Gov. Markell on C-SPAN This Morning
Governor Markell is at the National Governor’s Association meeting in Mississippi this week and appeared on C-SPAN this AM to talk about a number of topics. This is about 26 minutes long and I can’t see a way to embed this directly from the C-SPAN site, so you’ll have to click here to see the whole thing.
Tags: Jack Markell
Gov. Markell did a pretty good job here! These C-SPAN questioners were all over the place, though and even Nancy Willing called in because apparently people she knows are not getting their slice of the stimulus money.
I was hoping that he would talk in greater specificity about why he (and other govs) are not so interested in an additional stimulus package. If watching the folks I know administer this program, I would strongly suspect that the admin overhead for this program is pretty brutal for the payoff. Wonder if these Gov would change their minds if they were given basically a block grant — with some rules on spending and transparency — and told to go spend it as they pleased.
I did indeed. The C-SPAN question was on Markell and why he is standing against further stimulus. I wonder how many needs are not being met because of the status quo. And from some of the House hearing today with Bernanke, it looks like there may be a similar problem with the financial sector and government involvement.
Some of the smaller banks are supposedly having difficulty getting hands on bailout money. We all know that credit and lending on the small scale is stagnant. I see a pattern. TBTF for banks who weren’t getting the job done in the first place. Is stimulus money also being used along tried and maybe not-so-true lines? It is a tough call that I am not able to make without studying in depth….ugh. MSNBC reported that a lot of stimulus is going directly to pork. Is that not happening here in DE?
As far as future stimulus, I think Markell is positioning himself just as most of top Delaware leadership does….”moderate conservative” what ever that means. Little of the stim. money has yet to be spent. How can one judge its value; its efficacy?
It’s taken some time to distribute the money.
It must have been easier and more practical to give it to those who have already had their hand out because they have relationships and some kind of track record with government bureaucracy. But, in that same sense, there’s room for criticism (as in the not-really needed Rehoboth boardwalk refurbishing) that some of this shovel-ready stuff is make-work and not at all the best use of the money.
I know that I would trust our government agencies more if Delaware politicians had less political contraint over them. [We could improve that improper influence from politicians by eliminating codified language placed by Kermit Justice for then Gov. Castle~segue~Gov. Carper that opened DelDOT to vulnerability to fiat].
When you have a DelDOT that skips over WILMAPCO PAC and TAC recommendations at the whim of a powerful Senator or Governor or development attorney…
or DNREC politely ‘redoing’ the entire Pollution Control Strategy for the Inner Bays process (at public expense) because the Positive Growth Alliance talked a powerful Senator into stepping in after the fact,
then how can we trust government to fairly mete out these monies?
I spent much of the late winter and early spring writing proposals for stimulus money projects — it was a hurry up and go effort since awardees were expected to have shovels in the ground by about Memorial Day. We got quite a few awards, but money from the Feds did not shake loose on their ambitious schedule.
Nonetheless, it doesn’t look like the Delaware Recovery.gov site has been updated especially well recently. If you click thru to DelDOT, they have somewhat more recent data. What is up on the Delaware recovery.gov site are specific instructions for firms and non-profits for how to tap into the funds. Most of those come with instructions to send in proposals complete with deadlines for submission. Like any other opportunity, you need to be ready to capitalize on it — expecting the government to track down some of the usual suspects to ask them if they want some money is not reasonable.
That said, it is hard to tell from the website where they are in terms of awards and proposal review. I also can’t tell from the website if they are pretty much just going to track transportation projects or if they will be tracking the other categories too. I just saw in the news that some arts organizations got some funding — is that supposed to be tracked at the Delaware site or is another agency accountable for tracking that?