
Andrew Norman
The almost $100 billion slated to provide clean drinking water and to rebuild and develop the nation’s roads, bridges and rails is expected to be one of the federal stimulus’ biggest job creators.
And it’s an area that has clear environmental ramifications. For instance, the U.S. Department of Transportation recently announced a $25 million grant for 3.4 miles of light rail to connect 12 locations from downtown Detroit to its New Center commercial district.
So how stimulated are the Great Lakes states? It depends on how you look at it.
The investigative journalism non-profit Propublica.org published a story Feb. 15 titled “Stimulus Infrastructure Funding Short-Changes States With High Unemployment.” The non-profit’s reporters “crunched the numbers and found that the higher a state’s unemployment, the less money it gets.”
Sure enough, at 9.6 percent unemployment – the highest rate in the country – Michigan received only $2,434.37 per unemployed worker in transportation and infrastructure funds. Compare that to the more than $20,000 received per unemployed worker in Wyoming, which boasts the country’s lowest unemployment rate at 3.2 percent.
Michigan ranks second only to Nevada in receiving the least amount per unemployed worker. Other Great Lakes ranks: Ohio (8); Illinois (10); Minnesota (15); Indiana (17); Pennsylvania (20); and Wisconsin (23). New York is the only Great Lakes state that ranks in the top half of all states’ transportation and infrastructure stimulus money per unemployed worker.
Those rankings seems at first counterintuitive – other than Wisconsin, all of these states rank in the top half of unemployment nationally. So why would they be getting less than their fair piece of the pie?
They’re not.
In fact, when you examine total funds received for transportation and infrastructure improvements, the Great Lakes states fare pretty well: New York ranks third in total money received, followed by Illinois (5), Pennsylvania (6), Ohio (8), Michigan (9), Indiana (14) and Wisconsin (17).
But maybe these states’ totals reflect relatively large populations? Even when we calculate the total stimulus funds per capita, the Great Lakes states seem to be well stimulated. New York ranks first in the country, followed by Illinois (3) Michigan (5) and Pennsylvania (5). The rest of the Great Lakes states all fall in the top 22.
Propublica’s right, these states receive less per unemployed worker, but that’s a product of simple mathematics. There are a lot of unemployed workers in the Great Lakes region. I love the interactive map Propublica assembled to show where each state ranks. And I get their point, that job-creating funds should go to the states most in need of the jobs.
But I would argue that, by and large, they already are.