The list below includes links to the searches of each of the five top recipients in Monroe County. These are complied from the current list (August 27, 2010) of top NYS recipients.
- The University of Rochester, $45,846,317 (link)
- The Rochester City School District, $38,180,286 (link)
- The County of Monroe, $26,319,233 (link)
- The Monroe County Water Authority, $23,730,887 (link)
- Regional Greater Rochester Transit Authority – RGRTA, $20,915,542 (link)
I’ve been keeping my eye on the Recovery.org website over the last few months, trying to see where Stimulus money is going in the Rochester area. The results are very interesting across the board – I’ll probably report more general information at some point later on.
But what jumped out at me today was the list of the highest-paid NYS award recipients. The Regional Greater Rochester Transit Authority, for example, won a $16 million award which according to the website has generated exactly 16.68 jobs:
This grant has resulted in the FTE of 16.68 jobs being sustained for the quarter ending June 30, 2010. These job hours are made up of manufacturing, design and legal work. To date, an additional 8,213 job hours have been sustained and reported in previous quarters as a result of this grant.
16 jobs? For that kind of loot? It appears that the RGRTA is planning on either replacing or augmenting the fleet with some new and nominally more energy efficient vehicles. Which of course means that while the money’s coming here, it’s not being spent here. It’s being spent wherever these busses are being made.
It would totally be worth asking a few questions about this project, I think. But I’m not the guy to do it. Conveniently, there is plenty of contact information right there on the award summary. Any takers?
The Rochester Business Journal online edition is currently declaring that the Sienna Research Institute study shows consumer confidence in the Rochester area is up. Sounds good. Unfortunately, the actual numbers are considerably less rosy. Confidence (which is actually three separate indexes, Current, Future and Overall) is only up about two percent from last quarter depending on the index that you look at. And while the current index is up even from the same time last year, the overall trend over the last four years has been down, down, down she goes. And the state average is less confident than even the national average.
But rather than waste time with silly reports that whitewash reality, perhaps the RBJ could better use its time actually digging into the numbers and reporting the facts.
There are positive things to be said about the stodgy old Eastern U.S. states like ours, including our venerated cities such as Rochester. I’ve been saying for a while now that one saving grace our city has over many others across the country is the fact that, while individual families are certainly hurting across the metro area, overall the market in Rochester has seen significantly less damage from the housing bubble. A harder-hit market would compound the already-heavy toll of a down economy in ways too numerous to mention.
Here is a quick chart, taken from the National Association of Realtors website, of Rochester’s median home price as a function of its relative value to the U.S. national average. You can see just how much harder the nation is being hit by underwater homes and high unemployment. I know of at least one person who moved to Rochester for a fresh start, which is not something you hear about often.. and they can’t sell their house where they’re from.
* taken from Realtor.org: Metropolitan Median Prices
I’m sure like most of you, I’m watching the movements of the economy – from the daily news to much more local things like Monster searches of jobs in my industry in Rochester. And like most of you, I’m hearing the same whispers, “we’ve gotta have a good Christmas.”
And it is certainly true that many retail companies rely on Christmas for nearly a third of their total yearly income. Not simply down years but every year relies on the Christmas season to keep it afloat; with the economy in as much jeopardy as it is currently, we need some good news from the holidays to keep us from sliding off our tenuous perch at the edge of financial precipice.
But what is strange is the silence in the economic community about what is surely an early-warning bell-weather of our holiday mood, Halloween. Not to put too much of a damper on what is, after all, a pure-entertainment “holiday,” of course. But Halloween’s share of the marketplace has grown exponentially over the last decade. According to this About.com article written in 2006, each of us is likely to spend as much as $60 dollars on Halloween stuff on average. That’s not Christmas territory by any means, but that’s a hell of a lot of money for a single two- to three-hour celebration. Halloween is getting close to Valentine’s Day, where we spend around $122 a person when the economy doesn’t suck.
But as that last link points out, such frivolous expenses can and are easily shed when the economy is bad. Valentine’s and Halloween are even more expendable celebrations than Christmas is. So the question is: what will Halloween sales look like this year and what does that say about the Christmas season?
