Recessionary Road

Welcome to The Big Money's Recessionary Road feature. On July 6, 2009, TBM staff writer Chadwick Matlin embarked on a three-week cross-country trip to discover what the stimulus looks like from the ground up. Below, you'll find a running map of Chad's route and all he's written along the way—from tweets and blogs to full-length articles—as well as accompanying pictures shot by friend and photographer David Backer.

Recessionary Route

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Dispatches from the Road

* August 4, 2009: The Schizophrenic Stimulus: On the ground the stimulus is working. Nationally, who knows ? By Chadwick Matlin

Let's get right to it. This is the final article in a 12-piece series about the stimulus. That means that in the back of your mind, you're hoping to get an answer to the one question—the only question—that we've all asked since this thing began:
Is it working?
No offense, kind reader, but that's an awful question...

* July 30, 2009: Radioactive Recovery: The stimulus goes nuclear. By Chadwick Matlin

RICHLAND, Wash.—I may be in Richland, but I am actually at Hanford, a former nuclear production site and a place all its own. To locals, Hanford is not necessarily a town, but it's definitely a destination. This is not the Washington of your imagination, the one with pine trees, rain, and good coffee. Hanford is brown everywhere you look: brown mountains in the distance, brown tufts of grass, brown sand caking the earth. It is the perfect setting for Cormac McCarthy's next novel. So hot that people arrange outdoor meetings at 7 a.m. to beat the heat. So dry that trucks drive around all day squirting water out of their butts, wetting the sand so it can't blind workers when the winds start blowing. So bleak that even the mountains take on a dirty sheen...

* July 30, 2009: Stimulus Served Sunny Side Up: How a solar business in Colorado is basking in new Recovery Act initiatives. by Chadwick Matlin

BOULDER, Colo.—It was Feb. 17, and Blake Jones was in Denver to make a speech. When you're the president of the largest solar company in the Boulder-Denver corridor, this whole speech thing isn't unheard of. But this was Feb. 17, 2009. This was the day the stimulus was going to be signed. This wasn't a normal speech; it was an introduction of the president of the United States. Barack Obama needed a warm-up act, somebody who could put a face on both the stimulus and the future of the American economy. Blake Jones was that guy...

* July 28, 2009: Pity City: Albuquerque's mayor is struggling to get a fair share of the stimulus. by Chadwick Matlin

Over the last six months, [Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chávez's] optimism has spoiled into exasperated defeat. When he talks about the stimulus—as he did with me for a half-hour in Albuquerque—he speaks in a soft, flat voice that rattles off examples of how his city has been slighted. Albuquerque is in line for $59 million of stimulus money as of now, and hardly any has arrived. New Mexico is receiving $2.4 billion: 2.5 percent of the state's stimulus haul is planned for a city with about one-quarter of New Mexico's population. The government giving Albuquerque only $59 million is like the tooth fairy leaving an IOU under the pillow. The city had to go through all sorts of pain—a 72 percent rise in unemployment in a year—to get the tooth fairy to show up; the least she could do is leave a fair reward. And so for Chávez, that $59 million is a symptom of the stimulus's limitations. And—though he won't say it explicitly—maybe the stimulus's failure...

* July 27,2009: Texas Weatherizes the Storm: Austin waits on stimulus funds to cut electric costs and create jobs. by Chadwick Matlin

AUSTIN, Texas—Some myth-busting to begin with: Weatherization—an imposing term that brings to mind solar panels, torn-down walls, and smashed energy meters—isn't actually that impressive. It's really rather drab: a couple of guys with some hammers, a few glass panes, and an insulation truck full of what's essentially heat-trapping cotton candy. It's a small process that takes a small amount of time. And costs a small amount of money: between $1,500 and $1,800 for a 10 percent to 15 percent drop in energy bills. Which is why the government's throwing so much of the stimulus at it...

*(July 22, 2009): Dredge Funds. My day tracking the stimulus on the Mississippi. by Chadwick Matlin

MEDORA CROSSING, La.—If Michael Bay is looking for his next Transformer, I have found it in the middle of the Mississippi River. It's a dredge boat named the Dodge Island, and it's eerily anthropomorphic. On its side are two dragarms, giant metallic appendages that are lowered down by winches that make the sound of a whale's cry. When the arms are dropped dozens of feet into the river, its hands—called dragheads—scoop up sediment that has settled at the bottom of the river. It pumps the sand through its arms like a heroin addict injecting through the wrist. The sediment is pushed against gravity and into the tubes, where it's deposited in the ship's hopper...

