States to Taxpayer: Help Us Spend Your Money

The blowing of billions in taxpayer money continues.   Only now the states want you to help do their job in figuring out how to spend it.

States continue to tell us of their dire need for money.   Much of the $787 billion dollar stimulus plan is going to states for their use.   Apparently they not only need your money, but they also need your ideas on how to best spend it.

Some states have created websites about their use of the stimulus money (http://www.recovery.gov/?q=content/state-recovery-page).   Many of the states that have a website available are now asking their citizen taxpayers to do the work of the elected officials in figuring out how to spend the money.

Check this out:

Ohio (http://recovery.ohio.gov/ ) has had 16,716 online proposals on how to spend the money submitted as of March 3rd.

Virginia (http://www.stimulus.virginia.gov)  has a very basic webpage which simply asks for your proposals.  Similar story with Illinois (http://www.illinois.gov/recovery/)

Maryland (http://statestat.maryland.gov/workshops.asp) is actually offering "stimulus workships," ostensibly to teach local officials how to better spend money.

New Hampshire (http://www4.egov.nh.gov/econstim/) is helpful enough to at least give the online submitter a menu of project headers to choose from (got to love the "leaking underground storage tank" proposal ... that's sure to boost jobs and the economy)

The award for the most ridiculous website has to go to Kansas.  Check out these "highlights" from the stimulus plan (http://www.governor.ks.gov/Recovery/highlights.htm)   "Kansans know affordable and quality health care is key to strong economic growth?"    That is awfully assumptive.

While an active citizenry is the key to a successful Democracy, this "interactive" effort brings up a few disturbing questions:

1. 1. If the states are so desperate for money, shouldn't their top officials already know where the money is best served?  Whatever happened to the "shovel ready projects" we keep hearing about?
   2. How much time and money is being spent just going through all these proposals?    Is Ohio using state employees' valuable time to go through each proposal, or hiring new workers to analyze them?
   3. If a state is using state employees, is this the best use of their time?  And who is doing their current job while they sift through thousands of online submissions?
   4. If they are hiring new workers to go through the proposals, are we really better off trusting the decisions of where to spend millions on crucial projects to what amounts to a temporary staffer?

Transparency is a good thing.   Having others do your job for you is another.

Consider this:  Ohio has received 16,716 proposals.   Assuming it takes a government worker 5 minutes to review each one, that would be: 12 vetted per hour / 96 per 8-hour work day (let's call it 100 for math's sake) / 500 per week / 2,000 per month.   That means it would take one Ohio state worker more than 8 months to go through each proposal!   Or a team of 8 people one month.  And that is assuming they are doing nothing but reviewing proposals, and doesn't include the extra time it will take to discuss, re-review and finalize the proposal.   Which is saying nothing of the work to pick the ones that merit money and put them into effect.

I'll give Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin and a few of the others credit.   They at least appear to be stopping the buck where it should be (the elected and state officials) and not wasting valuable time and money by hoping the public can do their jobs for them.

I guess one upside is that web designers appear to be a job in demand.