The $14.7 million for a new airport on an Alaskan island that averages only 42 flights a month. The half-million dollars for a new skateboard park in unemployment-ravaged Rhode Island. The $3.4 million for fencing and tunnels to keep Florida turtles from becoming roadkill.

Those proposals for spending federal stimulus money were all criticized by cable news commentators, Republican officials and, in the case of the airport, the inspector general of the Transportation Department. But they have something else in common, too. They are popular locally. And they underscore a truth that has been evident since the New Deal: sometimes the boondoggle is in the eye of the beholder.

Dan Clarion, the maintenance manager and harbor master in Ouzinkie, a town of about 170 people on an island off Alaska, said the new airport was vital for safety reasons. The island’s current runway is too short, Mr. Clarion said, and its location leaves it vulnerable to dangerous crosswinds that sometimes shut down the airport, stranding islanders who rely on planes for their mail, their groceries and their access to the mainland when the seas are too high.

“Many times it’s the only way we can get in and out,” Mr. Clarion said by telephone.

The outcry that greeted Pawtucket, R.I., over its plans to spend stimulus money on a playground with a skate park at a junior high school was so fierce that city officials soon scrapped the idea and decided to spend their stimulus money on road work instead. But residents of Pawtucket had sought the skate park for a decade to lure skaters off the steps of the city’s library, the granite walls by the old mill and even the steps of City Hall. So the city is building it anyway, using the original source of federal financing that it had planned to use before the stimulus law passed.