See the blog post on the top 10 here and the full 100 report by Sen. Coburn here.
A few more of my favorites:
12. South Dakota fish hatchery to spend half of a $20,000 grant on a freezer for fish sperm. Gavins Point National Fish Hatchery already has three cryo freezers for storing sperm from pallid sturgeon, but stimulus money has given it the to purchase another one. “The insulation on the side that holds the liquid nitrogen is breaking up,” explained Jeff Powell, a project manager with the hatchery. The new refrigerator will be used “to hold sperm samples, hormones and ice packs.” The hatchery plans to use the other $10,000 portion of its grant to replace lighting, which is expected to save the hatchery $713 per year – meaning it will take only 14 years for the savings to outstrip the cost of the grant.
15. Road signs costing $300 each are being placed at construction sites to alert motorists that the project is being paid for by stimulus money. Signs are popping up all across American. In Illinois alone, the signs are expected to cost $150,000, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT). According to an IDOT spokesman, “It's difficult for us to determine how many signs there will be.”
16. Stimulus grant may cost Dayton, Ohio 1,200 jobs. NCR Corp., an automated teller machine company based in Dayton, may consolidate all of its operations in Duluth, Georgia, possibly with the help of a $5.5 million stimulus grant that Ohio legislators claim would help pay for the NCR factory. Ohio state senator, Jon Husted, complained that it was not fair. “The use of stimulus funds means that Ohio taxpayers were forced to pay for NCR's move to Georgia,” he said.
27. The National Institute of Health gives Indiana University professor $356,000 to study how kids perceive foreign accents. The grant was given to the University of Indiana, which has an endowment of more than $1.5 billion, to “test how children perceive foreign-accented speech compared to native-accented speech.” It will also determine how such accents might influence speech development in children.
32. A National Forest in Missouri will receive $462,000 to replace toilets. The Mark Twain National Forest will purchase 22 new concrete toilets to replace existing toilets.
37. Pawtucket, Rhode Island spending $550,000 on a skateboard park. According to the Providence Journal, the skatepark is being funded in the place of much higher priorities: “In this city burdened with one of Rhode Island’s highest home foreclosure rates and a $10-million current-year budget deficit, $550,000 in federal stimulus money is coming to build a skateboarding park and renovate tennis and basketball courts at Jenks Junior High School.” Construction will not begin until September, but Ronald Wunschel, the city’s finance director, believes that the skatepark is, in fact, a top priority for the city. Asked why? “So that young people don’t skate on other public property,” he said.
38. Yale and the University of Connecticut are receiving $850,000 in stimulus for research “to study how paying attention improves performance of difficult tasks.” Yale, which had the second-largest endowment in the country in 2007 ($22.5 billion), is getting funding for research on a project to study how paying attention improves performance of difficult tasks.
65. Washington, North Carolina is using stimulus funds to pay for “project-funding manager” whose job it is to secure even more stimulus funds. The City hopes to pay the new “projectfunding manager” to identify available Stimulus money using a $40,234 grant from the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program which, in turn, received funding through the stimulus bill.
83. Portland, Oregon will spend $1 million in stimulus funds for bike lockers. City officials plan to upgrade 100 bike lockers and build a parking garage that will house 250 bicycles.148 One local columnist questioned the need for the lockers, noting that Oregon had the fifth highest unemployment rate in January at 9.9 percent. Raising the question, “is this proper use of federal stimulus money?” he answered, “of course not!”