Information on stimulus difficult to come by

“You can’t really judge whether or not you are getting the most bang for the buck or that we are spending the money well unless you are also looking at what is getting turned down,” said Bill Allison, editorial director of the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation, which seeks transparency in government. “If somebody applies for federal money, that should be a public record.”

Partial news release

Earl Devaney, who was appointed by President Barack Obama to chair the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, said if he had the list of 170 projects he would probably release it to the public.

“What you will see, for instance, with us is if we have control over the issue we are going to be very transparent with it,” Devaney said.

An Oct. 8 news release from the White House says Vice President Joe Biden outlined for Obama “recent administration success ensuring recovery dollars are prudently spent on programs and projects that best achieve job creation and economic growth.”

“While the vast majority of proposed projects meet the administration’s high standards from the beginning, the vice president advised that more than 170 projects were halted or modified in the last seven months to ensure even better use of recovery funds,” the news release says.

That release also summarizes a fraction of the projects that were rejected or changed in some way. Among those that were stopped are plans to buy a freezer for fish sperm at the Gavins Point National Fish Hatchery near Yankton, S.D.; a proposal to repair and rehabilitate the East Wing of the White House; a project to steam clean bird droppings from an unidentified building; and a request for stimulus funds to rent the Georgia Dome for an event on homelessness.

A homeless project

U.S. Labor Department officials, who rejected the funding request for the Georgia event, refused to identify the person who applied for the money or to disclose how much was sought or how the applicant intended to use it. A department spokeswoman said the “unsolicited” request was rejected because it did not meet her agency’s criteria for offering worker training, providing extended unemployment benefits and educating workers about expanded access to health benefits.

Labor Department spokeswoman Lina Garcia said the news release was issued to show how federal stimulus funds are — and are not — being spent.

“We believe releasing the actual name or identifying details of an applicant for a project that was never funded is not necessary to achieve that goal,” she said in an e-mail.

Through interviews with local advocates for the homeless, the AJC identified a woman who made such a request. Safiya Khalid, executive director of a local nonprofit agency called the NEED Service Inc., said she was seeking a combination of about $377,000 in stimulus funds and donations from other sources to rent out the Georgia Dome and part of the Georgia World Congress Center in August.

She predicted her event would help 25,000 homeless and others find medical care, housing, jobs and education opportunities. Each person would have been required to pay $1 to attend. Khalid said she never received a decision from the federal government, so she assumed she had been rejected and canceled her event.

“I was just like really bummed out about how much time and energy that went into all of this so far in advance,” Khalid said.

Khalid said she was hoping more than 1,500 volunteers and 500 nonprofit organizations and companies would help out at the event. She approached the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta for help in March. Protip Biswas, executive director of the United Way’s Regional Commission on Homelessness, said he thinks the government was right to reject her request.

“It didn’t seem like she had an organization or resources, except for a dream,” Biswas said. “She approached us to be partners and we said, ‘We are always willing to be partners, if it is a real event.’ But once we started to have conversations it was pretty clear it was a one-person show.”

Khalid confirmed she sought help from the United Way, but she said she never met with Biswas about her proposal. Khalid said she held a similar event in Detroit in February of 2005 with few resources of her own.

‘Legitimate inquiry’

Several other federal agencies have scrapped plans for stimulus spending as well. For example, the White House said in its news release that Defense Department officials had “removed 16 projects from their final project lists during internal discussions.” Among them were plans to renovate swimming pools, straighten headstones at a cemetery and repair the roof on a fast food franchise on a military base.

A Defense Department spokesman said he did not have more details about these projects and referred additional questions to the White House.

“Providing specifics on these 16 potential DoD projects that eventually did not go forward because of a thorough review process does not advance the purpose of showing how [Recovery Act] funds are being spent,” said Cmdr. Darryn James, a Defense Department spokesman.

The Obama administration opened the door to inquiries when it sent out its news release last month, said Craig Jennings, a senior policy analyst for the Washington-based OMB Watch, a government watchdog group that is also part of the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery.

“It seems,” Jennings said, “like it’s a legitimate inquiry now to ask, ‘Well, you are telling us you have prevented all of this waste, fraud and abuse. Prove it. Give us the list.’ ”

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Meet our reporter

Jeremy Redmon has reported for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution since 2005, covering federal stimulus spending, military affairs and state government and politics. He previously reported for newspapers in Richmond, Va.; Washington, D.C.; and Northern Virginia. In his 15 years of reporting for newspapers, Redmon has embedded with U.S. soldiers and Marines during three tours in Iraq and covered state legislatures and gubernatorial elections in Virginia, Maryland and Georgia. He has also reported on devastating fires, floods and a hurricane while on assignments in the Southeast. Redmon graduated from George Mason University in 1994 and 1997 with undergraduate and graduate degrees in English.