The House of Representatives added $3 billion for transit spending on its way to passing the stimulus bill yesterday. raising the total to $12 billion.
That’s good news. Still, highway building gets $30 billion and it will be pumped through the traditional formulas, which simply do not work very well.
Will the feds ease the onerous rules on capital transit funding to allow the money to get spent in a way that might actually stimulate?
$30 billion for highway expansion, $10 billion for transit.
More here…
County Executive Scott Walker is not going to take any stimulus money because tax cuts are the only stimulus he likes, according to the JS.
Wow. That’s dumb. County facilities and even the county workforce are in shambles because of Walker’s policies. Walker has been a joke of an administrator; now he is proving himself to be a buffoon. Thank goodness the major workforce training entity was moved from the county to the city because surely Walker would rather see an even more obscenely astronomical unemployment rate in the central city than accept stimulus money.
There are a lot of questions about what the stimulus package will contain and whether it will do any good. Here’s hoping that congress critters actually know what they are voting on this time around before they approve it. But to simply reject, in advance, any funding from the package is just plain crazy stupid.
Questions:
Can the County Board override Walker’s bone-headed stance?
If he runs for governor and due to some obscene twist of fate actually is elected, will Walker refuse stimulus money for the entire state?
Will he reject any stimulus money that flows through the state to the county?
Walker says he won’t rule out stimulus money for local infrastructure projects (a rather large exception to his general stance). So stimulus money used to fund WisDOT’s freeway expansion concrete-a-thon might be OK, but stimulus money meant to pay for transit operating costs somehow would not be OK. Isn’t much of transit funding on the local property tax? So Walker would rather maintain a higher property tax burden for county residents than take stimulus money? Is he nuts?
Will he refuse to contract with private agencies that receive stimulus money either directly or through other levels of government?
Shouldn’t Walker, to be ideologically consistent, reject all state and federal funding, since all that funding requires some sort of taxes to be levied (and increased) and all that funding has the indirect effect of stimulating the economy and creating jobs?
Hasn’t he spent a lot of time complaining that the state does not give the county enough money?
Who the heck is advising him on this stuff?