“Job Creating” Stimulus To Fund Goes To Prevent Teen Pregnancy In Ohio
Jun 8, 2009 3 Comments ›› Erik Wong
Creating jobs… Preventing pregnancy… You can probably guess what profession this will benefit, and it’s not going to be door-to-door condom sales.
President Obama may have been thinking big with his $787 billion stimulus package, but his counterparts in local government are thinking decidedly small.
As local cities and counties put together their applications for some of their first tastes of stimulus money, they’ve come up with block grant applications where the typical project costs less than $250,000.
The city of Covington, for example, has broken down its line items as small as $1,650 each – to replace 117 curb ramps in the neighborhood around Decoursey and Winston avenues, to make them handicapped-accessible. Cincinnati is giving out grants as small as $8,556 for a program to prevent teen pregnancy and violence.
The list of local applications for the Community Development Block Grants also includes $61,200 for sidewalks in Forest Park, $93,000 for air conditioners in Sharonville and $56,008 for playground renovations in Hamilton.
In Woodlawn and Lincoln Heights, taxpayers will spend $100,000 to resurface one-seventh of a mile of Prairie Avenue, and install curbs for 20 houses along the way – a project that Rev. Jesse O’Conner hopes will stop the flooding in his basement.
Without curbs or gutters, rainwater comes down the street and settles on his property. He’s even had precast concrete parking blocks installed in place of curbs in an effort to prevent floods like the one that put eight inches of water in his basement last week.
“We need to get people working again, spending money,” said O’Conner, a General Electric retiree who’s lived on the street since 1954. “It needs to be spent, not put in the bank somewhere.”
Those projects may sound like small potatoes in the context of a spending plan usually measured in the millions, billions and even trillions. But local officials say it’s important that smaller communities aren’t forgotten in the effort to pump federal taxpayer money into the economy.
“So far, everything coming out of the stimulus has been mega-projects that only big communities get,” said Hamilton County Commissioner David Pepper. “We heard a lot of discussion from smaller communities who said, ‘What about us?’”
