Meet the woman keeping track of all of Michigan’s stimulus billions.

Case in point: Wednesday, 9 a.m. We're in a Department of Transportation conference room that looks like it hasn't been reupholstered since the '80s. There are 30 or so people seated around a dozen folding tables that have been assembled into a makeshift boardroom. It is a stereotype of state government come to life.

They're meeting to talk about stimulus money earmarked for rural broadband, just as they have every week since late January. There is $7.2 billion available nationally, and last week the government finally released the 121-page request for proposals. One state official jokes that he spent "last week basking in the clarity of the plan." We stay for only an hour but already a host of questions are asked. Which parts of Michigan qualify as urban, rural, and remote? (The answers change the amount of money the state can apply for.) How many pages can the application be, and how does that affect getting letters of support from senators and Congress members? (If it's too many pages, will the feds simply ignore the application? And there's no mention of funds available for computers—can they sneak that into part of the "networking" budget? If not, is it worth doing if they have to independently buy the computers?)

Throughout the meeting, Fritz stays quiet, letting the IT and infrastructure guys do the talking. It's not as though she knows the answers to these questions, either. Later, I ask whether there's anybody to call in Washington so the questions can be asked directly rather than just guessing among themselves. Yes, she said, but "often they don't know the answer to the question, and they have to go figure it out." The more states that ask, the quicker the questions get answered. But the states still have to make plans in the meantime. "We spend a lot of time making our best guess and moving forward," Fritz said.

The broadband meeting is indicative of Fritz's evolving job description. The initial crush of stimulus dollars were assigned to states based on complicated government formulas, so the issue was only giving the money out and then tracking it. The states didn't have to worry about getting the money; it was coming to them no matter what. Three of the stimulus sites I visited with Fritz—a youth-worker program for eight kids, a sewer project in the middle of Lansing, and a homeless shelter—are these kinds of endeavors. For Fritz, they are now just rows in a spreadsheet; her work with them is more or less completed. All that's left is for them to complete the project and file a report of how many jobs were created. (In one case, none.)