Shovels Are There, but the Readiness May Not Be

[WriteDown]

Source: WSJ

North Middleton Township, Pa. -- On a warm afternoon last month, a week before the stimulus bill became law, Vice President Joseph Biden strolled out onto a narrow, 79-year-old bridge over the Conodoguinet Creek. He poked his shoe through a hole in a rotting girder, tore off a piece of rusty metal, and examined a crack in the concrete deck.

"Is this a shovel-ready project?" Mr. Biden asked Scott Christie, the state transportation official charged with deploying economic-stimulus money.

"It's ready to go," Mr. Christie answered. "I literally have the plans in the car right now."

It turns out, though, that shovel-readiness is in the eye of the beholder. Soon after his visit, Mr. Biden found out that his model stimulus project wouldn't see a shovel for almost four more months, possibly longer, knowing how such timetables slip. In North Middleton, a White House eager for action had run up against locals eager to avoid disruption. The locals won...

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123722072120443301.html?mod=igoogle_wsj_gadgv1&

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Bureaucracy at its best.

[islandmkl]

1. i hope a damn school bus doesn't fall through the bridge THIS SCHOOL YEAR...

oh, wait....then we can have a national headline story about a tragedy that was caused by the lack of quick action by the Obama administration, coupled with the guy from the school district explaining how critical the bus schedule was to maintaining order....

[fob]

2. That's not "bureaucracy at its best" at all. It sounds like democracy

in action. The Feds supplied money to fix a bridge that badly needed it, the people most affected by the construction wanted to wait, they won. How is this a slap at "bureaucracy"? If the bureaucracy had won, the construction would have started already, or possibly seconds after Biden left the bridge and then it would have stopped when the cameras left, with the people affected left with a half-torn up bridge.

In the end the bridge will be fixed as the locals need and at the locals time schedule, with Fed funds. Sounds like a winner for everyone involved.

[DCKit]

3. Hope they're not pulling cars out of the creek before they decide to get on it. n/t

[SPedigrees]

4. Too cold to pour concrete...

here in the northeast for at least a couple more months.

[XemaSab]

6. Welcome to DU!

Summer is construction season in California too.

Yesterday we had 3 inches of rain in 2 hours! That would be a hugh bummer for someone working a project.

[jody]

5. IMO some of the "shovel ready" projects are really "pitchfork ready" projects ready to take

taxpayer dollars and siphon off much of it to various local political scams.