Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, Don Mares, congratulates the first group of LIUNA weatherization program graduates.
On the one-year anniversary of President Obama's American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, a new report obtained by ABC News says a $5 billion weatherization program that was meant to save energy and create jobshas not yet done much of either.
As of December 31, only 9,100 homes had been weatherized nationwide, according to the new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to be released Thursday.
The Department of Energy, which runs the program, says it actually weatherized more than 22,000 homes last year with Recovery Act funds. Either way, it's a far cry from the 593,000 they had planned to complete last year.
What's the hold up?
The GAO says the problem is red tape. Before getting the full funding, local governments and contractors have to jump through several hoops.
For example, the Recovery Act included so-called Davis-Bacon requirements for all weatherization grants. Davis-Bacon is a Depression-era law meant to ensure equitable pay for workers on federally funded projects. Under that law, the grants may only go to projects that pay a "prevailing wage" on par with private sector employers.
According to the GAO report, the Department of Labor spent most of last year trying to determine the prevailing wage is for weatherization work, a determination that had to be made for each of the more than 3,000 counties in the United States.
Secondly, many homes have to go through a National Historic Preservation Trust review before work can be started. The report quotes Michigan state officials as saying that 90 percent of the homes to be weatherized must go through that review process, but the state only has two employees in its historic preservation office.
According to the Department of Energy, the pace of weatherization is starting to pick up because the Davis-Bacon issues have now "largely been resolved."
"The states received wage determinations for every county in the U.S. before Labor Day and worked through the process of updating their systems and their wage rates throughout the fall," the Department of Energy said in a written statement.
The statement continued: "The agency is on a path to reach its target of weatherizing 20,000-30,000 homes a month."
Using The Money
The Department of Energy also told ABC News that about $522 million Recovery Act dollars has been spent so far on weatherization -- or about 10 percent of the $5 billion set aside for the program.
But Energy Department officials pointed out that the department weatherization program that pre-dates the Recovery Act and is not subject to Davis-Bacon requirements. Including that program, the Department financed the weatherization of about 124,000 homes in 2009.
"The Department continues to take proactive steps to accelerate the program schedule and ensure the success of the program," the Energy Department statement read. "For instance, we have developed a national agreement on Historic Preservation, which affects many older homes in America. The standardized template is helping to simplify the states' interactions with Historic Preservation Offices."
President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have repeatedly touted the weatherization program as an example of a stimulus project that will create jobs and move the country toward a new energy future.
"If you allocate money to weatherize homes, the homeowner gets the benefit of lower energy bills. You right away put people back to work, many of whom in the construction industry and in the housing industry are out of work right now. They are immediately put to work doing something," Obama said at an event in Elkhart, Indiana last year. "There are billions of dollars in this plan allocated for moving us towards a new energy future."
A year ago, the administration said that this money would put 87,000 Americans to work through partnerships with the Department of Energy and state and local governments.
In his jobs proposal late last year, the president proposed giving an additional $10 billion for weatherization projects -- create new incentives for consumers who invest in energy efficient retrofits in their homes, and expand existing incentives for businesses that invest in energy efficiency and create clean energy manufacturing jobs.
But Obama administration officials also acknowledged at that time that getting over constraints will determine how fast these weatherization projects can be implemented.
"These are projects that have very high rates of return. They would pay off purely as economic problems, even if there was no energy independence issue, even if there was no environmental issue," Obama's economic adviser Larry Summers said in an interview in December. "So the constraint is not going to be lack of federal budget, the constraint is simply going to be how rapidly these projects can be implemented."
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