For reasons which remain obscure to me I was dragooned onto a committee tasked to hire a streetscaping firm that will spend a $300,000 stimulus grant. The winning firm is to develop a long-range plan for one particular blighted stretch of my small, Appalachian town, and then to figure out which portion of that plan can actually be built with the remaining funds. We are tasked to manage them, as it were.
None of which, I think, is unusual. But since this is where the shovel hits the earth, I wanted to share a couple quick observations. The first of which is: From my perspective, the money authorized with such urgency many months back has yet to filter into the economy. At least into my economy.
Follow me, if you would be so kind...
So. We've got a nice $300,000 grant. It is not clear to me whether this is or is not the grant the mayor wished to turn down because it obliged the city to come up with some matching funds; in any event, he was in the meeting, and didn't grumble about anything, and so it's been sorted out one way or another.
But $300,000 isn't $300,000. It's actually $270,000, because the state takes ten percent to administer the funds. Or, if I followed right, to administer the consultants who actually manage the funds.
My sense is that $270,000 isn't a huge construction budget, that even here it wouldn't even build a house I'd be ashamed to live in.
And yet we had eleven firms apply through the initial RFP, four of which made it through to the interview round (there was a tie, apparently, for third place). Our town is a good hour away from the big city, and yet each of those firms showed up with power point presentations and between three and five ranking staffers to solicit our business.
This tells me work is hard to come by. I don't quite understand how these firms are compensated (but since I'm apparently on this committee for the life of the project, I will find out), but apparently they get a flat fee of about $25,000 to develop the long-range plan. (Our city shelves are filled with such long range-plans, most of which can never be funded, nor acquiesced to by the electorate.)
So that leaves $245,000 for actual streetscaping construction. Of which the winning firm will keep, say, 5 percent for administering and supervising and all that. So by my count, if the math is right, they stand to make $37,250 on the deal. Which doesn't seem like all that much (OK, it's more than I'll make this year, but I'm not running an office with a payroll in the dozens or hundreds).
So that leaves about, oh, $230,000 for actual streetscaping construction.
But along the way some people have been paid, so that's what stimulus is for, right?
All that's just sort of a curiosity to me, an echo of Deep Throat's dictum to follow the money.
Two points of interest from the presentations we heard, other than that civil engineers probably ought not to be repurposed into sales jobs.
First, only one of these four firms -- the largest -- had begun work on a stimulus project, had actually begun to engage in the paperwork, actually had a staff member certified in whatever one need be certified in to manage this process.
Which tells me that we're a good six months to a year to a year and a half from seeing the broader impacts of stimulus ripple through our economy. (I type this in hopes that my many errors of surmise may be corrected here by my betters.)
Second thing, and this is probably obvious: Several presentations noted that the current bid environment makes it possible to do more with our money than might have been the case two years ago. Which means that lots of construction/road building (and that's a huge, putatively crooked enterprise here) firms are hurting badly. That concrete and mulch and river rock and such are in oversupply.
That's kind of what I've got this morning. That's what it looks like from the ground, peering up toward the policies we typically discuss here.