The Roger Williams Park Zoo is raising money to reopen its polar bear exhibit, which once housed animals like Kobe, in 1999.

THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL / MARY MURPHY

In a bluish image of ice and rocks stands a sad-looking polar bear, with its head slightly cocked to the side, staring out at CNN Web viewers under the headline “Mayors’ infrastructure request full of pork, critic says.”

The bear under attack is a former Rhode Island resident, at the Roger Williams Park Zoo, and it has been singled out as a grand example of wasteful spending.

Among 607 pages of stimulus spending proposed last month by the United States Conference of Mayors –– and now under consideration by President-elect Barack Obama — is $4.8 million for the Providence polar bear exhibit.

As zoo visitors would tell you, those bears were well-loved. Visitors still ask where the polar bears have gone and when, pray tell, will they return.

The zoo closed the polar bear exhibit in 2005, with the promise that it would reopen in 2007, and has been working to raise the necessary money. To date, the zoo has raised $25 million toward its $35-million capital campaign. The $4.8 million, if the federal government provided the money, would help the zoo reach its goal, says Jack Mulvena, the zoo’s executive director.

But the bears — which remain in the zoo’s logo, if not within its borders –– have become part of the national budget debate. In that CNN.com story and beyond, the nonpartisan National Taxpayers Union has roundly criticized spending for such a project.

Looking at the Conference of Mayors report again yesterday, Pete Sepp, the group’s vice president of policy and communications, quickly ticked off the ways the report says the proposed projects, many of them bridges and roads, would jump-start the nation’s economy. Rhode Island’s polar bears just don’t meet those criteria, he said. (Nor do gorillas in Minnesota, who also made the list, he added.)

“The thing to remember is that this money is not coming for free,” he said. “It’s being taken out of Rhode Islanders’ pockets in the form of their federal taxes. … The government is not magically creating money and pumping it into the economy.”

At the zoo, Mulvena spoke yesterday about how it has felt to be under attack on the national stage.

“My first reaction is the old standard –– any press is great press,” Mulvena said. “Right out of the box, we’re actually kind of proud to be out there.”

Plus, he says, the stories have shifted a bit from that first CNN coverage last month. He has been speaking with a Time magazine reporter –– he’s not sure if a story is planned –– and says other publications, also, seem to be taking a more even-handed look at the projects that have been criticized. And Mulvena has a ready defense for his polar bears.

“It’s clearly a worthwhile project,” he says. “It clearly meets the standards of the economic stimulus package.”

Not to mention that the zoo’s original elephant house –– since converted to the Tropical America building, which houses the monkeys –– was built as a WPA project, Mulvena said.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration was the largest New Deal agency, providing almost 8 million jobs for the unemployed during the Great Depression. They Workers built public buildings, projects and roads, and operated arts, drama, media and literacy projects. And Roosevelt’s approach to the Depression is frequently cited as a model for what Obama is trying to accomplish.

But Sepp said taxpayers must challenge the notion that “another trillion dollars of federal spending will somehow lift the country out of its economic doldrums.” As for comparing the current proposed projects to WPA projects, he said that program wasn’t nearly as impressive as people say it was at improving the country’s economic performance.

Choosing proposed projects for Providence fell to Mayor David N. Cicilline and his staff. Cicilline raved yesterday afternoon about the zoo, the polar bears and the Conference of Mayors’ report as he was heading home from meeting with Obama at George Mason University in Virginia with a contingent of mayors.

Cicilline said the polar bear exhibit draws people from beyond Rhode Island to the zoo — and, therefore, to other local businesses as well.

“I think the zoo is an incredibly important aspect in Rhode Island. … I think public parks and zoos are important assets in a city,” Cicilline said. “It obviously doesn’t have the same standing … as a bridge or a road, but we put together a list of projects that were ready to be done in 90 days and could be done. There are cultural assets that should be part of that list.”The bear facts

•Exhibit open for 25 years before closing in 2005.

•The exhibit featured eight different bears during that period, including two — Triton and Kobe — who were born at the zoo.

•Trixie, mother of Triton and Kobe, died after being sedated in advance of transferring her to a zoo in Indianapolis 2005.

•Reopening, first scheduled for 2007, now set for 2012.

kbramson@projo.com