The Angry White Guy

How’s that STIMULUS working for you?

Posted June 16th 2009 at 8:27 pm by AWG

Sen. Coburn questions 100 stimulus projects

$840,000 to repair a bridge in Portage County, Wis., that carries 260 vehicles a day largely to a backwater saloon and a country club.

Wouldn’t want those drunks driving over dangerous bridges they could get hurt.

$3.4 million Florida Department of Transportation project for an “eco-passage” – an underground wildlife road crossing for turtles and other wildlife in Lake Jackson, Fla., along U.S. 27.

Somebody please explain to me how the turtle (or any animal for that matter) is going to know it suppose to cross the road via a tunnel. Can turtles read? What rabbits can they read? Can they at least look at the picture of the crossing and figure it out? Do these animals have this kind of critical thinking? I want a webcam set up on Hwy 27 showing me animals using the tunnel and NOTHING and I mean NOTHING crossing the road… not even a bug.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. who is keeping up with spending waste also criticized,

_A Bureau of Land Management project to study the impact wind farms have on the sage grouse population in Oregon. The proposal calls for hiring people to tag sage grouse in areas where wind farms may be built, to help determine where turbines could be located.

_$1.5 million in stimulus money for a $5 million new wastewater treatment plant in Perkins, Okla., his home state. Coburn said the stimulus money came with strings that will increase the costs. With a new total cost of $7.2 million, the city will be forced to borrow money and, as a result, utility taxes have increased by 60 percent this year, the senator said.

_Grants and loans totaling $1.3 million to Solon Township in Leelanau County, Mich., to help pay for construction of a wastewater treatment plant. Local opposition killed the project. The money will now be used for a future treatment plant, for which there is no plan and questionable local support.

_Road signs costing $300 each, being placed at construction sites to alert motorists that the project is being paid for by the stimulus money. Transportation Department spokesman Jill Zuckman said each state decides whether to use stimulus money for signs, and the cost would vary in each state.

_A $3 million project to repair taxiways at Hanscom Field, Mass., which Coburn said is for corporate jets. Richard Walsh, a spokesman for the independent state agency that runs the airport, Massport, said only 18 percent of the traffic at the airport is for corporate jets. Most of the use, 70 percent cent, is for flight students, he said.

_Montana’s state-run liquor warehouse, to receive $2.2 million in stimulus cash to install skylights. The project is part of the $27.7 million the state has been awarded for energy programs.

Additional waste…

Town of Union, New York, encouraged to spend a $578,000 grant it did not request for a homelessness problem it claims it does not have.

10,000 dead people get stimulus checks, but the Social Security Administration blames a tough deadline.

Nearly $10 million to renovate an abandoned train station that hasn’t been used in 30 years.

$1.15 million for installation of a new guard rail for the non-existent Optima Lake in Oklahoma.

Nevada non-profit gets $2 million weatherization contract after recently being fired for same type of work.

$800,000 for little-used John Murtha Airport in Johnstown, Pennsylvania airport to repave a back-up runway; the ‘Airport for Nobody’ Has Already Received Tens of Millions in Taxpayer dollars.

$1 billion for FutureGen in Mattoon, Illinois is the “biggest earmark of all time” for a power plant that may never work.

and that folks is the tip of the spending iceberg…

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