During the March 12 Council meeting, City Manager Jim Percival called on the Council to prioritize four infrastructure improvement projects in order to apply for federal stimulus money.
Percival told the Council that on Thursday, February 19, the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission (MVRPC) asked all local jurisdictions to submit proposals to them for projects they would like to see accomplished with American Recovery & Reinvestment Act monies. At a presentation last night, they learned that 88 projects totaling almost $70 million were submitted to MVRPC and they actually only have $17.3 million to spend on highway projects. MVRPC has another $22 million to spend on transit projects. Some of that money will be coming to Greene County through Greene CATS.
He continued, saying,
Because time is of the essence in claiming these funds, the local jurisdictions were only given eight days to submit projects for consideration. Accordingly, the City of Xenia submitted four (4) projects that were deemed eligible for funding consideration. The four projects and their associated funding requests are ranked in order of priority:
Priority One: Miami Avenue Street Rehabilitation and Drainage Improvements ($186,815)
Priority Two: Cincinnati Avenue Pavement and Sidewalk Rehabilitation ($874,273)
Priority Three: Xenia Downtown Streetscape Improvement ($1,282,931)
Priority Four: Bicycle and Pedestrian Crossing Improvement from Xenia Station to Ohio Erie Trail ($51,123).
Why didn’t city administrators propose paving the city’s side streets? They could have justified it by showing how people they would need to employ to get the job done.
The federal stimulus money available to municipalities like Xenia are those funds originating from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This is one of a number of recent lawless actions perpetrated by Congressional Democrats. It was criminal because Democrats violated an underlying law of lawmaking: giving all congressional lawmakers and the President a copy of proposed laws and time to evaluate and amend them. This underlying law is implied in Presidential review and veto clause of the Constitution as well as in the Full Faith and Credit clause. The Democrats even violated their own rules of lawmaking procedures by not making available the new 1,419 page Act 3 calendar days in advance of the vote.
The federal stimulus money being offered to local communities may be helpful but it also stolen money, which makes takers complicit in the crime. It is, moreover, a form of future taxation without representation justified by economic crisis that federal lawmakers helped to create. Besides the legal and moral issues, the stimulus money is supposed to either create or sustain jobs. How many local jobs will be created or how many threatened jobs will be saved in Xenia and elsewhere by the stolen money?