Wayne County Stimulus: Count 'Em, 636 Grants

A year ago, an array of governing units, schools and nonprofit agencies in Wayne County were mapping plans for no less than 636 allocations for a combined $920 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Spending from the $787 billion economic stimulus continues at full intensity, as President Barack Obama's landmark legislation covers a two-year span.

"The stimulus has been helpful," says Patrick Dostine, Wayne County spokesman and former newspaper reporter. "We are cautiously optimistic about the impact."

Wayne County schools received $420 million, nearly half of the county's share, according to the state of Michigan's official Web page for the Recovery Act, http://www.michigan.gov/recovery. Road projects are consuming another $128 million. Private enterprise is getting in on the act, such as Ford Motor Co. with $15 million to develop advanced technology powertrains and DTE Energy (Edison) with $5 million to prepare smart grid demonstration projects.

Main focuses are on enhancing educational opportunities, protecting natural resources, creating "green" jobs, strengthening communities and supporting families.

Massive public buildings and small neighborhood bungalows are being weatherized. Public housing is receiving facelifts. Local communities are spending funds for additional police officers. Community health centers and emergency food programs are gleaning support. Universities are reaping research grants.

Dostine acknowledges that the quantity of Recovery Act information sometimes may seem overwhelming. The online summary for Wayne County alone is 16 single-spaced pages of line items. Details are so specific that a reader on the second page will learn, for example, that the city of Detroit is receiving $10,461,529 in public safety grants, while the share for tiny Northville Charter Township is $11,244.

Anyone who wishes to become an informed citizen will find plenty to chew on, Dostine says. He recommends not only the state Web site, but also the national report at http://www.recovery.org.

"It's kind of tedious," Dostine says, "but there are a ton of reports that are drilled right down to the townships and the cities."

Narrowing Down the Stimulus Impact

While Dostine reviews the Recovery Act's $920 million haystack for various Wayne County entities, Desiree Cooper has focused on a comparatively small $11.2 million needle. This is the sum that the city of Detroit's Workforce Development Board steered to Connect City Detroit, a nonprofit agency, to oversee a Summer Youth Employment Program that hired 7,000 teenagers and young adults for temporary part-time employment.

Cooper is a Connect City senior analyst, and she has worked as a prominent journalist with The Detroit Free Press and National Public Radio. Her reporter's eye drew her to one individual among those 7,000, a 20-year-old young man whose personal share of the economic stimulus was less than $2,000 in cumulative summer wages.

Marvin Ligon Jr. had endured the troubled adolescent and teen years that are so common in America's cities, Cooper learned, but he was emerging as one of the summer program's shining stars.

Ligon was hired as a clerical assistant at the Detroit law firm of Phifer & White, a scenario that Cooper describes as "an odd placement for a kid who had been on the wrong side of the law in the past." Still, attorney Randolph Phifer was impressed that Ligon learned the work quickly and showed maturity. The mentor described his protégé as "a 20-year-old with the perspective of a 40-year-old."

As the summer progressed, Cooper was inspired to interview Ligon and prepare a feature write-up, not for her accustomed mass circulation, but for City Connect's program purposes.

Ligon told Cooper, "I have a strong work ethic. I may have been getting in trouble, but I was going to work. (The economic stimulus summer job) has meant the world to me. It took me out of my depressive state."

Also, Ligon composed a letter to President Obama. He wrote, in part: "I would like to tell you how you have affected me in such a positive way. Before I heard about this job, I had no money and I could not provide for myself. ... It goes to show you that all I needed was a chance. ... I regret that thanking you is all I can say for the opportunities you have given millions."

Cooper writes that in spite of Ligon's "no money" remark, the impact goes far beyond the earnings. Her headline is, "Not Just a Paycheck: How a Summer Job Turned One Youth's Life Around." She reports that Ligon today is maintaining a 3.3 grade point average at Wayne State University and is contemplating whether to become a doctor, a lawyer or, in his own words, "maybe both."

"Stimulus" or "Spending Spree?"

Critics of the economic stimulus plan, such as adjunct scholar Daniel Hager at mid-Michigan's Mackinac Center for Public Policy, assert that "make work" jobs such as Ligon's job actually harm the economy.

Free enterprise would create more jobs at higher pay, Hager says. Wages in Detroit's Summer Youth Employment Program were set at three tiers of $7.50, $9.25 and $11 per hour, based progressively on participants' ages.

"Today's national 'recovery' model emulates the Roosevelt follies of the 1930s that prolonged the Great Depression to the end of that decade," Hager states. "Right to the last, the Depression's great embarrassment was the proliferation of lean-on-your-shovel-ready jobs. Despite all the government-funded make-work, the unemployment rate in 1939 was still 17.2 percent. The figure plunged only with the mass hiring of buck privates in the early 1940s.

"Meanwhile, billions of dollars of new public debt in the 1930s dragged on the private economy. That era's scandalous binge in the billions prepared for the way for today's intoxication into the trillions."

Another source of criticism is that large shares of Recovery Act funds are being spent not for new initiatives, but to maintain status quo by bailing out state and local governments. First-year Detroit City Council President Charles Pugh acknowledges this point, but he says the decisions were for the greater good.

"Detroit has not seen many miracles from stimulus funds, but in the financially devastating environment, the stimulus was a much-needed assistance," Pugh says.

"I would have liked to see more of the money spent for creating jobs, such as Detroit's Summer Youth Employment Program. However, it is a reality that much of the money has been used to plug some holes in the state budget, so that police officers and teachers wouldn't be laid off, and that is understandable."

Competition for Stimulus Funds

Some of the stimulus funds are allocated on a statistical formula basis, with dollar amounts based on a community's population and poverty rate. However, the Recovery Act legislation and the Obama administration also have established winners-take-all competitive grant categories.

The Wayne County prosecuting attorney's office won $2.04 million for what insiders describe as a "Byrne JAG." The full title is Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant, named for a New York City police officer who was slain while on duty in 1986.

A U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance Web site reports that Wayne County was among 120 communities to receive awards from a group of 3,578 applicants. The pot of available money was $125 million, while the sum total of application requests exceeded $3 billion. Decisions were rooted in "peer review" by law enforcement professionals.

Prosecutor Kym L. Worthy and her staff engaged in the competition with a proposal to assign assistant prosecutors "outside the courtroom and in the community," focusing on Detroit police precincts.

"They will provide 24-hour, seven-day-a-week assistance to police investigators, local businesses, neighborhood groups and ordinary citizens," Worthy says. "This will lead to prompt search warrant preparation, procurement of investigative subpoenas, arrest warrant review and vertical prosecution from warrant to sentencing for the most dangerous offenders."

Worthy and her staff overcame 1-in-33 odds to land the economic stimulus Byrne JAG competitive grant, another version of a needle in a haystack.

"Due to severe cutbacks in all aspects of local government, including prosecutors, these grant monies will provide important funding for law enforcement, which will directly serve to help keep our communities safe from violent crime," Worthy says.

"These grants are the only thing that has kept this office up and running. We are on life support. We are critically understaffed and underfunded. We have worked so hard to get these grants, so that we can continue to try and perform our mandated functions."