Stimulus could shortchange hamlets
Tim Reamer’s office can’t waste time waiting around for a bailout.
Reamer, Buena Vista’s director of economic development, isn’t sure that the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – commonly known as the stimulus package – is going to help his city all that much.
“We’ve got issues we need to address, whether or not we get money from the stimulus package,” Reamer said. “Smaller, rural areas just can’t rely on that money.”
Bigger, more urban localities could end up receiving the bulk of that money to stimulate the economy, said Reamer. Fairfax County, with 432 requests, more than doubled any competition for the highest number of requests on a recent survey of Virginians’ stimulus fund projects.
And Reamer fears that might be indicative of how the stimulus money will eventually be distributed. He worries that counties with more resources and denser populations stand to garner a bulk of the funds, especially in Northern Virginia, which has the highest concentration of people in the state.
According to Gov. Tim Kaine’s office, Virginia is likely to receive $4.9 billion from the federal government for general spending and projects that encourage economic development. That money is not a part of about $1.7 billion in stimulus money included in the $77 billion state budget the General Assembly passed late in February.
Reamer sees a disadvantage for localities that cannot afford major surveying and analyst companies, because most projects receiving grants from the state’s allocation of the money will be those that are “shovel-ready,” waiting only for money to break ground.
“We’d love to have all our projects in that stage to be ready to go, but even to do preliminary studies is a huge obligation of resources,” he said. “[For] a lot of them, like the waste water treatment plant, we need $3 million just to draft up plans and survey the area.”
Buena Vista’s businesses might get lucky, however. Home to several manufacturing and industrial sites, including Modine Manufacturing Co., BONTEX Inc., ARAMARK and Sayre Enterprises Inc., the city of 7,000 is unusually well-positioned to exploit the industry boom President Obama envisioned in his recent address to the joint houses of Congress, said Reamer.
Citizens and local governments from localities all over the commonwealth proposed 9,157 stimulus-related projects through the Web site stimulus.virginia.gov by its March 6 deadline. Virginians made requests totaling $450 billion, more than half the national package’s total worth.
According to a representative of the governor’s office, which maintains the Web site, the proposals will be used more as a general guideline to gauge areas Virginians want to see the money go to. The Web site posted 20 areas of high concern, from infrastructure to health and human services, and Virginians thought up a variety of projects, from shovel-ready ecotourism parks to advocacy programs and simple pleas to keep law enforcement officials and teachers in the workplace.
The federal-level Web site that handles the stimulus package – www.recovery.gov -- says that 60 percent of the total money will go toward the states and 40 percent will go toward localities, but little has been made clear as to how a majority of either batch of money will be distributed.
“People think that you get approved based on those proposals, and you’ll just get a $30 million check in the mail,” said Reamer. “It’s just not gonna happen like that.”
The governor’s office said that citizens and localities will be alerted about the next step in the funding process in 60 to 90 days.
Reamer says the state’s portion of the money will likely be made available through the same grant programs that currently operate in Virginia, along with some new ones. He expects stringent monitoring and doubts small localities like Buena Vista will see big benefits.
“My expectations are low – very low. We have a reasonable opportunity for some minor project funds, but less on the million-dollar side and probably closer to $15,000.”
Buena Vista residents got in on the forum as well, with Buena Vista Public School psychologist Juli Gibson proposing a $100,000 project to take her house “off the grid,” that is, to make the house completely sustainable on renewable power. She and her husband proposed modifications including solar panels and geothermal energy.
“It was just an idea, but if we could make it work that’d be great,” she said.
The Gibsons are not alone. In Pittsylvania County in southeast Virginia, six residential requests for alternative energy funding range from a proposed “residential windmill” to mixed-source energy projects such as the Gibsons’. According to the Web site, energy and environmental proposals constituted nearly 18 percent of all requests, behind only infrastructure and transportation.
Produced by
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Lead Supervisors:
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Prof. Indira Somani
Editing supervisor:
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Technical supervisor: Michael Todd