Mark Boughton

Dear Congress,

Your most important task-  job one, is the economy.

With the exception of national security, everything else must wait.

We are losing jobs and people are losing their homes at a rate not seen since the Great Depression.

You and President Obama have acted with great expediency in response to the Great Recession by passing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).  ARRA and the 700 billion dollars in funding allocated for its implementation was created to stimulate our economy by investing in infrastructure and getting “shovel ready” projects moving at the state, county, and municipal level.

There is just one problem, almost 6 months later, we are still waiting for the money with no sign of it showing up anytime soon .

In fact, the distribution of funds has been so slow that in Danbury we will miss the summer construction season. No paving, no housing, no new jobs created at a time when we need it the most.

While the infrastructure money represents a fraction of the stimulus funds, it is the most important to create jobs and sustain jobs. It is the most stimulative of the stimulus program. It is the one area that you should have funded the most and should have funded first.

The problem?

The enemy of all good governmental intentions, bureaucracy.

Most of the money is tied up with redundant paperwork, arcane rules, and reporting requirements that require a PhD to fill out.

In other cases the State of Ct. is taking an “admin fee” out of our stimulus dollars to tell us how to spend it on projects that we designed to begin with. For example, a one million dollar grant for  replacement bridge may mean that Danbury will only receive nine hundred thousand dollars.

The balance is pocketed by the state.

I know you didn’t intend for it to be this way.

There is a way to turn this mess around. Scrap the infrastructure side of ARRA now. Expand CDBG (Community Development Block Grant), a tried and true system to distribute infrastructure dollars and adjust the rules for spending so that the money is flexible in a community.

Get rid of the “shovel ready” requirement since it has already been 6 months and any project that wasn’t “shovel ready” in January, is probably “shovel ready” now. This will allow for diversity in projects that will hire more people. For example, many communities are opting to pave with their infrastructure money because of the “shovel ready” requirement. Good for asphalt plants, bad for carpenters, sheet metal workers, steel workers, plumbers, electricians, you get the picture.

It is not too late, you can still fix it, but, the clock is running…