Stimulus Funds in California Mostly Going to Routine Projects

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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.

But critics say the stimulus bill is merelypaying 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.



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