Road fixes top Va.'s suggestions wish list for stimulus

RICHMOND

You've got a lot of ideas about how to spend federal stimulus money, Virginia.

A Web site launched last month by the state registered more than 9,150 project suggestions totaling $465.6 billion by the time it stopped accepting submissions late last week.

The five South Hampton Roads cities contributed more than 800 suggestions, many of them related to transportation.

Road improvements were a focus across Virginia - nearly one-fifth of all the ideas were for transportation projects with a combined value of $193.6 billion. Most of the citizen proposals won't get any of the roughly $4.8 billion Virginia will receive from the $787 billion stimulus package. But the volume of responses and Web site traffic suggest that people have strong ideas about where the money should go.

"Relative to calls and letters, it's fairly safe to say this is probably a tenfold increase in civic participation by allowing people to click on a button, submit their ideas and engage with their governor," Virginia technology secretary Aneesh Chopra said.

The state Web site, Stimulus.Virginia.gov, today will transition from a public wish list to an online ledger tracking how Virginia spends its economic recovery money.

And Virginia officials aren't the only ones paying attention.

Researchers at George Mason University recently launched a site, VirginiaStimulus.org, that allows residents to offer feedback on the ideas submitted by the public.

The site is "a way to encourage the state to be more transparent," said Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, an independent agency on the university's campus. "If you make data publicly available online, third parties will take it and convert it into something useful for citizens."

Julian Walker, (804) 697-1564, julian.walker@pilotonline.com