Federal stimulus site gives Maryland 15 new congressional districts

By Len Lazarick
Len@MarylandReporter.com

Maryland's congressional delegation has nearly tripled in size, according to a government Web site, even though next year’s census that will reapportion seats in the U.S. House of Representatives has yet to take place.

The federal site tracking use of stimulus dollars cites 15 new Maryland districts in which more than $11 million was spent to create or save 37 jobs. The state has had only eight congressional districts for decades.  

In Maryland’s phantom 38th Congressional District, 16 jobs were saved or created with $789,000 or $49,000 per job. The lowest cost per job was $31,200 in the nonexistent 40th District and the highest cost was in the "00" Congressional District, where $3.9 million generated just two jobs at about $2 million apiece.

In eight of the imaginary districts, from the 9th to the 75th, no jobs at all came out of $4.4 million in spending.

The phantom districts on the federal tracking site were first reported on Monday by the New Mexico Watchdog, followed by similar reports from Watchdog sites in New Hampshire, Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota and West Virginia.

Ed Pound, director of communications for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversees the site, told the Montana Watchdog that his organization is accurately reporting the information that recipients provide. He said in some cases it appears recipients are entering the wrong congressional districts in their reports.

“People make errors, and we’ve found people are making errors in these reports,” Pound said.

Pound said he planned to tell the chairman of the recovery board about the calls he has received. However, he said there are no plans to change the information on the Web site at this time. Pound said the reports will be updated and have a chance to be corrected during the next reporting phase in January.

Recipients of the federal aid file their reports on a password-protected site. That information is then relayed to officials who oversee the Recovery.gov Web site, Pound said. Unless an egregious error is noted, Pound said they post the information exactly as it is received. “Our job is data integrity, not data quality,” he said.

Other media, including The Boston Globe and the Associated Press, have raised questions about the accuracy of reporting on Recovery.gov. "Finding flaws in the data is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel," says Alec MacGillis in Wednesday's Washington Post, noting that Congress demanded the difficult -to-calculate jobs figures, but is not expressing outrage over inaccurate reports. 

Stimulus spending in the state’s miscoded district data was low compared to the $3.4 billion going to Maryland’s eight real congressional districts. Those billions,which largely in the form of state spending, generated or protected 6,711 jobs, an average of $472,000 per job. The range was from a high of $1.9 million per job in Rep. Roscoe Bartlett’s 6th District to $207,000 in Rep. Donna Edward’s 4th District.