Katy Prairie Houston Texas By Shane Tully

With the recent stimulus plans President Obama has put into place, there is a lot of spending to do. With the billions of dollars in stimulus, the government has left about $27.5 billion to the states to spend on transportation. The conflict in mind in this article is about the recent activity in the Katy Prairie region in Houston, Texas. The States wants to build a new highway with its new money, but environmentalists are not too happy with this plan. Environmentalists have lately been trying to oppose the plan and have even filed a lawsuit to have the project stopped, so someone can first do an environmental review of the prairie. President Obama has also commented on the issue and says that the project would use renewable energy, energy efficient buildings, and that the stimulus plan gives tax credits to people who own hybrid vehicles.
The current times in our economy have been bad, and President Obama has gone through a whole lot of mess that former President Bush has left behind. Obama’s views on this economic issue are geared towards more government spending and stimulus. His fiscal policy would be best described as an expansionary effort, but its not looking that way so far.
In this article, the author shows the ways of how the current state of Texas is dealing with their spending money on transportation. Many people have gotten involved on this issue, including environmentalists, governors, and other government officials. The conflict is that the Katy Prairie reserve is located just outside of a large city, Houston. Government officials from this state have set out a plan to build a highway right through this prairie for future use, as the state grows in population. But, environmentalists see this as a threat to the wildlife that lives there and have been trying to block this road from being built. On the other hand, Houston is becoming a larger and larger city everyday and some government officials see this as an opportunity to get ahead on the population boom, other than just letting it happen.
Because this stimulus bill gives full control to the states they can consider this a key issue to use the money for. In the article as well, it points out that under the Recovery Act this, according to Mr. Shapiro, “creates jobs by investing in immediate projects such as highways, bridges and tunnels — and within limitations to prevent waste, fraud, and ‘highways to nowhere’ — grants the states and their citizens broad discretion to choose which highway projects get funding,” (New York Times 2). Although, this is an opinion oriented article and there seem to be many good possibilities to make their decision based on any of them.
This article relates to what we are doing in class because it shows the various monetary and fiscal policies our government is trying to use by implementing the stimulus plan. Another thing is that it closely relates to how we are learning about the federal reserve and how they produce and give the money to the government to spend on things that will help the bad economy we are in now.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/us/23sprawl.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&ref=todayspaper