Pace of stimulus prompts blame game

This is not an attempt to get all political on your asphalt, but are you having trouble figuring out who to believe when it comes to Nevada's effectiveness in cashing its $201 million stimulus check for transportation projects?

About five months ago, Reps. Shelley Berkley and Dina Titus, both Democrats, unloaded on Gov. Jim Gibbons, a Republican, for failing to aggressively spend the money on transportation projects in a state in dire need of new jobs. The next month, Nevada slipped to 47th in the nation when it comes to allocating that money to building or fixing highways and bridges.

Gibbons claimed back then that the rankings -- calculated by the federal government's Transportation and Infrastructure Committee -- were deceptive. He offered two reasons:

• First, the full spending reports had yet to make it to Washington D.C.

• Second, some of the funding was allocated to local agencies making the figures more difficult to track.

Obviously this is an election year, and Titus and Berkley have an interest in replacing Gibbons with a Democrat. So, the representatives saw these numbers as a giant softball plopped atop a tee that they could whack over the fence.

"It's ridiculous that we've seen as little movement as we have," said Berkley's spokesman, David Cherry. "We have been calling on the governor to get moving and get these folks back to work. The monies are there, the question is, 'What's taking so long?'

"The governor has said five times in a row that nothing has gone wrong, yet every month we go backward. We've never gone forward."

See? Whack.

As of November, when the latest numbers were released, Nevada had free fallen to No. 50. Now stop the grumbling. That's not dead last because the District of Columbia is included in the rankings. For the record, Virginia is the only state that, at least on paper, is worse than Nevada when it comes to spending the funding.

If the District of Columbia still doesn't have the paperwork, where is it? Stuck in cyberspace? Perhaps Gibbons and Co. should opt for certified mail.

It would be nice to extract the politics from this mess and see the real numbers.

According to the "transparency and accountability information" released this month by the federal government, 41 percent of the stimulus funding has been allocated to jobs under contract.

But Gibbons' office and NDOT officials say those numbers are outdated, and 51 percent of the funds are under contract. So, halfway through the stimulus plan, the state has half its money dedicated to projects. Sounds reasonable.

The federal government ranks each state by a weighted system that gives one-fourth to a percentage of funds allocated to projects out to bid, one-fourth to monies associated with projects under contract and one-half to stimulus projects under way.

Only 31 percent of Nevada's projects are under way, which might explain why we're sinking in the rankings each month.

Dan Burns, spokesman for Gibbons, said that on paper the state looks like its lagging because transportation officials chose to do dozens of projects throughout Nevada rather than one large capital project.

"If you look at the hard numbers, it doesn't tell the whole story," Burns said. "We want to create a greater number of jobs. We have more projects, which makes the bidding process longer."

NDOT officials said they expect the remaining funding to be under contract within the next couple of months.

"We didn't take the money and build one bridge across Interstate 15; instead we found projects in all 17 districts," Burns said. "The whole idea is to create jobs and stimulate the economy."

Burns emphasized that Gibbons chose to put more people to work across the state, although the bulk of the projects will be done in the most populated regions. The most successful month, according to state transportation officials, was October, when 550 workers were employed on stimulus projects.

So why the differing accounts? It's political; that is something both sides agree on.

"Absolutely, without a question," Burns said.

Cherry: "There is a blame game going on here. He (Gibbons) started it by blaming us for not getting enough money in the stimulus package."

The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. But Nevada residents don't really care about the politics. They want our elected officials to stop getting all political on our ascending jobless rate and start stimulating our economy.

If you have a question, tip or tirade, call Adrienne Packer at 702-387-2904, or send an e-mail to roadwarrior@reviewjournal .com. Please include your phone number.