Oh, So That's Where COVID Relief Money Went

townhall.com ^ | 3/24/2022 0830 hrs edt | Katie Pavlich

[rktman]

When politicians in Washington D.C. planned to infuse the economy with trillions of dollars in Wuhan coronavirus "relief funds," fiscal conservatives warned about the inevitability of widespread fraud and abuse.

Once again, they were correct. A new report from the Associated Press shows "pandemic relief" money, earned by hard working taxpayers, was used for over-the-top vacations, parties and other completely unrelated expenditures.

"Thanks to a sudden $140 million cash infusion, officials in Broward County, Florida, recently broke ground on a high-end hotel that will have views of the Atlantic Ocean and an 11,000-square-foot spa," the Associated Press Reports. "In New York, Dutchess County pledged $12 million for renovations of a minor league baseball stadium to meet requirements the New York Yankees set for their farm teams."

"And in Massachusetts, lawmakers delivered $5 million to pay off debts of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate in Boston, a nonprofit established to honor the late senator that has struggled financially," the story continues. "The three distinctly different outlays have one thing in common: Each is among the scores of projects that state and local governments across the United States are funding with federal coronavirus relief money despite having little to do with combating the pandemic."

The IRS revealed this week that investigators have found nearly $2 billion in stimulus check fraud.

[rktman]

CONvid. Show of hands of those that didn't think this would be the case. I'll wait...............

[Bob434]

Still,wondering where all.the cigarette mo ey that was supposed to,go,to,education went after they taxed the snott out of ciggs “for the kid’s sakes of course’

[rlmorel]

This is the same with all of these types of things. I wrote this some years ago when the Obama Administration was throwing stimulus money around, hot off the presses with the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act".

This is long, but it shows just how much this money, free money, is abused, and is just ONE example...ONE.

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I can't tell you how angry I was when I recently tried to find out how many dollars from the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" were used to build a state of the art visitor center on the grounds of a national park near me.

Sudbury, Massachusetts is near where I live, it is one of the wealthiest communities in the state, and is located some twenty miles due west of Boston. In Near Sudbury, MA, one of the wealthiest localities in Massachusetts, there was an old, abandoned Army base that had been closed up for years, and sometime in the last ten years or so, it was opened to the public to be able to walk through. It was great.

Not many people knew about it or knew it was open, and one could walk on dilapidated old crumbling roads through the woods, punctuated by an occasional boarded up decaying building. Most interestingly, there are a series of huge concrete munitions bunkers with evidence of railroad (possibly small gage) that serviced the bunkers, and on a few of them, you could get inside to find old, empty metal desks, light fixtures in the overhead with old fashioned incandescent bulbs in them.

To anyone who has ever lived on military installations, it has that general air of decay you know you could sniff out in the remote accesses even on some large active bases. As someone who grew up as a military brat and spent many hours exploring such ignored areas, that type of thing has always had a kind of charm for me. Anyway, it was great, and always deserted. Just about two years ago, I began to see evidence of activity...backhoes, roads being paved and such. It was a real disappointment, and I stopped going there for a while. Then, last winter, my wife and I went for a wintertime snow walk there, and came across this facility:

Now, just seeing that sign makes my blood pressure go up, but as I looked over the facility, I got angrier and angrier.

There was apparently no expense spared to build this facility, everything built of the highest quality materials, I do believe there were solar electricity panels on the roof (not sure though) but it didn't look like they skimped on anything. As I looked through the windows of the closed facility, I think I even saw Herman Miller chairs in what looked like an office. Bottom line, I see this, and figure they probably spent at LEAST a million or two on this facility, probably more, and now have it staffed with a park ranger or two. All this money WE DON'T HAVE for one or two government employee FTE's. Don't get me wrong, I like parks and such. BUT YOU DON'T SPEND MONEY YOU HAVE TO BORROW TO BUILD THEM! If times are prosperous, just maybe you can do it, but when we have a debt burden of $500,000 per household in this country, it is INSANITY to spend money on this type of thing.

So I decided to try to find out just how much of the "stimulus" was spent on this boondoggle. There is a website in Massachusetts to monitor the distribution of the stimulus funds at Massachusetts Recovery Website (which is most likely a dead link now) as an an attempt to live up to the Obama administration's promise of "transparency".

