Morgan Hargrave's blog

As Americans rush to fill out and send in their taxes before April 15th, they are finding relief from the Recovery Act.  The average tax refund so far this year is $3,036, up ten percent from last year.

The Recovery Act's most well-known tax provision provided up to $800 in tax relief for all workers making up to $250,000, but other benefits included credit for first-time homebuyers, students, and the unemployed.  A full list compiled by RecoveryForTexas.org can be seen here.

With health care reform off their plates (for now), the House of Representatives has begun to turn its attention to another pressing issue: jobs.  While the Recovery Act has created hundreds of thousands of jobs, helped get the economy growing again, and made investments in important sectors, it has only been able to slow job loss rather than actually decreasing the unemployment rate.  With that in mind, the House hopes to draft another piece of job-focused

The fifth and final committee to produce its own version of health care reform completed their task on October 13th.  The bill from the Senate Finance Committee will now be merged with another Senate version before being voted on by the entire Senate.  Then, the differences between the resulting legislation and the final bill that comes out of the House would have to be ironed out.  In the meantime, there is still a lot of work to be done, as this article from T

After committing almost $50 billion to new energy priorities through the Recovery Act, President Obama has made sure the federal government will lead by example. On October 5th, he signed an Executive Order that lays out "sustainability goals for Federal agencies and focuses on making improvements in their environmental, energy and economic performance." The order requires federal agencies to "measure, manage, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions" and sets the following targets:

* 30% reduction in vehicle fleet petroleum use by 2020;

On the front page, we highlighted a new feature on Recovery.gov that allows the public to see how the Recovery Act is having an impact in their own neighborhoods.  It is a really useful tool to see what kind of benefits our communities are getting for $787 billion—in addition to the tax cuts, individual benefits, and state budget relief.  In my neighborhood, for example, there are three projects: a small business loan, a Section 8 housing grant to an apartment complex, and a grant going to an early childhood education program.

Try it out for yourself to see what is happening in your neighborhood.

Texas cities and counties will soon be getting greener thanks to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. On March 26, the US Department of Energy announced it would be releasing the $3.2 billion in Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants funded by the ARRA. As expected, more than $208 million dollars will be available to entities in Texas to support energy efficiency initiatives, with approximately $163 million available to large cities and counties according to pre-defined formulas based on population and energy use statistics. The remaining balance, approximately $45 million, will go to the State Energy Conservation Office (SECO), which will be responsible for allocating sixty percent of the funds to smaller cities and counties and dispersing the leftover forty percent via a discretionary grant process. To find out when and where the funds could end up, see below.