Reed compared the economy to a yard that is brown when you come back from a vacation. After watering it, you decide it needs fertilizer and since it’s the end of the month and you just got back from vacation, you have to put it on your credit card.
Then your neighbor talks about bugs and you pull out the credit card again to get some insecticide. Then someone else convinces you that aerating it is the way to get things growing again.
The way this compares to the stimulus, Reed said, is that when the yard finally starts turning green again you really don’t know which, if any, of the efforts contributed the most to it growing.
To take his analogy further, separate programs from federal agencies could be seen as rain.
Right now, the local area is at the point of starting to put some fertilizer on the yard.
The first major state-related stimulus project to get going will be Monday with resurfacing of Texas 317 - Belton’s Main Street - from 13th Street to Interstate 35. The $1.6 million project, which Reed called a mixture of state maintenance and federal stimulus funds, will include a new traffic signal and expanding the turning radius at the intersection of Main and Sixth Avenue.
Speaking to the Temple Kiwanis Club on Tuesday, Reed said only a minimal amount of the $167 million of federal stimulus funds allocated to the CTCOG area has been received - some funds for summer youth programs. The Belton highway project is the next step.
He noted that some of the stimulus money is available through federal agencies, but that money sent through the state is filtered through the 24 councils of governments - in part to keep from having to have thousands of entities across the state handle the paperwork and planning.
By far the largest stimulus program in the seven-county region is the widening of Interstate 35 to six lanes from FM 2484 in Salado to U.S. Highway 190 in Belton. The area was able to leverage $11 million it received for any highway project into a deal with the Texas Department of Transportation for the $135 million I-35 project. The plan includes a new interchange with U.S. 190 with a flyover for vehicles going north on I-35.
The key to the highway construction is that it has to be “shovel ready” - and Reed said about 30 days of the 90-day threshold for starting projects has already gone by.
Ken Roberts, spokesman for TxDOT’s Waco district, said there would be no problem getting the I-35 project going in time - that was one reason, along with the cost, those projects were submitted. “We get more bang for our buck with that project,” he said.
One area where the region narrowly lost out was in law enforcement funding for rural areas. Reed said the classification for a rural area was set at 52 people per square mile and CTCOG averaged out to 52.1 - meaning the region got $464,668 in funding in that category instead of $900,000. If a Fort Hood division had been deployed, he said, the area would have gone below the 52-person average.
