California towns with dirty water should be a shoo-in for stimulus money, right?
Seville's residents could be looking forward to clean, potable water. California got nearly $160 million in federal stimulus dollars to improve drinking water quality, but none of it reached Seville.
In fact, although stimulus funds were intended to clean up drinking water, most of the money bypassed communities with the most contaminated water, like Seville.
The reason? Stimulus funds could only be spent on shovel-ready projects and in many rural towns, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, the projects were far from ready to go. Just to get shovel ready, projects require ample initial funding for design and environmental studies, and many small towns don't have the money up-front to do this groundwork.
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