Local impact of dollar deluge is story to watch

As Peter Gabriel might say, "Lord, here comes the flood."

As Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, might say, "Are you a good flood or a bad flood?"

That, alas, remains to be seen. Whether the unprecedented dollar deluge from President Barack Obama and Congress will restore the nation's economic strength or delay its revival will be the subject of competing blogs, columns, e-mail spam and talking-head punditries for years, if not decades, but one thing is certain. The money storm will be felt in Illinois, Chicago and the suburbs. The question that we at the Daily Herald will try to track is how.

It's a question that will have many dimensions. We've already sought to address its most obvious - where will the suburbs see the money? And, as we've learned, schools, governments and road builders have wish lists for the billions headed our way but as yet no assurance of what specific goals and projects will be funded.

Daily Herald reporters will be watching carefully and haranguing local and statewide government officials with questions in the months ahead. Today's speculation will eventually give way to tomorrow's spadework - all those shovels at the ready we've been hearing about will eventually slice into the soil - and we'll be watching, with the aim of showing you how your tax money is being spent.

Another dimension of the coming spending spree will be even harder to monitor. Inevitably throughout history, when money flows from the government mountaintop, some of it gets mysteriously lost along the route, some of it drains into questionable projects that no one intended and some of it finds its way into unscrupulous pockets.

In Illinois these days, we have good reason to wonder about these questionable projects and unscrupulous pockets. We have a former governor sitting in federal prison and another possibly headed that direction, not to mention a litany of underlings who preceded them both to jail and who knows how many who never got caught.

The last time anything approaching this magnitude came up, it was the Homeland Security windfall set in motion when, with the wave of a post-9/11 finger, President Bush created a whole new cabinet department and initiated billions of dollars in funding nationwide that was supposed to help make our communities and our nation safer.

No doubt some of it did that. But as later investigations showed, it also bought luxury salt spreaders in some cities around the country, not to mention such purchases in Illinois and the suburbs as T-shirts, jackets, exercise equipment and a $19 million emergency operations center in Springfield.

In fact, many counties and communities wouldn't even tell how they spent the money. The city of Chicago, as we reported in 2005, refused to detail how it spent nearly $66 million in Homeland Security money.

President Obama promises that the massive new wave of spending he announced Tuesday will be more transparent, including, supposedly, the possibility to "trace every dime" on the Internet. Let's hope so. But even if that's true - and I, for one, am skeptical - you'll need some help identifying all those dimes and understanding what they went for. That's where the Daily Herald comes in.

We may have to leave it to the commentary pages to determine whether the coming torrent is a good flood or a bad flood, but our reporters certainly will be watching carefully to see what the water looks like and where it goes.

Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.