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| 'Bridge to Microsoft' Is One of Puget Sound Prizes in Stimulus |
| 2009-03-15 |
| (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp., which has $20 billion of cash in the bank, is among the first in the Puget Sound area to benefit from the investment in roads and bridges through President Barack Obama's stimulus plan. Local planners allotted $11 million of $214 million awarded to the region to help pay for a highway overpass in Redmond, Washington, connecting one part of Microsoft's wooded campus with another. The world's largest software maker will contribute almost half of the $36.5 million cost. Other federal and local money will pay the rest. Work is scheduled to begin by June, while larger projects in the area await funding, including replacing an elevated highway in Seattle damaged by a 2001 earthquake and a bridge over Lake Washington at risk of cracking in a windstorm. Spending watchdogs and even some Microsoft employees see more pressing needs. "I'm sure Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates could finance this out of pocket change," Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said of Microsoft's chief executive officer and chairman. "Subsidizing an overpass to one of the richest companies in the country certainly isn't going to be the best use of our precious dollars. "It's a bridge to Microsoft," he said. Ellis's Washington, D.C.-based group, which tracks government spending, coined the phrase "bridge to nowhere" to describe a proposed span in Alaska that got $223 million in federal funding in 2005 and later was canceled. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #3 usual patronage highway construction [and kickback] outfits won't necessarily get the job. A lot of such building 'stim' is just going to be recycled to the same old, same old people in the politically connected world at the local and state level. I don't know how you do it where you live, P2K, but even here in CA, the land of fruits and nuts, we do it be sealed bid, with lowest responsible* bid winning. Successful companies do repeated contracts because they submit the lowest bid and know how to do it (I do bridges) right and still make their profit * responsible = bid item prices are not unreasonably skewed ( like 60% mobilization) or screwed up. That mobilization was an open door for theft and run til the subsequent Special Provisions shut that door (Green Book and Caltrans) |
| Posted by: Frank G 2009-03-15 17:08 |
| #2 The advantage of MS paying for all of it is that the usual patronage highway construction [and kickback] outfits won't necessarily get the job. A lot of such building 'stim' is just going to be recycled to the same old, same old people in the politically connected world at the local and state level. Given MS history, I'd skip the 'overpass' and go for another design that can't 'crash'. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2009-03-15 16:40 |
| #1 There is a Washington DOT website for this project (which would be an overpass over state route 520 to connect 31st and 36th streets). In that website, it looks as if Microsoft is paying all the costs. |
| Posted by: mhw 2009-03-15 12:21 |