Another Green Casualty

Vanessa Ho at Seattlepi.com:

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.

You might be surprised and disgusted to find that it takes a $20 million grant to create 14 jobs and retrofit three homes, but you shouldn’t be. Private companies can’t make it in the ‘green’ space, it’s no surprise the government fails even harder. After all, the government has the added burden of implementing bureaucracy on top of anything it touches.

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.

Mostly administrative jobs? I’m not a contractor, but give me $20 million and I guarantee I could land more than three contracts and create zero administrative jobs. Give that money to a motivated and business-savvy contractor and they could turn it into a multimillion dollar company that provides dozens or hundreds of jobs in the span of a few years—just not a ‘green’ company, because the whole pretense is a complete lie.