Transit - federal stimulus

Bobbie just finished up being a juror on a four week trial. As with most people, she didn’t want to do it, but she just had to be truthful during jury selection questioning and was chosen. She found the experience interesting, and now knows what it looks like inside a courtroom. I was on a half dozen juries while living in southern California as I too was truthful during questioning.

What are the right answers? Some examples: “My brother was recently arrested for the same thing”, “Can’t trust those freekin’ cops, they lie about everything”, “Yes, I’ve been reading a lot about this case and wanted to find out how the guilty sucker was going to defend himself”. Get you kicked off every time.

I was driving her to the federal courthouse downtown every morning and continuing on to work from there (yes, finally got a job – hooray!!) and she would take a bus home each day. She found that interesting, just confirming how poor bus service is in Vegas but at least forcing exercise upon her walking between bus stops and home. There is some construction downtown: a big new city government office building is going up, and some of that federal stimulus money was used to construct a downtown transit center, which had its official opening last week (even though the buses aren’t stopping there yet as it really isn’t completed).


I read that 80% of the federal stimulus funds went directly to states and ended up being used to balance state budgets and pay extended unemployment. This is one of the few ‘shovel ready’ projects that really provided construction jobs. Almost every private construction project in Vegas is on hold, with several big steel structures half finished around town, a few of them on the Strip.