The headline on a recent article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was painfully straightforward. It read, “Seattle’s ‘green jobs’ program a bust.”
Seattle got a $20 million grant from the federal government in 2010 to insulate homes and make them more energy efficient. That was supposed to create lots of jobs — 2,000 of them — while weatherizing thousands of homes in low-income neighborhoods.
It didn’t work. Nearly a year and a half later, only three homes have actually been weatherized, and only 14 jobs have been created. Worse still, many of those jobs are bureaucratic and don’t involve the actual work of weatherizing homes.
As the head of a Seattle environmental group said: “The jobs haven’t surfaced yet. It’s been a very slow and tedious process.”
So workers in Seattle have not benefited from this expensive federal program, and taxpayers are out millions of dollars.
Does that sound like a federal success story to you?