After a month investigating, or at least poking around on, the topic of stimulus money coming to the greater Seattle area, I had trouble finding any great stories.
Yes, as I reported on KPLU, there’s money to clean-up diesel pollution around the ports. And, there’s a decent chunk of funding for Community Health Centers (which serve low-income and uninsured people). And, as Sandy Doughton reported, faculty at the U.W. will get plenty of additional NIH research funding.
But, I was looking for the big legacy projects, something akin to the fine parks structures built by FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930’s. As I said in my clinics story, the federal stimulus money is “more of a cushion to soften the crash,” than a spark to create something new.
Maybe the U.W. will build a great new science lab that was only a pipe dream before.
Other beat reporters at KPLU have found similar tales when it comes to stimulus money and public housing, and public schools. In order to get the money spent quickly, it is paying for projects that were already planned and would have happened anyway, eventually. The stimulus makes them happen more quickly. Or else, instead of creating jobs, it’s preserving work that would have been eliminated by budget cuts elsewhere.
I’m not saying it’s bad to preserve jobs from the chopping block, or speed up a construction schedule. It just makes it hard a decade from now to point to something and say, That’s the legacy of what the federal government did during the Great Recession.
Science and Wonder 
Have you checked rbaltman’s blog? He’s got a pretty interesting post up about how the last few weeks should really be considered proposal submission time.
Basically, the quiet before the storm… There might yet be some great work done with that cash. Of course, it might not even be the ‘big’ projects that yield the most notable results that people would point to a decade from now, but that’s just the nature of pure research of course.