When Matthew Fritz, Connecticut’s Recovery Act coordinator, began thinking about the federal stimulus package,  “I thought this was going to revolutionize how government does business [and] I was expecting government as a whole to change.”  

He found, as have others, that changes have been more evolutionary than revolutionary, and as with any evolutionary process there have been a lot of fits and starts.

One of the lessons Fritz picked up from his experience is that almost all the parties involved could have done a better job of managing expectations. Headlines trumpeting the fact that hundreds of billions of dollars were available made many people overlook the fact that all that money was boiled down to smaller amounts in a vast number of different programs. “The expectations were so high that every single shovel-ready infrastructure project was going to receive funds. The dollars were going to flow and that is what we'd be doing for years on end.”

Indeed, he says his office still gets calls from people asking to get in line for some of the funds, even though, as Fritz says, much of the granting and contracting is finishing up, and the stimulus has entered a second, implementation and oversight phase.

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