When President Obama first outlined his stimulus plan to boost the economy, leaders across the country envisioned a burst of federal funding to build high-speed rail lines, modern classrooms and a new national electricity grid.
Latrine repair? No one mentioned that. But $500,000 has been set aside to fix the toilets at Ft. Irwin, an Army base south of Death Valley National Park, according to data from the California Recovery Task Force.
In fact, much of the stimulus money earmarked for California so far has gone toward run-of-the-mill projects such as replacing a metal guardrail with a concrete one in the city of Orange and conducting a campus-wide elevator study at the Department of Veterans Affairs Hospital in San Francisco.
Federal officials defend the expenditures, saying they wanted to emphasize "shovel-ready" projects that would get people working. California had one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation in June at 11.6%, and economists anticipate it to remain in the same ballpark when the latest numbers are released today.
But critics say the stimulus bill is merely paying for work that would have been completed anyway. Worse, they say, the government is missing a chance to reshape the way Californians live, a failure that's being repeated in states across the country.
"We have these huge, challenging needs facing the country in infrastructure," said Steve Ellis, a vice president at consumer advocacy group Taxpayers for Common Sense. "But at the end of the day, we'll have spent $800 billion and we'll still have some of these huge projects staring us in the face."
The $787-billion stimulus plan includes $499 billion in spending programs and $288 billion in various tax cuts and credits, said Ed DeSeve, senior advisor to the president on Recovery Act issues.
Over the next three years, California is expected to get $26 billion in stimulus funds for projects including building highways and bridges, developing education programs and stabilizing the state's finances, according to a private research group. About $5.6 billion in spending in the state has been approved by the federal government as of July 22, according to the most recent update on the state's Recovery Task Force website.
Transportation makes up a big share of the stimulus projects already approved. About $2 billion is going to transportation, including the building of a six-lane highway near the Mexican border.
