South Dakota Stimulus Website: Middle of Underachieving Pack

Policy watchdog GoodJobsFirst.org has issued a report card on the websites states have created to track their use of American recovery and Reinvestment Act dollars—you know, the federal stimulus money. How's South Dakota's recovery website rank?

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[source: Mattera et al., "Show Us the Stimulus..." GoodJobsFirst.org, July 2009, p. 8]

Our recovery website comes in 34th with a googob of other states, including our neighbors Minnesota and Iowa. On highway reporting, we do a little better, making a four-way tie for 22nd.

But check out those scores: 15 out of 100 for the full web effort, 40 out of 100 on highway reporting. The nationwide averages on those scores were 28.2 and 37.8, respectively. Hmmm...

South Dakota does get props for having its ARRA data nicely centralized on one site and for being one of just five states showing how the spending of highway dollars matches up geographically with measures of local economic distress—in other words, showing that the dollars are going to areas that need more help. Overall, though, we're doing a poor job of posting all the ARRA information and keeping it updated. (See the full scorecard for South Dakota here.)