InBerkeley

A new web site tracking American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) spending by federal, state and local agencies is now available online. The web site, Recovery.org,  was developed by Onvia, a Seattle-based company that offers a database of sales opportunities to businesses.

The site’s home page lets you use your mouse to view a state-by-state breakdown of where Recovery Act funds have been allocated, to date, and lets you drill down to the county level.  This link, for example, will show you all the Recovery Act funds allocated to Alameda County.  From there, you can use a drop-down menu to see the fund allocations for each city within the county.

By far, most of the Recovery Act funds shown on this site for Berkeley have been allocated to projects involving the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, including $115,800,000 for the “accelerated construction of the Advanced Light Source User Support Building, supporting advanced materials, energy, and biology research. Major decommissioning of an obsolete facility, and a range of important laboratory improvements under a seismic safety initiative, including construction and renovation to support advanced biological research for DOE missions,” $8,800,000 for the “Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment (NDCX-1)” $2,000,000 for the “conceptual design of the Berkeley Laboratory Laser Acceleration project,” (BELLA) and another $15,000,000 for the “procurement of a 1 terawatt laser system” for this same BELLA project.  Some of these funds will be shared with other out-of-state facilities.

It would appear unlikely that most of this money would be directly spent in the local Berkeley economy.  It is unclear from this web site how much other funding will be directed to Berkeley.

Only$1,619,000 has been allocated to refurbish University Ave., and only the section between San Pablo Avenue and Sacramento Street.

The site will be updated as additional funds are allocated. As of this writing, the site is tracking only $71.74 billion allocated to 21,291 projects across the U.S.

The federal government also provides a breakdown of funding by government agency on its web site on the Recovery Act.

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