WASHINGTON — It is a six-mile stretch of guardrail near a manufactured lake in a desolate patch of the Oklahoma Panhandle. There's little reason for anyone to visit. Weeds are overgrown; the lake bed is virtually dry.
Yet repairing the guardrail is on a list of projects developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to tap into President Obama's $787-billion economic stimulus program.
The price tag: more than $1.1 million.
As Obama moves to accelerate the flow of federal stimulus funds, public officials are voicing concerns that some of the projects being devised are of dubious merit.
Obama spoke of the stimulus as a mechanism to create jobs, drop money into a struggling economy and reposition the U.S. as a more energy-efficient nation. So far, those goals are proving difficult to meet.
U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) is putting out a report early this week that will raise questions about the validity of certain projects.
By some measures, the stimulus program is working. Aging bridges and roads are being repaired, providing needed jobs for construction workers. Money is going back to working-class Americans in the form of a tax cut.
Yet some projects moving forward aren't what was envisioned when the stimulus was signed into law Feb. 17.
Obama billed the program not only as a vehicle for new jobs but as seed money for a kind of top-to-bottom transformation. Part of the payoff would be a long-term dividend of new renewable energy sources feeding into "smart" grids that reduce utility costs and rid the atmosphere of dangerous greenhouse gases.
A few days before signing the stimulus bill, Obama said in his weekly radio address that the money would underwrite "the work of building wind turbines and solar panels and the smart grid necessary to transport the clean energy they create; and laying broadband Internet lines to connect rural homes, schools and businesses to the information superhighway."
Not all of the money is heading toward such purposes. Local governments have their own ideas on how it should be spent. And some are making choices that may be at odds with Obama's vision.
In Minneapolis, the City Council voted recently to spend $2 million in stimulus funds on a vacant 99-year-old theater that developers want to convert into a center for dance. The project would create about 48 permanent jobs, city documents indicate.