On the site, you can dig around in a variety of ways to see data, one way to slice it is by project, another shows funds by zip code. Unfortunately, they make it so you cannot download all the funds for all Massachusetts zip codes, but at least you can download data for a given zip code for a given fiscal quarter. Now, I never did find out how much was spent on that facility. But what I did find out was interesting.

I downloaded the data for 01776 (oh, the IRONY at that zip code) in successive passes for each fiscal quarter and got them all into an Excel spreadsheet. Once there, I used a pivot table to slice the data in a variety of ways. The column on the left is a general category, and the categories from left to right are subcategories of that. I specified that I only wanted to see the top four, and specifically excluded the Police and Firefighter components, but since the total money awarded was $25.2 million and this table shows an expenditure of $23.13 million, that means all other expenditures for this community that I didn't show totaled just over two million dollars. So my table below shows the lion's share.

(I only showed money awarded, not money used, but gee whiz, is anyone concerned they would get awarded the money and not use it? I'm not...)

As I went through the data, I kept seeing an entry for Minuteman Nashoba Heath, and it was a large chunk twice a year. Doing a search on the Internet showed this website: Minuteman Nashoba Health Group (Again, probably a dead link). They describe themselves as such:

"The Minuteman Nashoba Health Group (MNHG) is a coalition of Massachusetts towns and school districts that have joined together to purchase health benefits for their employees, retirees, and their eligible dependents. Joint purchasing of health benefits gives the participating governmental employers purchasing clout to help keep costs under control. The MNHG has been operational since 1990 and has added several towns to its membership in the last several years." I don't know what the cost for healthcare is for teachers in that town, but it looks from a couple of things I have seen that teachers might contribute between 20-30% of their own money towards their premium. Bottom line, you folks down in Texas, all you Freepers in California, even you Sooners out in Oklahoma, your tax dollars are all paying for the health care of unionized Massachusetts teachers.

I am not choosing Sudbury, MA for analysis because of some perceived corruption. I don't believe it is any more or less corrupt than any other community in this country. It just happened to be the community I was looking at to find out about something else, and this fell out of it. I fully expect that if I were to do this analysis on my town (which I will do) or any other locality in this state or throughout the country, we might find similar activity. What is unspeakable in my opinion is the fact that we took hundreds of billions of dollars we didn't have, and opened the coffers for every community around the nation to dip their hands into. To me, this is the equivalent of a family that cannot meet their mortgage (or their second and third concurrent and outstanding Home Equity Loan) pay their car insurance or keep up with any of the other bills they have incurred, taking out a fourth home equity loan, withdrawing it in cash and distributing it throughout the family. "Hey everyone, I'm going to buy a new boat, Mom is going to get a sports car, you kids can take the rest of this and spend it on whatever you wish! Computers, video games, clothes, whatever you want! You don't have to tell me precisely what you are doing with it (and even if you do tell me, I'll just wink and approve!) and you won't have to pay any of it back! This is FREE MONEY, and we are going to have a great time with it!" We have heard people say the whole stimulus bill is a scam. From day one, I have believed it. We have heard many say that this stimulus was supposed to provide "shovel ready jobs" that would stimulate the economy, but from looking at the expenditures, it is clear that, in one of the single, wealthiest communities in Massachusetts, 25 million dollars of stimulus money was spent, and the vast majority of it appears to be spent not on "shovel ready jobs" (whatever the HELL that means) but instead for paying for unemployment benefits, benefits for teachers and other "unspecified" educational costs (that detail could not be teased out of the spreadsheet, since it is not broken down that way). Spending the money on unemployment benefits may or may not be the best use for that money, but I think there should have at least been a dialogue about the wisdom of using it. It might indeed be the best use of our taxpayer money, but nobody got to even discuss it. It was just used to pay for these things...AND THOSE USES WERE NOT WHAT THE "STIMULUS" WAS SOLD AS. Brain dead liberals think that pumping borrowed/printed money back into the hands of the unemployed so it can be used to pay bills actually STIMULATES an economy. (Ask Nancy Pelosi...SHE thinks it does, and has said so.) It doesn't, but people who believe in socialism think it does. And socialists are running the show now.

Many of us recognize that the stimulus was a bill of goods, being used primarily by many communities to cover shortfalls, and who could blame those communities for doing so. But the unimpeachable idiocy of declaring that this money was going to stimulate anything is apparent, and it is yet another instance of the dishonesty of the liberals (and so-called "conservatives") who not only supported this expenditure the first time around, but are now pushing for more money WE DON'T HAVE to be thrown down the rat-hole.

