Stimulus Fail: Green Your Home for $57,000
Nicolas Loris /
A $5 billion stimulus program to weatherize homes is off to a shaky start. ABC News reports that at the end of 2009, only 9,100 have been weatherized to save energy through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. $522 million of the $5 billion has been spent thus far, which equates to over $57,000 per home. That’s quite a slow for a stimulus bill that was supposed to be timely and effective; the goal of the plan was to cover 593,000 homes from the passage of the stimulus bill through 2012. That means they’re 1.5% of the way there towards meeting the goal. Only 98.5% to go!
The Department of Energy contests that 22,000 homes have been weatherized, but that still only equates to 3.7% of the targeted goal. What’s the problem? Everything, to start, but in this instance it is the government’s red tape:
[T]he Recovery Act included so-called Davis-Bacon requirements for all weatherization grants. Davis-Bacon is a Depression-era law meant to ensure equitable pay for workers on federally funded projects. Under that law, the grants may only go to projects that pay a “prevailing wage” on par with private-sector employers.