Kodak has just posted a second-quarter loss which is staggering, relative to this time last year: 20% down from second-quarter 2008. Oh, that’s not good. CEO Antonio Perez says his company predicts a 1 to 3 percent up-tick in sales by the end of the year, which is far from reassuring.
And not quite as crappy, but crappy nonetheless is news that the Rochester Broadway Theater League is bowing to the obvious and looking outside Rochester for it’s new venue. You may recall – a hazy, foggy, far off memory, to be sure – that the Renaissance Square project was originally to include three theaters for use by RBTL, MCC and others. Well, that shit ain’t happenin’, is it?
So once again, those in search of culture must look outside Rochester. Great.
If the problem with the Stimulus package is that the money’s not going out the door fast enough, perhaps the solution is to give the money to KBR and Bechtel? Anyone even know where that 18 billion went to in Iraq?
If the past ten years of growth (at least) have been based on the generation of artificial wealth through financial slight of hand, what will a “full recovery” look like?
Mike Murphy was just on Meet the Press talking about the status of the stimulus and the economy. He said two “kitchen table” numbers are going the wrong direction: the unemployment rate and mortgage rates.
Well, I’ll give him the unemployment rate with the caveat that we’ve not yet reached the 14% that was predicted in the absence of a stimulus. But mortgage rates are not as simple. When mortgage rates go down, it is an indication of the weakness of the market: supply and demand, less people buying houses means lower prices for the mortgage.
Thus while mortgage rate increases do put a pinch on the recovery of the housing market – and with it, the breath of relief for middle class families watching their neighborhoods turn into ghost towns – they are the natural reflection of positive signs in that market. And by the way, more interest income means maybe we tax payers can start getting some of that TARP money back.
If you’ve not had a chance to read it, I highly recommend the book The J-Curve for all of you interested in international politics. The book is a great primer on international politics as a function of state stability, and state stability as a curve tracing from totalitarian stability to democratic stability. The book also details a number of case studies including Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, the education of the populace is the job of the Wahabist religious sects. This is why people living in the heart of the land that gave us modern mathematics and a goodly portion of our alphabet can recite whole passages of the Koran but not read or perform basic algebra.
All of this is to say that, in the absence of government works projects, very few in Saudi Arabia are capable of holding down jobs on their own. Unemployment is rampant and so the government is constantly building new soccer stadiums and monuments to themselves as a means to keep the inevitable revolution of millions of starving, uneducated citizens at bay. These public works serve no useful function and generate no revenue of their own, but merely serve as make-busy jobs until the next useless project can be funded.
Here in Monroe County, we have no Wahabist imams forcing religion down our throats. We have no problem with education, in fact our schools are the envy of a majority of the United States. But when Monroe County insists that the Renaissance Square project is a good “shovel ready” project with which to spend our Federal Stimulus dollars, the only reasonable benefit I see is precisely this make-busy idea that keeps Saudi citizens working.
Because while generating jobs to stimulate the economy is a good thing – and I would submit that blue collar jobs are especially important on this point – focusing on the construction industry for economic growth is ultimately self-defeating. Construction jobs are only really useful to the economy as a whole where those jobs are backed up by genuine economic activity. If we worked to build our manufacturing base in Monroe County, the employees of those manufacturing companies would have permanent jobs and the companies would need construction workers to build or repair facilities. But when we focus on construction jobs, once the project is built, what happens next?
Nothing. Which exactly the problem with every monument built in Saudi Arabia and exactly what’s wrong with Renn Square as an economic project. What new jobs will be created by Renn Square after it’s built? I can only think of minimum wage jobs working in stores and restaurants inside the new terminal. . . and not even that if Bob Duffy gets his scaled-down project. What new revenue will Renn Square generate? Nada, which makes it about as useful as a statue of the Prince of Saud.
Better that we should focus on building a new terminal at the site of the current Amtrak station, if we are to build any new bus terminal at all. We can get more bang for the buck if we create a terminal that both serves the Rochester public and advocates for Rochester to the people who travel through here on rail. Better still that we should use the Stimulus money to pave our streets and fix our roads. These things generate revenue and have intrinsic value. Renn Square’s only intrinsic value is as a campaign fund project.
