Twin Ports stimulus cash hard to track
Among the $11.3 million in stimulus money that went to the Duluth school district, $8.2 million went for programs “for the support of public elementary, secondary and postsecondary education,” according to Recovery.gov, the government website that’s meant to make stimulus spending transparent.By: Brandon Stahl, Duluth News Tribune
- New furniture at the Tri-Towers
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Among the $11.3 million in stimulus money that went to the Duluth school district, $8.2 million went for programs “for the support of public elementary, secondary and postsecondary education,” according to Recovery.gov, the government website that’s meant to make stimulus spending transparent.
There isn’t a website anywhere, however, that explains specifically how that money was spent.
It’s just one of many obstacles to tracking how stimulus money is allocated and spent.
“One of our frustrations with the stimulus,” said Jonathon Blake, vice president of the conservative think tank Minnesota Freedom Foundation, “is that the (Obama) administration promised this would be done with the utmost transparency. And it hasn’t. We do believe they’ve done their best to accomplish that, but you’re talking about trillions of dollars of spending, and you end up with one-sentence descriptions on multimillion-dollar projects.”
Dozens of Duluth-area stimulus-funded projects come with bare-minimum descriptions of expenditures and who benefited. The News Tribune’s attempt to track down spending in the Twin Ports area required calling each organization to get the information.
Of the $6.7 million that went to the Duluth Housing and Redevelopment Authority, many of the projects were explained with one-sentence descriptions. One item, for example, lists $3 million to conduct “modernization activities” at public housing developments.
It turns out it’s essentially upkeep and maintenance on dilapidated homes, and it employed 20 workers. Money was spent adding new doors, carpet tile, paint, light fixtures and community room furniture for the Tri-Towers buildings, and new air-conditioning and heating systems for the MidTowne Manor buildings.
The HRA also used $2.5 million to restart construction on the Harbor Highlands project, building 38 new low- to moderate-income housing units below Central High School. That money, said Duluth HRA director Rick Ball, restarted a stalled project and created 200 jobs.
“Without that money, we could not have gone forward,” Ball said.
So why not have those explanations on the stimulus reports?
“They’re asking for a generalized description,” Ball said. “The report is a summary report and I don’t think they’re asking for a lot of detail.”
Another problem tracking stimulus money: Recovery.gov doesn’t list all of the projects awarded money or sometimes doesn’t show which region benefited.
About $7.5 million in stimulus money was allocated to bus company Jefferson Lines, according to Recovery.gov, but it takes digging on the Minnesota Department of Transportation website to learn that $2.85 million of that money went to purchasing eight buses.
From there, it takes getting confirmation from the company that much of the money went to buy five “Rocket Rider” buses. That purchase drew fire from the owner of Duluth’s Skyline Shuttle, who said stimulus money was used to compete with a private business that also transports riders to the Twin Cities.
The problem with the lack of transparency, said Cheryl Arvidson, Recovery.gov’s assistant director of communications, is that the federal government relies on the agencies that receive the money to report on how they’ve used it. And with thousands of reports filed, Arvidson said it’s difficult to track which groups haven’t fully explained their spending.
“In some cases, the descriptions are not as full as one would like,” she acknowledged.
In other cases, there’s no description at all. The federal Office of Management and Budget reported in early October that $162 million in spending has gone unreported on recovery.gov.
That’s not the government’s fault, Arvidson said, but that of the entity receiving the money.
“These are groups that have consistently refused to file these reports,” Arvidson said.
A full list of those entities is available at Recovery.gov, which shows that five groups in Minnesota have failed to report their spending.
None of those groups is in the Duluth area.
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