Stimulus: $1.8B boon or bust?

One of the goals of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was to put the details about stimulus spending front and center for public review, which means it’s online.

The portal to Hawaii’s facts and figures is at the ARRA state home page (hawaii.gov/recovery). The most current quarterly reports are posted there, and the sidebar has links to complete lists of contracts, grants and loans. There are links and instructions for reporting that old government hobgoblin, "waste, fraud and abuse."

There are documents galore: descriptions of benefits and tax credits funded by the stimulus, the expedited procedures Hawaii set up for handling ARRA contracts, how each state office planned to use the money.

That’s all pretty dry reading, but the site also links to the federal ARRA databases. They include a gallery of maps enabling a look at how Hawaii compares to other states on various indices (recovery.gov/Transparency/Pages/Maps.aspx). Check out the "lights-on map," an animated display in which dots appear on the map as each award is made (recovery.gov/Transparency/MapGallery/Pages/LightsOn.aspx).

The ARRA people also have set up a Flickr group enabling the public to submit photos of their neighborhood projects (flickr.com/groups/recoverydotgov/); you do have to join the group first, though.

Nobody’s done that for Hawaii, it seems. You can be the first.

Click the graphic to enlarge.