Keep an Eye on Stimulus Spending

By Kevin Robinson in News on Feb 12, 2009 8:30PM

A new website was recently launched to help regular citizens keep an eye on how the federal stimulus spending package is being spent. Stimulus Watch is an aggregation of projects listed in U.S. Conference of Mayors' report of its list of "shovel ready" projects that they hope will benefit from the massive federal spending bill.

Although the website is not a comprehensive list of projects specified in the legislation, since the bill will appropriate federal funds to the states, (such as housing, transportation and and education funding) which will then allocate those funds to cities, their projects are well worth scrutiny. And since that money will not satisfy all of the requests that the mayors have made, projects and programs will get more or less, or even no, money. In some cases, projects that aren't even listed may get funded.

You can have a look around the site, and even discuss and rate the proposed projects. One interesting thing to note, of course, is that Chicago's list of projects is conspicuously absent from the list.