Tax and Budget News

This is the finding of Show Us the Stimulus (Again), a report released today by the Maryland Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) and produced by Good Jobs First, a non-profit research center based in Washington, DC. The report released today at 1pm updates a similar study published last July.

“The Recovery Act has prompted states to ratchet up, and as a result, Maryland has done a good job of showing residents where our economic recovery dollars have gone. When it comes to transparency of stimulus spending, Maryland once again leads the pack” said Fielding Huseth of Maryland PIRG.

The full text of the report as well as the appendix for Maryland and other states can be found at www.goodjobsfirst.org/stimulusweb.cfm.

“Some states are making great strides in fulfilling President Obama’s promise that the Recovery Act would be carried out with an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability,” said Good Jobs First executive director Greg LeRoy. “Led by Maryland, which again receives the highest score, these states’ ARRA websites do a good job in helping taxpayers understand and evaluate the role of the Recovery Act in job creation and state fiscal relief.”

The study examines the quality and quantity of disclosure by official state websites on the many different ways that more than $200 billion in ARRA funding is flowing through state governments to communities, organizations and individuals. It examines the availability of information on spending programs as well as specific grants and contracts including data relating to jobs and the geographic distribution of spending within states. Using seven main criteria, each state was graded on a scale of 0 to 100. Maryland received a score of 87.

Governor O’Malley had this to say: "We are committed in Maryland to fulfilling President Obama's vision of timely, transparent, accountable information on the use and impact of Recovery dollars.  We invite all Marylanders to explore the data and provide feedback as we continue to improve and update our innovative web tracking tools."

The states scoring highest for transparency of stimulus funds in the new report are: Maryland (87), Kentucky (85), Connecticut (80), Colorado (72), Minnesota (72), Wisconsin (72), California (69), Illinois (69), Oregon (67), Massachusetts (65), Georgia (64), West Virginia (64), New Mexico (62), New York (62), Pennsylvania (62), Montana (61) and Arkansas (60).

At the other end, the ten states with the least adequate information on ARRA programs and specific projects, starting from the worst scoring, are: North Dakota (5), District of Columbia (6), Missouri (10), Alaska (13), Vermont (13), Louisiana (16), Mississippi (17), Idaho (18), Oklahoma (18), Texas (18) and South Carolina (19).

Although changes in methodology make exact comparisons impossible, some states improved greatly since a similar ranking in July. Kentucky soared from 47^th place to 2^nd; Illinois jumped from 50^th to 7^th; Minnesota climbed from 34^th to 4^th and Utah rose from 50^th to 24^th place.

“We are impressed by ‘Cinderella’ states such as Kentucky and Illinois, which were ranked at the bottom in our previous assessment but broke into the top tier in the new ranking,” said Philip Mattera, research director of Good Jobs First and principal author of both reports. “Numerous others have also improved their sites and are effectively incorporating the data states are helping to collect for the federal government’s Recovery.gov website. The state sites and Recovery.gov both have vital roles to play in helping the public evaluate the Recovery Act’s performance.”

Neil Bergsman with the Maryland Budget and Policy Institute added “Maryland has done a good job ensuring the Recovery website is transparent to the public.  However, the state should strive to reach a 100 score.  Two critical steps to get there are 1) providing access to contract award documents and 2) displaying information on workers’ wages created by the stimulus so the public knows whether the Recovery money is creating livable wages for working families.”   

Here are highlights of specific findings:

·                    Most states do a good job of providing information on the composition of their ARRA spending, both in broad program categories (energy, housing, transportation, etc.) and in narrower ones. Only the District of Columbia provides no program allocation information at all.

·                    Geographic breakdowns (by county or locality) are less common than summaries of spending by program category. Twenty-seven states provide geographic information, often with interactive maps, including Maryland.   

·                    Only three states—Kentucky, Maryland and Wisconsin—provide side-by-side comparison of the geographic distribution of spending with patterns of economic distress or need within the state.

·                    Besides overall spending amounts, state residents can see where individual ARRA projects such as the repaving of a road or repair of a school building are taking place. More than half the states (28) now have some kind of project mapping feature on their ARRA site, including Maryland.  

·                    Via maps or otherwise, Maryland was among 41 states in providing one or more of the following types of detail on projects funded through ARRA grants and contracts: description, dollar amount, recipient name, completion status, and the full text of contracts or grant awards. Four states—Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts and New Hampshire—included all these elements.

·                    Ten states have no information about actual job creation on their websites: Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina and the District of Columbia. By contrast, 16 states list jobs data on individual projects as well as totals by program area and for the state as a whole.

·                    Only five states—Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Mississippi and New Hampshire—provide the full texts of at least some ARRA contract awards.