Small Towns Say They Are Shovel Unready | Stimulus fund requirements prove tough for small towns to meet
With many cities and towns facing huge budget gaps and the possibility of major layoffs, local officials are bound to be looking for any way to bring in more funds.
So, when state officials in Massachusetts issued a call for “shovel-ready” projects looking for possible funding from the federal economic stimulus package, Central Massachusetts cities and towns responded with more than 750 requests totaling nearly $2.3 billion.
But some local leaders, particularly in small communities, say the requirement that work on the projects begins within 180 days makes it hard for them to get their fair share.
Leon A. Gaumond Jr., West Boylston’s town administrator and a member of a state task force that worked on the municipal end of the stimulus funding, said the town included the $11.6 million construction of a new town hall and senior center even though it’s not at all clear that it could be under construction in 180 days.
“We put in our needs, and if they decide to make this a multi-year project it is possible to expand it to another year which would certainly make that project a feasible one,” he said.
Gaumond said the state is more likely to find that the other 15 projects West Boylston submitted are shovel ready, but he said towns often lack the completed plans and site work that make quick turnaround a slam-dunk. He said large cities often have planners on staff who can draw up plans and have them ready to go when needed.
“Small towns like us, we don’t have a plan like that sitting on the shelf,” he said.
Paul Moosey, assistant commissioner of public works for the City of Worcester, agreed that larger cities like Worcester had an easier time coming up with appropriate projects for the list. Moosey leads the engineering and architectural divisions of the DPW, which provide the sorts of services that smaller communities would have to get from external companies. He said the DPW could shift projects around if necessary to get selected plans completed within the 180 days.
“We can find a way of doing it,” he said. “For a small community that doesn’t have a staff like that they’d have to go through a designer selection process.”
Even so, Moosey said, not all of the $271.5 million in projects that Worcester has proposed are really shovel-ready. He said the city started looking at appropriate projects before the exact terms that federal and state officials were looking for became clear, and he said he still hopes some longer-term projects might be approved for future years of the stimulus plan.
Playing It Safe
In Gardner, local officials submitted $29.4 million worth of projects, largely repairs of water and sewer mains and roads. Rob Hubbard, the director of community development and planning, said it was possible to include some of the items on the list only because the city happened to have plans from several years back that it hasn’t had the funds to implement.
Hubbard said he would have liked to include the extension of a downtown road on the list but didn’t think the project was far enough along yet.
“I took shovel ready to mean you have your engineering plans in your hand and you’re ready to go out to bid,” he said.
For now, the state has divided proposed Massachusetts stimulus projects into two lists. One includes items from university buildings to court houses that the state has already determined to be shovel ready. The other, composed almost entirely of municipal projects, is for projects that state staffers must still go through to determine whether they qualify.
Of course, shovel-ready status isn’t the only thing that determines whether a project is eligible for funding. State officials are still working out what sorts of expenditures can be included, and no project on either list is guaranteed funding.
To some, the simple fact that the state is leading the effort to distribute the stimulus money is troubling. Henry Danis, town manager of Westborough, which submitted nearly $1 billion in proposed projects, said he’d rather see the stimulus money go directly to cities and towns.
“Who knows where it’s going to go?” he said. “I think unfortunately sometimes it becomes very political.”
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