McCook Daily Gazette: Column: Sen. Ben Nelson: Nebraska's two seasons: Winter and construction

As the old joke goes, there are two seasons in Nebraska: winter and road construction. Well, it may still be summer, but road construction season is almost over for this year and too many local road projects funded by the stimulus have hit bureaucratic roadblocks.

Assurances from the Highway Administrator

I met in my office with Federal Highway Administrator Victor Mendez, Joe Werning, the agency's division administrator for Nebraska, and other federal highway officials just a few weeks ago to address this issue. They assured me that steps are being taken to cut the red tape that has led to the delays in local projects and the agency is committed to solving its problems in Nebraska.

The Federal Highway Administration has begun working closely with the Nebraska Department of Roads and local communities to provide additional technical expertise to expedite the document review process for approving the use of stimulus funds for local projects. They are holding workshops for local officials so that varying types of required documentation can be approved on-site and moved towards the ultimate goal of getting shovels in the ground.

FHWA has also pledged that the agency will hold one-on-one meetings with local officials to address any federal rule and requirement issues that come up along the way, rather than waiting until a particular document is finalized before any review occurs. This common sense approach should improve the approval process.

Administrator Mendez offered to hold bimonthly meetings with me to deliver progress reports and address any further problems. I certainly took him up on his offer because it's important we get these projects moving in Nebraska and across the nation because of what this means in terms of jobs, infrastructure and economic recovery.

Big Money for Nebraska

Nebraska stands to receive $235 million from the stimulus bill for roads construction. This money will not only provide good paying jobs fixing roads in our state, it will help our national economy get back on the road.

I was very concerned going into the meeting with Administrator Mendez because of a March 2010 local projects approval deadline that must be met in order to use stimulus dollars.

While I was pleased with the commitments I heard, I will keep close tabs to make sure I see action the rest of this year. I told the Administrator: "If you think I'm unhappy today, I'm happy compared to how I'll be next February if we lose a dime of those stimulus funds."

Too little, too late. The projects which were delayed until next year are still going to be delayed until next year despite the Senator's useless intervention but maybe he can eliminate some of the red tape (dubbed new accountability and oversight standards by supporters of the Stimulus last February) just in time for them to complete their projects for this year... next year. In case anyone is wondering how many road projects were actually funded by the Stimulus, the last count had that number all the way up to... one. All the other projects that were already scheduled to be done by communities this year were delayed because they were dealing with this red tape which delayed them to next year. They could have gone forward with what they had already budgeted but that would mean they'd have to forfeit the stimulus funds so they chose to delay instead. If the stimulus hadn't passed then most of these exact same projects would already be underway.

All I can say to the Senator is to settle down and don't get all upset because there's nothing you can do now. The projects are delayed until next year and they will remain that way regardless of how unhappy you are. People warned about this red tape before you passed the stimulus so you should have seen this coming and been prepared for it. Isn't the Boy Scout motto, "Be Prepared". So why weren't you prepared? You could have had this meeting a while ago when it actually would have done some good but you didn't bother.

The March 2010 deadline is only to approve the projects for funding from the State's allocatoion but has nothing to do with completing the actual projects so it will still be awhile before these projects are bid and completed. Possibly, a year from now when most economists say we would be out of this recession anyway. So much for stimulating us out of a recession. People warned that most of these funds wouldn't be spent until next year when we were already out of a recession making a "stimulus" irrelevant to bringing us out of the recession. They were ignored then but they are being proven correct today.

-- Posted by McCook1 on Mon, Aug 10, 2009, at 12:48 PM