Any of you who have been reading this blog regularly may be getting a little tired of hearing us complain about the absence of robust programmatic performance measures for stimulus spending. All too often, such measures have either been buried or forgotten, as much of the Recovery Act’s transparency and accountability efforts have been dedicated to tracking dollars and counting jobs, with too little attention devoted to figuring out just what benefits we’re getting from the stimulus beyond jobs.

But hold the presses (which is relatively easy to do in a blog). We’ve been reading Connecticut’s “Recovery Spotlight” project briefs each week for the last month and are excited about what we’ve seen. Each of these two-page briefs  details in plain language how much money has gone to a certain program and what the benefits of that spending have been.

For example, according to one brief, spending on Rotavirus Immunizations and an Immunization Registry has allowed the state to immunize 13,000 children against rotavirus, a disease that causes severe diarrhea and dehydration in children. Additional Recovery Act money has helped Connecticut update its immunization tracking system.

Matthew Fritz, ARRA Coordinator for the state, explains why his office has been pushing agencies to detail these figures, in addition to the other jobs and spending details they’ve had to publish. “There has been so much focus on the jobs number. While that is obviously important it isn't the whole story,” he explains. “The jobs are associated with real programs and there are real benefits associated with those programs."

“We have been doing these program summaries for about six weeks now. Every quarter I work with the agencies and try to pull out other metrics. If you just focus on the jobs you are losing the full picture,” he continues. “That is at the heart of the Recovery Act. It is intended to let people know what is going on."

As Fritz readily admits, some of the performance measures are far from perfect. But when the performance measures are working, their power speaks for them. Consider the money spent processing the state’s backlog of 20,000 DNA samples from convicts. Here are the four noted performance highlights of the program spending, taken from the relevant Recovery Spotlight brief. This effort:

·         Linked 10 offender samples to pending homicide investigations.

·         Linked 66 offender samples to sexual assault investigations.

·         Linked 49 offender samples to crimes against persons, robbery.

·         Linked 64 samples to felony property crimes, burglary.

Of course, these factoids, by themselves, don’t resolve the debate about whether or not the amount of money spent (about $750,000 so far, of $1.8 million funding total) was worth it. But without this kind of information, it’s hard to see how people can even have the discussion.

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