Colorado Spending Transparency

Joe Biden said the Obama stimulus is all about a three letter word: J-O-B-S. 

Colorado’s share of the stimulus money, $819,313,005 spent thus far, has created 5232 jobs according to Governor Ritter’s report The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: What it means for Colorado.  A closer look reveals that 2862 were temporary summer youth jobs.  Another 632 are part-time, mostly for AmeriCorps.  Some 30 plus of the full-time jobs are with the census and food stamp administration.  The balance, 1685, are with CDOT. 

Do the math, the cost for a full-time government stimulus job in Colorado: $471,411.40. 

And it’s going to get more expensive.  The Governor’s report claims another $544,565,460 in federal stimulus dollars will be coming into Colorado over the next three months.  That should lead to another 623 jobs.  Cost per job: $874,101.86.

COST wonders if that includes benefits — health insurance, retirement?

Let’s face it; we can put a man on the moon, bring down the evil empire, and cure diseases, but we cannot track $787 billion of taxpayer money.   

Denver Post reporter Miles Moffeit reports that “despite federal lawmakers’ pledge of transparency, the final stages of most money trails, along with key information about job impacts, will remain invisible to users of the Recovery.org website when it debuts next month.”

Things we won’t see on the federal Web site:

• Payments to grassroots-level recipients and their identities, such as subcontractors, the subcontractors’ own vendors and individuals.

For example, the U.S. Justice Department sent a criminal-justice grant to the state of Colorado, which in turn awarded $75,662 to the city of Denver, which in turn will contract with a nonprofit called Project PAVE to carry out the work. Under existing rules, only the payment passing to the state and to Denver, along with the identity of Project PAVE, must be reported.

The sum paid to Project PAVE and subsequent dollars passed along to other vendors or employees, along with their identities, will not be posted.

• Stimulus expenditures under $25,000.

If the state Department of Transportation were to award $24,999 to an engineer to help oversee a project, the identity of the engineer as well as the specific sum do not have to be publicly reported.

• Costs borne by nonfederal agencies in administering stimulus dollars.

Gov. Bill Ritter’s controversial $40,000 payment to his former law firm to help advise the state’s stimulus-oversight board does not have to be posted on the website because the Recovery Act doesn’t require reporting of administration costs. Those expenses include consultant fees, according to the governor’s office.

• Details about jobs generated and preserved, including performance data.

Agencies must use a formula to calculate “full-time equivalents” created, but school officials, for example, would not be required to detail whether those are teachers’ jobs. The public also won’t be able to determine from the website whether those FTEs bring insurance benefits.

Taxpayers can find some Colorado specific information on the state’s recovery Web site.  But if concerned taxpayers are looking for detailed expenditure information, they will be disappointed.  Most of the information is aggregated.

COST loves summer!  We don’t have to track bills at the state capitol or remind legislators about how they are voting for special interests over taxpayers.  Summer gives us time to do fun things like poke around Governor Bill Ritter’s status report on our “stimulus” dollars, a.k.a. your hard-earned tax dollars — more like your children and grandchildren’s hard-earned tax dollars, at work in Colorado.

The Governor maintains a working document (last updated June 19, 2009) titled “A Colorado Status Report” to provide Coloradans with a “snapshot of where Colorado stands” with respect to our $7 billion share of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.  Examples of how some of our dollars are being spent include projects such as $1.2 million for Weld County school bus pollution retrofit, $7 million for University of Colorado research grants, and $42.7 million for energy efficiency and conservation block program grants.

The most beguiling figure is the number of ”people benefitting from tax credits or direct grants.” Below is the Governor’s accounting of that number.  COST took the chart directly from his report. 

People benefiting from tax credits or direct grants

Social Security one‐time $250 payment            500,000

Pell Grant Increase                                                 52,000

Food Stamp Increase                                             326,000

Increased Unemployment Benefits                      115,000

Youth in summer employment program              3,000

Making Work Pay tax credit                                 1,800,000 families

Total                                                 2,796,000 plus

First of all, nearly 2.8 million Coloradans seems high since according to US Census figures the state’s total population as of July 1, 2008 was 4,939,456 people. That means nearly 57 percent of Colorado’s total population is getting some sort of grant or tax credit courtesy of the stimulus.  

But wait…

Notice the word “families” next to the 1,800,000 Making Work Pay tax credit figure.  Since “families” generally consist of 2 or more members, then 1.8 million “families” would, at the very least, equal 3.6 million people.  (Assuming a family means 2 people and multiplying it by 1.8 million families)  Continuing with our math problem and using the Governor’s own math formula, if we add 3.6 million Coloradans to the other figures, the new total number of beneficiaries is 4,596,000 or more than 93 percent of Colorado’s total population.  That means 343,456 Coloradans get nothing.

But wait…

According to the US Census, the average family size in Colorado is 3.13 people.  Multiply that number by 1.8 million families, and we find that 5,634,000 people are getting stimulus dollars.  Add that figure to the Governor’s other numbers, and our new total is 6,630,000 Coloradans receiving stimulus dollars, which is nearly 35 percent greater than the actual population of the state.

COST will give the Governor the benefit of the doubt and use the lower figure of 4,596,000.  We feel sorry for the 343,456 Coloradans who don’t get anything, but somebody has to pay for it.