Slate’s Big Money profiles Michigan stimulus spending boss

Slate magazine’s The Big Money blog profiles the head of the Michigan Recovery Office — aka “stimulus czar” — Leslee Fritz. Fritz, formerly an adviser to Gov. Jennifer Granholm, is in charge of overseeing the spending of money allocated to the state in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and complying with the law’s many restrictions and requirements. The profile chronicles the difficult job Fritz has:

Now she heads a 10-person office carved out of other departments’ personnel and office space. Her office is sparse, the most striking object being an “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009″ binder on her desk that has to be at least four inches thick.

She is simultaneously a cheerleader and a realist. One moment she says that she knows the stimulus is working because she can see an improvement in the community. The next she calls the bill “amazingly convoluted.” It’s an intriguing split—she knows the $5 billion in stimulus money that Michigan has received (with at least $2.5 billion more to come) is needed, but her voice carries a hint of exasperation that this whole thing is so unnecessarily difficult. So much of Fritz’s job is essentially reading the government’s body language, trying to figure out what its memos and requests for grant applications actually mean. She is perpetually on a first date, wondering if the feds’ words and actions have a double meaning and what that may mean for their future together.

Fritz makes an interesting argument about the different goals of different aspects of the stimulus package as well:

In her conversations, she separates the stimulus into two categories: stop-gap funding to curb the effects of the recession and long-term investments for the future. Fritz believes the stimulus won’t be able to be appropriately judged until after those long-term investments (broadband, high-speed rail, alternative energy, etc.) come to maturity in five to 10 years.

But this means Fritz’s mandate is different than the government’s. To hear Fritz tell it, the legacy of the stimulus shouldn’t be judged on how many jobs are created or saved in the next 12 months. That’s a flawed metric since we’ll never know the severity of our current recession without the stimulus. Instead, the stimulus’s reputation should be forged by the success of a state’s (and a nation’s) economic transformation. It’s a metamorphosis that’s possible only because of these long-term stimulus investments. Just like there are short-term and long-term stimulus investments, we may need to start thinking that there will be short-term and long-term stimulus legacies.

I didn’t realize until reading this article how much of the stimulus package involves competitive bidding by the states, as opposed to money allocated for each state. There’s a good deal of money up for grabs that one state will get and another will not based upon the strength of the proposals made by each state.