lambert, who has campaigned vigorously against the plant, which he views as a bull’s-eye for terrorists. So Lambert did what any savvy local politician would do when stonewalled by a Washington regulatory agency: Call his congressman.

Within weeks of the FERC decision, Lambert was celebrating provisions in two bills that make life difficult for Weaver’s Cove Energy, the company trying to build the LNG terminal, and its owner, New York energy firm Amerada Hess.

For four years Weaver’s Cove has been planning  to build a terminal off the Taunton River in the North End of Fall River where the company will be able to offload LNG brought on tankers from overseas. It has hardly been greeted by the welcome wagon.

The first legislative obstacle, included in a water resources bill that passed the House on July 14, bars dredging beyond a depth of 35 feet in Fall River Harbor, a restriction that may make the waters impassable for huge LNG tankers.

Then, on July 29, Congress passed a long-awaited highway bill. Tucked into the legislation was a provision that bars the use of federal funding to remove the Brightman Street Bridge over the Taunton River. A replacement span has been under construction since the late 1990s, and plans called for the older bridge to be torn down once the new one was complete. However, the transportation bill, which President Bush signed in August, directs that the existing span, a drawbridge whose opening is not big enough for LNG tankers to pass through, be kept in place and used as a pedestrian path across the river.

In both cases, US Rep. James McGovern worked quietly behind the scenes to ensure the provisions’ passage, discussing them publicly only after they were approved. And he says there will be more impediments thrown in the way of Weaver’s Cove later this year. “The company may think this battle is over, but it’s just beginning,” says McGovern, a Worcester Democrat whose district includes Fall River.

James Grasso, a Needham–based consultant who is acting as a spokesman for the developers, says the McGovern-sponsored roadblocks are unfortunate, and, ultimately, make for bad energy policy. “If every state and every municipality had the authority to veto or refuse the construction of a facility like we are proposing, nothing would get built,” he says.

But parochial preferences are more the rule than the exception in huge spending bills. The federal transportation spending plan, typically reauthorized every five years or so, is one of Washington’s great pork barrels, stuffed with projects included at the behest of individual members of Congress. The 2005 legislation included 6,500 such earmarks, at a total cost of $24 billion. McGovern’s proposals may have been easier sells because they were cost-savers, barring the use of federal funds for projects that, not coincidentally, would have made the LNG facility possible.

McGovern may have found sympathetic ears in the House because the number of proposed new LNG plants is rising and hitting all areas of the country. Almost everyone agrees that more energy is a good thing, but few want the potentially dangerous LNG facilities in their own backyard.

The efforts to block LNG terminals have frustrated the Bush administration, which argues that such facilities are crucial to national energy policy. The administration won a temporary victory in June, when it prevailed on the Senate to reject a provision in an energy bill supported by Massachusetts senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry that would have given states veto power over LNG siting.

But McGovern’s subsequent success demonstrates how the concerns of a single Democratic congressman —even a liberal one from the bluest of blue states—can still carry the day in a Republican-dominated House. Relations between the parties are regarded as more poisoned than ever, but when it comes to the pet projects of members of Congress, bipartisan back scratching endures.

“There is a tradition of it,” says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “When the Democrats were in charge, they let Republicans get something. You don’t get as much,” he says of those in the minority party, “but you get something.”

The extending of such courtesies is driven by personal relationships, and by the knowledge that a good turn may be repaid “when there is a tough committee hearing or vote on a controversial matter,” says Sabato.

McGovern is well positioned in that regard, holding a coveted seat on the powerful House Rules Committee, which sets the terms of debate under which all bills are considered on the House floor. It was because of his position as the second-ranking Democrat on Rules that McGovern was able to win a position on the conference committee that reconciled competing House and Senate drafts of the transportation bill. And it didn’t hurt that McGovern had previously served on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which shepherded the legislation through Congress. McGovern used his connections with Rep. Jim Oberstar of Minnesota, the top Democrat on that panel, to insert the provision in the House version of the transportation bill barring destruction of the old Brightman Street Bridge.

Lambert sees McGovern’s efforts as the first victories in a larger war. “We continue to apply public pressure, political pressure, hoping there is enough weight that might tip the scales,” says Lambert, who has argued vociferously that the LNG tankers pose a grave safety danger. A recent report by Sandia National Laboratories determined that an attack on an LNG tanker could cause a flaming cloud that would burn every person within a mile.

Weaver’s Cove spokesman Grasso argues that members of Congress should allow FERC, and related federal and state permitting authorities, to proceed without political interference. Four years of study by the company and two years by FERC have demonstrated that “this project can be constructed and operated safely and will bring much needed energy to this region,” says Grasso, adding that there has not been a major LNG disaster anywhere in the world in at least 60 years.

He says Weaver’s Cove hopes to begin construction of the facility next summer. If built, he adds, it will help lower natural gas prices in New England, provide thousands of construction jobs, and pay $3 million in local taxes each year.

But throwing yet another wrench into Weaver’s Cove’s plans—this one a move in which McGovern had no role—in August, the Navy asked FERC to reconsider its siting decision because the proposed plant would interfere with Navy training exercises in Narragansett Bay.

Fall River now has filed a petition with FERC asking it to reconsider its decision in light of the bridge provision and the Navy’s opposition. The June FERC vote was 3-1 in favor of the project, but because one of the three commissioners who voted “yes” has resigned and has not yet been replaced, advocates for Fall River hope they will only need to convince one commissioner to change his vote.

The city has hired Washington lawyer Lester Hyman, a former chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, to make its case. Hyman recently represented Rhode Island’s attorney general in his successful effort to stave off an LNG facility in Providence.

“There definitely is hope” that the FERC decision can be overturned, says Hyman. But if that fails, Hyman says, the city will take the case to the US District Court in either Washington or Boston.

Weaver’s Cove has lined up an army of lawyers, plus environmental and safety consultants, to defend its plan. “What [Weaver’s Cove] has done is take the best of anyone in the LNG industry and made them a team,” says Grasso. But even if Weaver’s Cove comes up with countermoves, the opponents say they’re ready.

The dredging and bridge provisions are just the first of “many obstacles that will be thrown in their path,” says McGovern, coyly declining to elaborate on further legislative tricks he may have up his sleeve. “If they think we are going away, they are mistaken.”

WATCHING HIS LANGUAGE

McGovern wasn’t the only member of the state’s all-Democratic congressional delegation who came away from the transportation bill with something to brag about. Rep. Michael Capuano of Somerville, the state’s lone representative on the House committee that oversees transportation, brought home more than $870 million per year in federal dollars to be spent on local highway and transit projects. The new money, which funds projects through 2009, will create 8,500 jobs in road construction each year. It will also fund construction of a new Lechmere MBTA stop and a new National Park Service visitor’s center for the Boston Harbor Islands, among other projects, and it authorizes an engineering study of commuter rail service from Boston to New Bedford and Fall River.

“I have no doubt that Republicans got a bigger slice of the pie than Democrats did,” says Capuano. But he is hardly complaining about the Bay State’s take, which represents a significant reversal in the state’s transportation fortunes. In the last round of funding, approved in 1998, Massachusetts secured only about $550 million per year, and it was the only state in the country to see its funding drop. From 1991 to 1998, Massachusetts had received $830 million annually, thanks to a steady infusion of cash for the Big Dig.

How did Capuano help the Bay State bounce back? Lots of glad-handing and horse-trading with other members who were seeking earmarked funding for their own special projects. That, he says, and “by never saying ‘big’ and ‘dig’ in the same sentence.”