And I do mean "Rat-Hole".

And it is a UNION Rathole. Using MY money to pay for it.

[Vaduz]

Pelosi spent millions for votes even paid for a golf course in Florid.

No greater waste than a democrats with power and money history list is long.

[Red Badger]

[V K Lee]

SloJo in charge of BO’s recovery act as well. “Not one thin
dime”. Anger can build over time; there comes a point when
it must be released to avoid a massive explosion causing self
harm and injury.

[rlmorel]

Researching that sure did make me burn.

What also made me burn was the way it was so artfully abstracted, that most people wouldn’t even stumble on that by going that far to see it. I only came across that as a function of looking for other information.

And that is the wealthiest locale in the state, or at least one of them, filled to the brim with dedicated Leftists.

This was and is going on in every single locale across this country...even conservative ones, no doubt. What are they going to do...refuse the money?????

They all become complicit.

[Lurkinanloomin]

Everybody knew it would be a super slush fund.

[joshua c]

govt pork goes by many names

[rktman]

Stick chks=ammo

[V K Lee]

"They all become complicit" CRIMINALS.

[Taxman]

Ping

[Robert A Cook PE]

Wow. Much time and research, thank you!

23 millions. For a building. And I have to fight to get 550.00 for new tooling from my company.

[LegendHasIt]

Just like we knew it would.

And that is just the ‘tip of the spear’. I doubt that even 20% of it actually went to the people who were worst hurt by the lockdowns, us mere peasants.

[SunkenCiv]

The IRS revealed this week that investigators have found nearly $2 billion in stimulus check fraud.

And their recommendation will be to double everyone's taxes.

[Carriage Hill]

Nice observation and rant.
Are you really surprised by the demonKKKrats/GOPers Deep States use of our hard-earned tax dollars?
I’ve just seen it too much, over many decades, that I guess I somewhat inured to it.

[Grampa Dave]

The rehabbing of military bases in America has been going on in America for centuries.

They even rehabbed the Russian Fort in N. California. It is now a California park, Fort Ross.

Rehabbing military bases in the SF Bay area and the Sac. area are continuous in nature. They often start low key with volunteers until they start getting federal and/or state funding.

The former Sub refit base in Vallejo, Mare Island, goes back
1854 and has had more lives than most cats.
Mare Island Naval Shipyard - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Mare_Island_Naval_S...

The Mare Island Naval Shipyard (MINSY) was the first United States Navy base established on the Pacific Ocean. ... It is located 25 miles (40 km) northeast of San ...
Built: 1854
NRHP reference No: 75002103
Location: Vallejo, California

Army base in Presido, San Francisco:

The Presidio has served as a military reservation from its establishment in 1776 as Spain’s northern-most outpost of colonial power in the New World. It was one of the longest-garrisoned posts in the country and the oldest installation in the American West.

Fort Ord in/by Monterrey, Ca. is officially closed, however, there are all types of plans eventually using our tax $’s to open it to the public.

McClellan AFB, Sacramento:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McClellan_Air_Force_Base
Retroing is going their now, re comments below:
Now many of those “closed bases are becoming new business centers and housing centers for the homeless or poor!

[rlmorel]

Hey, I have no problem with rehabbing military bases.

I had a problem with Rehabbing a military base with taxpayers dollars meant to rebuild infrastructure, and spending it on a fancy visitor center manned with Rangers at at time when we are going broke.

Or, using the same money to pay for teacher union and town employee health benefits when it is supposed to be going to fixing crumbling infrastructure.

That was what got me going...

[rlmorel]

It isn’t that I have never seen it or am inured to it, it was just seeing that quantity of money on ONE community out of tens of thousands across the country, all sucking at the teat of “free” taxpayer money, especially given what it was supposed to be used for, those “shovel ready” jobs.

[Grampa Dave]

“Hey, I have no problem with rehabbing military bases.

I had a problem with Rehabbing a military base with taxpayers dollars meant to rebuild infrastructure, and spending it on a fancy visitor center manned with Rangers at at time when we are going broke.

Or, using the same money to pay for teacher union and town employee health benefits when it is supposed to be going to fixing crumbling infrastructure.

That was what got me going...”

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Maybe, we should have problems with retroing anything from your named places/items to the ones I have listed.