How to spend the stimulus?

We at the Rio Grande Foundation certainly did not and do not support the so-called stimulus bill. Of course, with the fear factory in Washington working at a feverish pace and President Obama still in his honeymoon period, Congress caved in and gave him the nearly $800 billion in spending he wanted.
Of course, this did not stop the legislation from passing. But that doesn’t mean that all is lost. Money is going to be spent, so New Mexicans might as well benefit somewhat from this debacle. To that end, check out the New Mexico projects at this site called Stimulus Watch. You can then click on your area and individual projects and vote for the ones you think are either critical or not critical. As you can tell by going to the site, the voters seem to have a better grasp on what is important than their elected leaders. For example, the Paseo and I-25 interchange has been labeled a high priority by voters while the Albuquerque arena and streetcar have justifiably been categorized as low priorities.
I don’t know that the politicians in charge of spending this borrowed money will go to the Stimulus Watch website and peruse the results, but they would be smart to do so. Anyway, given the lack of control average citizens will have over how this stimulus money is used, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to try to influence them in this way.