OHIO IMPACT: Tracking Your Tax Dollars - COTA Spending

July 1 marked the beginning of the new fiscal year and it coincides with the start of NBC 4's new series of reports: Ohio Impact.

For the next several months, NBC 4 will examine how your tax dollars are being spent to stimulate the economy and whether the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is working as intended.

The Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) was given $16.2 million in stimulus funds.

As a retiree, Carol Albrecht boards a paratransit bus about once a week, leaving her Canal Winchester home to get groceries, head to the bank or library.

"It's very important to me," she said. "I wouldn't be able to be independent. I wouldn't be able to have my own apartment and live independently."

Albrecht said she isn't concerned with how the bus gets to her. That's COTA's job.

With $16.2 million in stimulus money to spend, COTA is using about one-third of it, $5.3 million, to help build a paratransit facility on Fields Avenue.

The facility will eventually hold 55 paratransit buses providing door-to-door transportation for Central Ohioans who have disabilities.

"How does that help the economy?" NBC 4's Patrick Preston asked COTA President and CEO Bill Lhota.

"Well, it helps the economy because we're able to create jobs by doing projects that we would not have been able to do if it were not for those funds," Lhota said.

The building was expanded to 104,000 square feet, which Lhota said will save taxpayers money over the next 50 years because the building won't need to be built out.

Down the street, COTA is spending another $5 million in stimulus funds to renovate the current Fields Avenue facility, which holds 180 large buses.

At the McKinley Avenue facility, COTA is spending its remaining $5.9 million in stimulus funds to rehabilitate the building, replace 28 hydraulic lifts, install an in-ground tire pressure check, a brake check and a state-of-the-art diagnostic system.

Lhota said all the projects are needed, but will they really help the economy as a whole or just help Albrecht's bus stay on schedule?

COTA estimates its stimulus funding will create the equivalent of 200 people working an entire year. It's an investment of $80,000 for each full-year of employment created.

"That doesn't really create long-term prosperity. That creates temporary jobs that will go back out and that person will get back in the unemployment line if the economy's not recovered," said Matt Mayer, president of the Buckeye Institute.

Mayer argues that the return on investment for stimulus projects doesn't justify borrowing money from future taxpayers. But Lhota said secondary or indirect, jobs need to be factored in.

"It's not only creating jobs in installing the lifts. It's creating secondary jobs in manufacturing of the lifts, manufacturing the parts to make the lifts," Lhota said. "You can't just look at the bricklayer laying the bricks. You can't just look at the concrete worker pouring the concrete. Somebody had to mix the concrete at the concrete plant. The driver of the concrete truck had to drive the concrete."

But if the lifts or the parts of other equipment aren't made in Ohio, those secondary jobs don't go to Ohioans.

Mayer argued that calculating secondary jobs is next to impossible because the formulas used to do so are speculative.

"They're just formulas that people use to make it sound like they're creating more jobs than they actually are," Mayer said.

To search other Ohio stimulus requests, click here.

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