Font ResizeWashington » Rep. Rob Bishop joined a growing list of Republicans on Tuesday pointing out the Obama administration's Recovery Act Web site is reporting stimulus money spent in nonexistent congressional districts.
But while the administration's Web site appears to need some tweaking, Bishop's specific complaint that $1.1 million in economic stimulus money was spent in a fictional Utah District 4 is also inaccurate.
That money, according to federal data on the same site, was actually spent in Salt Lake City through a subcontract to Cavanagh Services Group to perform remediation work in Bishop's own 1st Congressional District.
Tuesday afternoon, Bishop's office dispatched a news release poking fun at the administration for somehow creating a fourth congressional seat in Utah, which the state actually lost out on after the 2000 Census when LDS missionaries serving abroad were not counted.
"This is great news!" Bishop said in the exclamation-point peppered release. "Who needs to count Mormon missionaries in the Census when according to the Executive Branch, Utah already has a 4th seat in Congress!"
The administration's Recovery.gov site has a Utah page that does list the $1.1 million as going to a fourth congressional district. What is inaccurate is not the number of the district, but the state in which it's located. The main contract is handled out of the state of Washington that then subcontracted
The Tribune previously reported that the federal site's job creation numbers are inflated as scores of vendors apparently misread guidelines on how to report jobs saved or created.
But when it comes to mysterious congressional districts, at least one more nonexistent Utah district can be easily explained. While Utah definitely does not have a 68th congressional district that received $29,180 in stimulus funds, the town of Ephraim, where the money was spent, is located in the 68th district of Utah's state Legislature.
