It looks like our bufoonish Mayor McGinn has yet another epic fail to pad his resume in anticipation of the voters tossing him out on his ass next election. Seems Seattle’s recently awarded 20 million dollar federal grant for green jobs isn’t working out quite as well as intended.
“Last year, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city had won a coveted $20 million federal grant to invest in weatherization. The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy – able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint – and the announcement came with great fanfare.
McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.
But more than a year later, Seattle’s numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers. Some people wonder if the original goals are now achievable. Organizers and policy experts blame the economy, bureaucracy and bad timing for the program’s mediocre results.”
To review: A new bureaucracy is created, timed to provide jobs in a down economy, and it fails due to bureaucracy, bad timing, and the economy. And how ’bout those “mediocre” results! Three homes insulated by fourteen employees over the course of a year. Yes, out of the multitude of available words to describe this fiasco, mediocre is the word we’re looking for here.
We’re in the best of hands.
westsound modern 