* (July 20, 2009): Teaching Kids Left Behind: The Stimulus is paying youths to get their GEDs in rural Alabama. by Chadwick Matlin

GREENSBORO, Ala.— Come the fall, this GED class will be funded by the stimulus. But only through some seriously nested bureaucracy. The class is part of a national program called YouthBuild, which is backed by the Department of Labor. YouthBuild pays kids who are about 20 years old to get their GEDs and learn how to build a house. For six months, the students split their weeks into two days of class, two in the field, and one in leadership seminars. They work for $25 a day. Forty-seven million dollars of YouthBuild's budget comes from DoL's stimulus funding; $550,587 will go to this program...

* (July 17, 2009): Nashville's Sick Trap: The fate of a stimulus-funded clinic hinges on the nation's health care future. by Chadwick Matlin.

NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Unwittingly, Mary Bufwack first applied for stimulus money a year and a half ago. George Bush was in office, Barack Obama was campaigning in Iowa, and the economic crisis was still fermenting on the books of AIG (AIG). It was in December 2007 that Bufwack, the CEO of United Neighborhood Health Services, a network of local health clinics here, sent in an application to Bush's Health and Human Services Department.

The uninsured need health clinics like the homeless need homeless shelters. Clinic rates are adjustable, they almost exclusively serve the needy, and they want to help as many people as possible. Bufwack wanted extra grant money to build a health clinic on Dickerson Road, the thoroughfare of a hardscrabble district on the north side of the city. For whatever reason—lack of mobility, inaccessibility to public transport, neighborhood territoriality—the Dickersonians weren't coming to UNHS's pre-existing clinics. Rather than go to a doctor, they would wait until their illnesses got so bad that they'd have to use the emergency room. And as one of UNHS's educational pamphlets says, "The ER is not a doctor's office"...

* (July 14, 2009): At What Cost A New Economy?: A Kentucky town may be gaining $600 million of stimulus money. But what will it lose? by Chadwick Matlin

A few months ago, Glendale, Ky. was chosen as the site for a new electric-car-battery plant that would specialize in hybrids and plug-in vehicles. Six-hundred million dollars of stimulus money could arrive in this town within weeks, turning it into a 2,000-person worksite in six months. And soon after that, a factory on the edge of town would employ 1,800 people permanently. The site would be a national clearinghouse that would only manufacture the batteries-the research and development would be left to everybody else. Glendale would become a locus for the electric-car/hybrid industry...

* (July 13, 2009): FutureGen: The Mystery of Mattoon: Hunting for $1 billion of stimulus spending in rural Illinois. by Chadwick Matlin

MATTOON, Ill.—We had come from afar to look for the treasure of Mattoon. For years, it's been rumored that the government would help build a clean coal plant here. It was to be called FutureGen but has taken so long to get here that it's jokingly called NeverGen. It was the great hope that this prototypical small Midwestern town (population 17,177 in 2008) has always been searching for but could never find...

* (July 10, 2009): Czar Power: Meet the woman keeping track of all of Michigan’s stimulus billions. by Chadwick Matlin.

LANSING, Mich.—The stimulus doesn't come with an instruction manual. When both receiving and applying for money from the federal government, all 50 states are left wondering: How should we keep track of where all the money is going? What are the criteria to apply for more money? How should we calculate the number of jobs we've created or saved? How should we decide whether this thing is working?

These are the central questions of the stimulus, yet the feds only send advice, not answers. And if the feds don't know the answers to these questions, then who does...

* (July 5, 2009): Introducing Recessionary Road: A cross-country trip to discover what the stimulus looks like from the ground. by Chadwick Matlin

The stimulus's time has come. When it was signed into law in February, the Obama administration slow-played its effects, saying it would take months before we saw any progress. Money had to be allocated, states had to be advised about what to do, and grant applications needed to be sifted. The stimulus was a curtain-raiser to a brighter future, one that we were allowed to see but not touch. Obama seemed to say as much at the bill's signing ceremony: "Today does not mark the end of our economic troubles. Nor does it constitute all of what we must do to turn our economy around. But it does mark the beginning of the end..."