House letter : Va. last using highway cash

Charlottesville Daily Progress ^ | October 3, 2009 | Associated Press

[Mad Dawg]

RICHMOND — In a scathing letter to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, the chairman of the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee said no state has been slower than Virginia in putting federal highway stimulus cash to use.

As of Aug. 31, construction had begun on only 16.5 percent of the $695 million Virginia received for statewide and local highway and bridge projects under President Barack Obama’s stimulus initiative, said the letter from U.S. Rep. James L. Oberstar, D-Minn.

Nationally, nearly 43 percent of the billions of dollars a Democratic Congress approved for highway revitalization is already under construction, according to a footnote on the bluntly worded two-page letter to Kaine, Obama’s hand-picked Democratic National Committee chairman.

Oberstar said in August that he sent letters to laggard states urging them to put the federal funds to work swiftly. Since then, he wrote, many state have done that “to create and sustain family-wage jobs” to help push the nation through the worst recession since the 1930s.

“Regrettably, Virginia is not among these states,” Oberstar wrote. For emphasis, he wrote the paragraph in bold, italicized type, then underscored the words: “your state ranks last among all states [51 out of 51], based on an analysis of the percentage of Recovery Act highway formula funds put out to bid, under contract and under way.”

[Mad Dawg]

Unbelievable. The Washington Democrats are upset because the State government isn't spending money fast enough!

And so some no-account twit of a congesscritter writes a "scathing" letter?

Decency prohibits my candid assessment of this RAT POS.

[angkor]

They’re trying “motivate” the Rats in Northern Virginia to get behind the failing Rat candidate Creigh Deeds for governor.

Liberal doses of “recovery funds” are the answer (they think).

What is also amusing is that Rat Gov. Kaine is “Obama’s hand-picked Democratic National Committee chairman.”

For a while the rarely-seen Gov. Kaine was hiding his weekly travel schedule so as to mask his very frequent out-of-state trips on behalf of the DNC.

But since he’s now a lame duck (VA governors can’t be reelected from their office), he’s unveiled his travel and it was what everyone thought, something like 30 to 40 percent IIRC.

[JoanneSD]

I thought we had 50 states, not 51, must be a obama scholar

[OldMissileer]

Kaine is probably just trying to funnel most of the funds to his liberal cronies and getting some of it transferred to his campaign coffers.

[Mad Dawg]

50, 51, 57 .... Who cares as long as we’re in the White House?

[iceskater]

Governor Gridlock taken to the woodshed ping.

[iceskater]

I love it when Rats turn on each other. :D

I would be just as happy if none of this money were spent. But I still have to enjoy Gov. Gridlock getting yelled at by one of his own. Him being the DNC chair and all....

[Gabz]

There was an article about this in the Pilot this morning and the comments about the article were hilarious.

There is one regular who is some kind of a developer or something and he is just beside himself laying all the blame on the House Republicans in Richmond. This guy has never seen a tax increase he didn’t support nor a Republican he won’t trash. It was actually amusing, even though his psychophants scare the pants off me.