Of bats and billions: Following Recovery funds

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile • E-mail

Halloween has come and gone, but your U.S. government is focusing some attention and a bit of money provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 on bats. Not the baseball kind, but the furry, flying, cave-dwelling creatures more often associated with trick-or-treating than federal spending.

The National Park Service is offering somewhere between $5,000 and $25,000 to a contractor who can install a “bat compatible gate” in Great Basin National Park, Nevada. Similar to a dozen that already exist in the park, resource manager Ben Roberts says the gate will keep humans out of an old mine while preserving access for the six species of bats that roost there. Interested bidders should know that the 8-by-8-foot gate needs to be built 57 feet inside the mine in Lincoln Canyon. And bring strong backs or pack animals. The job site is 2.2 miles and a 1,000-foot elevation gain from the nearest dirt road.

This opportunity is just one of the thousands of government contracts and grants you can explore using the “Stimulus Tracker” — a new msnbc.com online tool that provides details on projects being funded via the $787 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. More commonly known as the stimulus bill, the massive funding package was passed by Congress in February at the behest of the Obama administration to help pull the U.S. out of recession.

The bat gate is one of the puniest jobs detailed by the “Stimulus Tracker,” which keeps tabs on jobs that are receiving some Recovery Act funding.

As reports and data generated by the act pile up, tracking stimulus outlays and results is fast becoming the hottest cyber parlor game for bloggers, journalists and Joe Taxpayer.

“This new transparency, and the use of the Internet and Twitter and the use of the media, has really connected people like never before in being able to get the information,” said David Williams, vice president of policy for Citizens Against Government Waste, the nonprofit famous for its “Pig Book” reports on federal earmarks.

Everyone can track the spending
Online tools promise to let everyone be a Monday morning quarterback on government spending. After all, who knows better that a road needs repaving or a school needs a new roof – or that they don’t — than folks who live in the community? And who doesn’t have an opinion on whether or not the government should have spent millions to help non-digital TV owners convert their sets so as not to miss a single episode of “30 Rock?”

Other tidbits gleaned from a few hours of playing armchair auditor with the Recovery Act data in "Stimulus Tracker:"

• The big winner so far in sheer dollar volume is California, the nation’s most populous state with 50 percent more residents (and 21 more members of Congress) than No. 2 Texas. The Golden State currently has $11.2 billion worth of stimulus work under contract.
• Vermont’s $299.3 million worth of contracts put it at the bottom of the list in dollar volume, befitting its status as the nation’s 49th state as ranked by population.
• The largest listing is for hazardous waste cleanup work at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state's Benton County, with an estimated value of $1.65 billion.
• In Elkhart County, Ind., the focus of msnbc.com’s “Elkhart Project” about one community’s struggle to recover from the recession, the lion’s share of nearly $65 million being spent, some $39.2 million, is going to Navistar Inc., for its work to develop electric delivery trucks. (Click here to read related article, U.S. stimulus buoys U.K. factory's workers.)

“Stimulus Tracker” is one of a number of online tools launched by news organizations, watchdog groups and private enterprises to capitalize on what President Obama said would be “an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability” when he signed the 1,071-page Recovery Act on Feb. 17.

Best known is the government’s own site at www.recovery.gov, where the president promised “every American can go online and see how their money is being spent.” Recovery.gov, which is operated by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and relies on data reported by recipients of Recovery Act funds, has been widely criticized as inaccurate and poorly presented.

Another popular site for tracking stimulus data is www.recovery.org created by Onvia.com, a Seattle-based firm that uses public records to gather and publish information on government jobs, for sale to contractors. Onvia provides the data for msnbc.com’s “Stimulus Tracker.”

In business for 13 years, Onvia provides information on direct spending by 89,546 government entities, including the federal government, said Michael Balsam, the firm’s chief solutions officer.

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