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

But now the states and Fritz are transitioning into a new dynamic. They're competing for stimulus money from the feds, just like local contractors have competed for stimulus dollars from the state. Whenever Fritz mentions how much money Michigan has already received, she stresses that there will still be more to come if she and her office does the job right.

To Fritz, the competitive grants are where Michigan's future will be sculpted. In her conversations, she separates the stimulus into two categories: stop-gap funding to curb the effects of the recession and long-term investments for the future. Fritz believes the stimulus won't be able to be appropriately judged until after those long-term investments (broadband, high-speed rail, alternative energy, etc.) come to maturity in five to 10 years.

But this means Fritz's mandate is different than the government's. To hear Fritz tell it, the legacy of the stimulus shouldn't be judged on how many jobs are created or saved in the next 12 months. That's a flawed metric since we'll never know the severity of our current recession without the stimulus. Instead, the stimulus's reputation should be forged by the success of a state's (and a nation's) economic transformation. It's a metamorphosis that's possible only because of these long-term stimulus investments. Just like there are short-term and long-term stimulus investments, we may need to start thinking that there will be short-term and long-term stimulus legacies.

This highlights an important difference between federal and local officials' recovery rubric. The short view is motivated by politics; the long view is based on work in the trenches. Given how muddled the feds have been on stimulus details, maybe we should start trusting the locals on this one. They are, after all, the ones with all the answers.

(Photos by David Backer.)

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If you're into that kind of thing, you can follow Recessionary Road on Twitter. For more of Recessionary Road's visit to Lansing, visit the blog for dispatches on youth employment spending, a sewer infrastructure project, and a homeless shelter's $20,000 of stimulus money.