Saturday, January 24. 2009

Update: Infrastructure spending to be used sparingly

Update 1/24/09: The CBO report cited by all the media outlets below was not a report. Further, it was not a complete analysis and was based on an older version of the stimulus proposal. So, best for all bets to be off until the official report is released.

Controversial CBO Report On Stimulus Turns Out Not To Exist
- Huffington Post

"The CBO report looked at a -- only a portion of the legislation and looked at that portion of the legislation before it began the committee process that Jake was talking about -- a snapshot in time that's long past." - White House Press Secretary Gibbs
- Transcript from White House Briefing (Friday)

Thanks to Sean Gillies for keeping an eye on me and my sources.

--- original post 1/21/09 ----

That's the title of the article in The Washington Times.

Key points:

About $26 billion, just 9 percent, of President Obama's proposed $274 billion stimulus effort aimed at infrastructure will be spent by Sept. 30, the end of fiscal 2009. That's according to the Congressional Budget Office, the agency that analyzes tax and spending proposals for Congress.

Further, less than half of the $30 billion in highway construction spending sought by House Democrats would get into the nation's spending pipeline in the next four years per the AP.

via Twitter (@bentleysystems, retweeted by @geothinkers)

More sources (all ultimately cite CBO): Washington Post, AP

Posted by Adena Schutzberg at 15:31 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

A Second Proposal Regarding Geo and the Stimulus: NSDI 2.0

What if "a collaborative grassroots coalition" came together to develop a proposition "that advances a business case applicable to the entire geospatial and environmental business sector." What if the resulting paper represented "(although unofficially) the consensus view of a collaboration between small, mid-sized, and large corporate entities, the non-profit sector, the open source GIS software community, as well as Municipal, County, Regional, and State Government Agencies who produce and rely upon the Nation’s critical geospatial and environmental data resources."

Then you'd have: "A Concept for American Recovery and Reinvestment, NSDI 2.0: Powering our National Economy, Renewing our Infrastructure, Protecting our Environment" (pdf). The document provides a "how to" of sorts of a National GIS. In fact, the paper states that it fits perfectly with that idea."...it is important to note that an NSDI 2.0 network complements proposals for a National GIS. In fact, NSDI 2.0 has the potential to be the ‘always on’, community-powered dial-tone for a National GIS."

That dial-tone idea sounds familiar to me from my consulting work with OGC. And, it was ex-OCGer Jeff Harrison, now CEO of the Carbon Project, who sent me the press release about this effort. The authors, including Mr. Harrison are listed (without affiliation since the views are connected to the people, not their organizations or any professional organizations or standards bodies on which they serve) are noted in the document and from my quick look do represent the various communities above.

At the proposal's website, NSDI2.net you can read the document and "Make yourself heard." I expected I'd be able to leave comments, via the latter link, but instead was taken to an app to find my Senators and Representatives.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg at 15:12 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |