Gordon County, Ga., just down Interstate 75 below Dalton, spends about $518,000 per year on electricity to perform various county government functions.
But it has received $300,000 in federal “stimulus” funds to build a solar power project on top of an old landfill.
That is expected to reduce the county’s electricity bill from $518,000 per year to $510,000 per year. You read that correctly: The savings from the $300,000 project are expected to be only about $8,000 annually.
At that rate, it will take the project nearly 38 years to recoup its up-front price tag — assuming no maintenance or other costs come along that are not covered by the “stimulus” funds. That doesn’t seem very practical, even with the county’s hopes for the project to grow with private investment down the road.
That impracticality may be why officials offered assurances that no local money was being used for the federally funded project.
But that is a shell game. Federal funds are either collected from current U.S. taxpayers or borrowed from future U.S. taxpayers — including those in Gordon County. Sure, taxpayers all across the nation are having to pony up for Gordon County’s “solar farm,” but taxpayers in Gordon County are just as surely paying for unfeasible “stimulus” projects in Colorado, Wisconsin, Connecticut and everywhere else.
And with the stimulus’ total tab being $862 billion, it’s a safe assumption that residents of many counties in America are going to get a lot less money from the stimulus than they pay into it.
That’s no bargain.