Mich. recovery director: State ill-equipped to make stimulus distribution more transparent

Lt. Gov. John Cherry, right, joins U.S. Rep. Mark Schauer, left, and local officials in Jackson earlier this year at a ceremony where federal stimulus money was officially doled out for a train station improvement project. (Creative Commons photo by People for Cherry via Flickr)

The director of Michigan’s Economic Recovery office said this week that the state does not have the capacity to post comprehensive information about how it spends federal stimulus money on its American Recovery and Reinvestment Act website.

The comments by Economic Recovery Office Director Leslee Fritz were in response to a recent report by the Washington, D.C.-based Good Jobs First that criticized Michigan and other states for failing to use the Internet to effectively disclose Recovery Act spending.

The report said that Michigan’s website does not describe specific projects that have been funded, provide a map of where they are, give information about their status, or state how many jobs they are expected to create.

The Michigan Department of Transportation, which has its own Recovery Act-oriented website, posts more detailed information about stimulus-related contracts and receives much higher marks than the state as a whole in the Good Jobs First report.

Bill Shrek, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Transportation, said that his agency was able to post details of Recovery Act-affiliated contracts because it was already accustomed to providing contract information online.

“We already had a lot of this stuff in place for normal operations,” he said. “This information was already required by the Federal Highway Administration.”

According to Good Jobs First, it shouldn’t be hard for Michigan to disclose more detailed information because it is required to collect it for reports to the federal government.

But Fritz told Michigan Messenger that the report doesn’t paint a fair picture of the state’s efforts.

“We reviewed the report and it represents one group’s opinion,” Fritz said, adding that the first comprehensive report on how the state is handling stimulus money is due in October and that it will be made public after it is filed with the Office of Management and Budget in nation’s capital.

“We feel like we are making every effort to make information available,” she said. “They [Good Jobs First] are wanting to know the status of projects in real time, that is not a capacity we have without hiring additional staff.”

Craig Jennings, senior financial policy analyst with OMB Watch — a group that promotes transparency in government spending and is part of the Coalition for Accountable Recovery, which is made up of around 30 social justice groups that are advocating for more transparency in Recovery Act spending — said that that concerns raised in the Good Jobs First report are shared by his group and others focused on promoting government transparency.

Jennings said that many states have complained that they do no have the resources to fully communicate how they are using stimulus money.

In response to those concerns, he said, the White House and the Office of Management and Budget in May announced that states may use half a percent of their stimulus money for administrative costs. Jennings said this would include costs associated with maintaining and updating Recovery Act-affiliated websites.

Jennings described state efforts to effectively disclose recovery spending as a “total mixed bag,” and “dependent on what the political drive is to make it transparent.”

Some states may hesitate to spend money on such disclosure needs because that means less money is available for other purposes, he said. The cost and difficulty of sharing spending information online depends on what kind of reporting infrastructure was already in place.

Michigan is among the states selected by the Government Accountability Office for extra monitoring of how it is using Recovery Act funding.

Fritz said that auditors from the GAO spend at least a week a month with state agencies, local governments, schools, housing commissions and others.

In a report issued last month, GAO gave an overview of how Michigan has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of the state’s stimulus money and described some of the challenges Michigan is having assessing and reporting on its stimulus spending.

Michigan is having a hard time “capturing the number of jobs created and determining the formats needed for reporting information” the report said. It goes on to say, “Michigan officials are still uncertain what the federal government expects from the state regarding tracking and reporting on funds to local entities when federal funds flow directly to these entities, rather than through the state.”

It also noted administrative challenges within the Michigan Department of Education.

“MDE officials told us that limited administrative funds have prevented the department from hiring additional staff to monitor up to 4,500 additional recipients of Recovery Act funds.”

The GAO said that as part of preparing for Recovery Act reporting requirements, Michigan’s Department of Information Technology is developing a Recovery Act database to use to track projects and reflect the impact of stimulus spending in the state.

The Department of Information Technology did not respond to a request for information about the status of its Recovery Act database.