Everyone is keeping their eye on what will happen with Obama’s stimulus package. When it does pass, Obama pledges full “transparency,” so that “citizens can see how and where their tax dollars are being spent.” So as citizens, how can we best evaluate the appropriateness and effectiveness of projects that will be candidates for stimulus funding?
To help us, stimuluswatch.org has set up a site dedicated to helping “the new administration keep its pledge to invest stimulus money smartly, and to hold public officials to account for the taxpayer money they spend.” They provide a database of “proposed ‘shovel-ready’ projects” throughout the country which will be candidates for federal grant money as part of the stimulus package. The site offers the capability for citizens to view the proposals and decide if they think they are critical or not.
In order to help viewers better assess the appropriateness of these projects, we uploaded the data to Finder! and then used Maker! to compare where these projects will be and where jobs are most needed.
In the map below, we show the projects by the number of jobs that will be created. The larger circles are where more jobs will be created. We also show the change in unemployment by county between November of 2007 and November of 2008. The blue counties are where there was a decrease in unemployment, the white where there was a fairly small increase, and the yellow and orange areas show larger increases.
Taking a look at the country as a whole, it does seem that many of the projects are proposed in areas that have suffered job losses. This is particularly true for areas of Southern California, Florida and the Rust Belt. Areas in the center of the country, where there have been the some decreases in unemployment have less proposals for job creating projects.
Lets look more closely into an area to examine how the proposed projects are matching up to job losses. Georgia is one area that seems to have experienced a heavy loss in jobs over the past year.
You can see in the map above that there are many clusters of counties whose unemployment rate has increased by more than five percent in Georgia. None of these counties have a project planned in the direct vicinity. The county of Hancock Georgia has had the highest increase in unemployment and the third highest unemployment rate for this November of all the counties in the US. In November of 2007, its unemployment rate was 9.2 and in November of 2008 the rate reached 20.1, a 10.9 percent increase overall. The nearest proposed projects to Hancock are either an hour and a half away in Macon or an hour and forty minutes away in Conyers.
While the governor of Georgia may have good reasons for creating jobs in the proposed areas, it leaves one to wonder what will become of the towns, such as Hancock, who have suffered the greatest in this economic crisis.
Take a look at this map yourself in Maker!. You can zoom in to areas you are interested and decide for yourself the validity of these projects.
On the other hand, it is interesting that Illinois is fairly well represented here. Of the 891 projects in the country, 119 or 13.8% of them are in Illinois. While Illinois does have some yellow and orange counties, it is by no means the hardest hit state in the country in terms of unemployment. Does the state expect some favoritism from the new president?
At a closer look, the 119 projects in Illinois will create significantly fewer jobs then projects in other states. California, which faced the fourth highest unemployment rate in November, is proposing 93 projects which will produce 238,329 jobs.
The chart below provides 16 states with the highest unemployment rates in November along with the number of projects proposed in each state and the total number of jobs and the number of jobs per 1,000 people those projects will create.
States like Michigan and South Carolina, who need jobs the most are proposing projects that will create comparatively few jobs per capita. You can download a CSV of this dataset from Finder! and do your own analysis of the proposed projects.
We can also look at the projects compared to state unemployment rates, as is seen in the map below. The yellow and orange states are the ones shown in the graph above. To see this map click here.
Of course nobody is saying that the unemployment rates should be the only criteria as to where stimulus money should go. But if the package it going to truly address unemployment, projects that will add significant jobs to areas with high unemployment rates should be considered strong candidates for federal funding.
14 Responses to Dataset of the Day: Stimulus Projects and Unemployment
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Stimuluswatch is largely speculative, a collection of so-called “shovel-ready” projects which were submitted. However, it’s hardly a comprehensive list, with many notable omissions of vital, needed infrastructure projects, nor has it been particularly well-vetted – some of these projects have been sitting on the shelf for years, and as we all know, circumstances change. In some instances, the investments are no longer needed, in others, what’s proposed is now based on obsolete technology and needs to be updated, in some instances, the dollar cost needs to be revisited, and so on.
That said, it’s probably one of the more comprehensive lists of needed projects floating around out there, but all totalled, what’s actually needed would by far outstrip the proposed stimulus by many orders of magnitude. So again, as a nation, we need good tools to assess and examine best bang for the buck. It’s great to see this mashup examining jobs created relative to need, toward aligning investment to geography, but beyond that, is it “make-work” projects, or are they investments that will have a lasting impact on local, regional, state and national economies?
Hi Dave,
The stimuluswatch.org projects are taken directly from the report of the US Conference of Mayors, which went through a major revision on January 17 (growing from ~11k to ~18k projects even as many original requests were removed.) There are indeed a lot of long-since-shelved projects in the report, but there has also probably never been such anticipation of a federal windfall, and some rummaging through the municipal closets must have happened. It is clear from their presentation, their classifications by federal program, and their breadth, that these projects represent the likeliest destination of immediate stimulus spending that finds its way to these constituencies. There are cases where requests or projects look a bit slapdash, but again this does not have as much to do with StimulusWatch as with the local authorities who are proposing them.
The bang-for-the-buck question is indeed the motivation for the site — by the bye there are something like 25 GIS related projects, it would be great if readers here could have a look at them and help assess the price-value ratio, or flag mayors who may have been oversold on some technology, or especially to highlight the good investments.
It’s a great mashup, and brings to mind the Washington Post series done on USDA a few years back looking at agricultural grants and expenditures relative to distressed agricultural communities that were most in need of the money – the WaPo analysis revealed a clear mismatch, on a high level.
Certainly the stimulus investments in these projects would reap jobs, hopefully aligned to geographies which have faced massive job loss, but beyond an initial high-level analysis, we also should be looking levels deeper – e.g. are the jobs and investments sustainable, do they generate additional opportunities, and so on – e.g. construction on one highway widening project or intermodal facility in one area might not contribute as much to interstate commerce, longterm jobs, et cetera, than as with an identical project in another locale, and hopefully these things can be weighed and evaluated as well as policymakers continue to press forward on the Hill.
From what I have learned a fair percentage of the projects being proposed by local areas are far from shovel ready – as much as 3-5 years from that point. Pols are seeing the stimulus as a way to fund huge projects that are not far along because there is no money to pay for the construction. It takes a long time to go throught the planning, design, permitting and bid/award process.
The vast majority of shovel ready projects already have funding. They would typically not have been brought to that point without having the funding to build them. Funding these projects with stimulus money will not create any new jobs as they were going to be done anyway.
Now that the bill is out, it would be better to map and debate the actual line items. Unfortunately we don’t have that data unless you want to go through the text line by line (I considered it.)
Anyway, I love the mashup of the data with unemployment. I like what recovery.org is trying to do but they need to go farther in presenting their information in an intelligent way. See recovery.gov done better, with stimuluswatch.org’s data here:
http://www.tableausoftware.com/blog/viz-police%3A-improving-digital-democracy
[...] the Map takes stimuluswatch.org’s database and plots it on a map to see if the stimulus projects match areas with heavy job losses. Via [...]
[...] state, budget deficits and foreclosures from CNN. Act II, Intervention: The data of Stimuluswatch, mapped, and expected job gains by state, while newspapers and the auto industry die. Act III, the Future: [...]
[...] map with regional unemployment numbers. Check out the interactive map. Also, be sure to read their post explaining what they did. Off the Map, a website dedicated to geodata and visualization, has taken StimulusWatch.org’s [...]
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