100 Days 100 Questions
The Obama administration is touting the 100 days since the Federal Stimulus Act kicked in with a recap of 100 projects worth being all presidentail gloat over. The LA Times has a dimmer view. We’ll start with guard rails in Oklahoma:
Then there are projects that create work, but seem to fit no long-range plan.
Oklahoma officials were stunned to see the $1.1-million guardrail project offered up by the Army Corps of Engineers as a candidate for stimulus money. With so many other pressing needs, spending money in a desolate area showing no signs of a comeback is indefensible, they said.
“They’re not mowing the weeds, which are 2 or 3 feet tall,” said Ted Graham, city manager in nearby Guymon, Okla. “They quit maintaining the lake in the park, so it would be a frustration if they spend a million dollars on a guardrail they don’t maintain currently.”
A spokesman for the corps said that repairing the guardrail with stimulus money was one of several options under consideration. “The guardrail is deficient, broken and needs repairs,” said Ross Adkins, spokesman for the corps’ Tulsa district.
He conceded that the guardrail is within an area that “has pretty much been abandoned.”
“There’s no water there, no recreation to speak of. There’s nothing there to attract people,” Adkins said.
Coburn and the state’s other U.S. senator, Republican James M. Inhofe, sent a letter to the corps earlier this month objecting to the project.
Given the “serious infrastructure concerns around the nation,” they wrote, “it is difficult to comprehend the decision by your agency.”
Americans may be wondering the same thing, on a broader scale.
A Rasmussen poll last week showed that only 39% believed that stimulus spending would help the economy, compared with 44% who said it wouldn’t.
The poll also showed that 45% of respondents believed the stimulus program should be canceled, compared with 36% who wanted to keep it going.
Guard rails are one of those things that mystify me. People complain that cars go too fast, and then demand more things that reduce the risk to drivers. Nothing beats the threat to imminent danger as a way to keep drivers alert. Europeans tend to understand this dynamic a bit better. A few years ago when I was driving in the Alps, I was very alert since the narrow winding roads had no guard rails and one mistake in taking a turn too fast would send you over the edge and down a steep slope. Nary a pot hole either. But the LA Times article didn’t just focus on the Oklahoma guard rail. It also offered up Solar Energy versus Arts Center. Tech vs. Art.
Obama billed the program not only as a vehicle for new jobs but as seed money for a kind of top-to-bottom transformation. Part of the payoff would be a long-term dividend of new renewable energy sources feeding into “smart” grids that reduce utility costs and rid the atmosphere of dangerous greenhouse gases.
A few days before signing the stimulus bill, Obama said in his weekly radio address that the money would underwrite “the work of building wind turbines and solar panels and the smart grid necessary to transport the clean energy they create; and laying broadband Internet lines to connect rural homes, schools and businesses to the information superhighway.”
Not all of the money is heading toward such purposes. Local governments have their own ideas on how it should be spent. And some are making choices that may be at odds with Obama’s vision.
In Minneapolis, the City Council voted recently to spend $2 million in stimulus funds on a vacant 99-year-old theater that developers want to convert into a center for dance. The project would create about 48 permanent jobs, city documents indicate.
In the competition for the limited stimulus money, the council awarded less than $300,000 to a company that wants to open a solar-energy-panel manufacturing plant that would create 360 jobs by 2011, according to city records.
I can easily see both sides to the issue. On the one hand, the start up costs for a high tech venture are huge and often, in early adoption phases, totally unprofitable. It’s one of the things that the capital markets have been good at, funding ventures where the risks are high. Yet, part of the way to build a strong diverse economic base is to invest in the cultural amenities that attract people to live and work in an area. All Class A office space tends to look alike. The draw to one area over another is a complex mix of labor pool, cost of operations and the ability to grow. Areas such as Silicon Valley thrive because of the proximity to cultural and recreational assets that are world class. Same with Route 128 or Research Triangle. So what comes first?
Closer to home we can look at New Haven as the Connecticut petri dish of economic stimulation. They city essentially subsists on huge state funding allocations, because it hasn’t yet figured out how to sustain economic growth. Yet, New Haven has the right mix of multiple college and universities, multiple world class cultural institutions and organizations and a decent amount of recreational areas. New Haven has tried to create industry focus. There was Science Park, a facility devoted to tech start ups. There was the nano technology and biotech initiatives. Neither has really taken hold. Now, and not just in New Haven, its green technology.
Norwalk has a decent amount of green tech companies calling Norwalk home. There are several big projects, like Spinaker’s 95/7 and the Connecticut Friends School that are at the forefront of green building design. Add in the rest of Norwalk’s uniqueness; largest amount of public waterfront recreational areas in Connecticut, high concentration of creative economy green builders, architects, and entrepreneurs along with the proximity to NYC and accessible to Boston, and you have a great start. Yet the list of federal stimulus projects that include Norwalk is slim. Connecticut is busy looking for more $1 million dollar guard rail projects. Which is a shame.
source: LA TIMES, Some projects raise question: Where’s the stimulus?, By Peter Nicholas
June 14, 2009
