Stimulus Scribbles

February 16, 2009 at 3:30 pm

I’m trying to wrap my head around the final stimulus bill, and I’ll have a post with some numbers and details, but it’s interesting to look at the final copy and notice the hand written changes made in the bill. Here’s a link to the transportation section. Whole pieces were removed, sections were added, all appearantly at the last minute. Every change in the bill was obviously made for a reason, and I suppose if you watched C-Span really closely you could determine why. Granted, I’ve never followed a single piece of legistlation so much before, but I had no idea this is how Congress did business.

4 Responses to Stimulus Scribbles

Gordon Werner says:


I find it cool that this stuff is online for us to be able to read (or not) …

AJ says:


I’m heartened by the fact that they make concessions to project acceleration and based on geographic area, to boot! Wonder if Joni can use this to her advantage in regards to North Link and South Link.

Andrew Smith says:


Unfortunately, I don’t think either of those will get money, since U-link hasn’t been written into the law about “new starts” yet. It does mean that money for new starts will free up, so U-Link might be getting money sooner still, though I don’t think as part of the stimulus.

AJ says:


U-Link is paid for, including the initial boring for North Link (all of, what, 100 feet?). It would be somewhat silly to not pony up the $100mil or so it would take to accelerate North Link, especially since they’d have TBMs on-deck and ready to move from the UW station after some retrieval.

South Link isn’t a high priority, but the Airport might be amenable to seeing this pushed forward to cut back on construction time since they’re probably going to be looking into a new 20 year plan.