Fishers Where Are You on the Simulus Bill?

Fishers where are you?

You are not on the list?

What List?

The State of Indiana has a list of shovel ready project they hope to get funded under the Stimulus Bill. The total of cost of all the projects submitted by Indiana is $2,598,965,295.

Who is on the list?
Carmel • Crawfordsville • Crown Point • East Chicago • Evansville • Fort Wayne • Gary • Hammond • Hobart • Indianapolis • Kokomo • Kokomo, IN • Lake Station • Lawrence • Merrillville • Michigan City • Mishawaka • Muncie • Plymouth • Richmond • St. John • Terre Haute • Whiting

Notice all of these are cities, no towns, how come? You see the list comes from the "shovel-ready" projects the mayors submitted in the 2008 U.S. Conference of Mayors report.

Will Fishers be totally left out – No. But they will have to file for Federal Grants after the fact, so while they are filling out a grant application, Carmel will be building more of their silly roundabouts and Fishers will still be going in circles on paper.

Will all projects be funded from this list, no, but they will have a head start in the funding process.

Where can you find the list? Glad you asked. Please go:

http://www.stimuluswatch.org/project/by_state/IN

In the Saturday Indy Star is an article “City to get $11.6M from feds” The article starts out by stating “first wave of stimulus money heading to states and cities.” Once again the word town was left out. Many of the road projects that were listed in the article also appear to be going to cities and not towns.

The overall problem is a Federal mindset that a city is a city and a town is 4 stoplights and 2000 people.

Now back to the first question. Fishers is a town and therefore will always play 2nd fiddle to any city even ones much smaller in population in the eyes of those far away looking at giving away Federal money. Don’t forget they see the word Town and have no clue about what the town really is a large city with the wrong name.