How's the stimulus working out for N.C.?

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Tuesday, August 18, 2009

News How's the stimulus working out for N.C.?

Posted By Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman on Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 11:30 AM

According to ProPublica.org, an independent, non-profit, non-partisan investigative journalism project, North Carolina has received $2,719,107,840 in stimulus funds -- so far. Mecklenburg County has received $85,672,640, with the Department of Education receiving the bulk of the money, $43,534,811, and the Department of Transportation coming in second with $28,611,015.

Want to know exactly where the money is going? Follow the links.

ProPublic has chosen Charlotte as one of the eight cities they are taking a monthly stimulus snap shot of, along with Atlanta, Boston, Elkhard (Ind.), Grand Forks (N.D.), Las Vegas, Seattle and St. Cloud (Minn.)

ProPublica pulled a random sample of 520 of the roughly 6,000 approved projects to examine stimulus progress around the country. That sample is large enough to estimate national patterns with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percent. ProPublica asked members of its reporting network to find out if states had advertised the projects, awarded contracts or actually started construction work.

While about 30 percent of the projects in the sample had broken ground by mid-summer, at least 66 percent had a contract and 76 percent had been put out to bid – suggesting an impending gusher of stimulus work in late summer and early fall.

In addition to the survey, ProPublica reviewed federal transportation data [3] to determine how many stimulus projects reached a critical juncture – receipt of a “notice to proceed,” the last bureaucratic step before construction can start.

The data show some surprising trends: a wide range of progress [3] among states, a tendency for cold weather states to have more projects under way, and a relatively bigger lag getting started in states where unemployment is highest.