A second wind turbine at the Medina public works facility is out. So are hot air hand-dryers that would have replaced paper towels in the Hennepin County Government Center’s restrooms. But as my colleague Mary Jane Smetanka reports, the Hennepin commissioners are approving all sorts of stimulus funded projects: $10 million to digitize health clinic medical records, $9.7 million for a new hyperbaric chamber, $200,000 to promote the 2010 census. The distribution comes at a time when the county’s so financially strapped that its managers are going on three-day unpaid furloughs.

That’s one of the strange spectacles of the feast-and-famine time for government spending. The promises of transparency in the commitment of billions in stimulus money are translating into new government web sites, left and right. The Metropolitan Council has a good breakdown of how nearly $600 million in transportation money will be divvied up among state highways and bridges, local roads and bridges and transit. The public is also invited to meetings throughout the month in which officials will decide where the money goes.

MnDOT has its own stimulus page with a map of greater Minnesota projects that I blogged about last week. There’s also money for these local road and bridge projects.

The stimulus is also kicking in $1.3 billion to help balance the state budget, mainly going to health care for the poor.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Government spends your money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.