TRAC!

July 7th, 2011 by Russ Choma No comments »

It’s been awhile and an update is overdue. I’m sad to say, I have just one more story in me for the Investigative Reporting Workshop – it should be coming in the next few weeks – but the good news is that I’ve found a new (work) home.

Later this summer, I’ll be starting at TRAC – which, if you’re not an investigative journalism nerd and aren’t familiar with, is short for Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a project of Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. TRAC does a lot of things, but primarily they collect massive amounts of data about just what the government does everyday, and then publicizes their findings. Or, more formally, from the website:

“The purpose of TRAC is to provide the American people — and institutions of oversight such as Congress, news organizations, public interest groups, businesses, scholars and lawyers — with comprehensive information about staffing, spending, and enforcement activities of the federal government. On a day-to-day basis, what are the agencies and prosecutors actually doing?”

This is accomplished a lot of different ways, but a huge chunk of the data is obtained via FOIA, a personal passion of mine. I’ll be signing on for nine months as an investigative reporter, under a fellowship with Syracuse that runs through the academic year. We haven’t quite nailed down my duties, but I’ll certainly be posting updates on my new work here once I get going.

But I won’t be giving up my green reporting either – in the few months before the new job kicks off, I’ll be freelancing some stories at various places – again, I’ll be linking them here. And, to say that I have a lot of unfinished business from the Workshop is an understatement – one of my favorite things about working there was how each story spawned three or four new story ideas. And that’s not changing just because I’m leaving – I’ve got stacks of documents, tips and FOIA requests waiting to be returned, that have left me with material to write for months.

Hopefully, the stories will keep coming, and to all those who still contact me about previous stories, offer tips or want to talk about my presentations at Reynolds, keep emailing – I’ve always got time to talk.

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FOIA Real?

April 15th, 2011 by Russ Choma No comments »

I’ve mentioned in the past that I’ve got some FOIA problems – Treasury/Department of Energy and I don’t see eye-to-eye on some things. In fact, we don’t see eye-to-eye on anything, apparently, since a FOIA I filed 18 months ago has yielded nothing that I originally asked for.

I asked for all applications to the Section 1603 grant program, which I’ve reported on extensively, as well as a great deal of internal correspondence on the program and correspondence about press coverage, etc.

What I’ve gotten is a partial list of applicants (which wasn’t what I asked for) from December of 2009, and a sample application, mostly blacked out. You can view the partial list of applicants if you want to see who’s been going to the administration with their hand out, but be warned – the data is a bit dodgy: there are a lot of corporate names, LLCs, shell companies, etc., and some just downright bad data (someone filed their application with the “name” entry filled out with “not applicable” – there’s no other data because the administration has kept it under lock and key thus far.)

To make a long story short, the administration has told me it will cost at least $12,400 for copying and duplication fees to get the public documents I’ve asked for, and we’re stuck there, because that’s absurd. I don’t want copies and I don’t need copies – an electronic version of the public records is not only possible, it’s preferable -  but the administration isn’t willing to consider either of those things.

To read about my troubles in more detail, check out my latest blog post over at the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

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The state of the American clean energy industry

March 30th, 2011 by Russ Choma No comments »

Source: Flickr user Hugo90

It took awhile, but someone finally picked up on one of the key points – maybe THE key point – underpinning most of my reporting on how a great deal of stimulus money for green energy is actually going overseas…

Yesterday, Oakley Brooks had a piece in Miller-McCune discussing how the United States is stacking up against foreign competitors when it comes to clean-tech:

“There’s a lot of hand-wringing these days about the mediocre American record on clean energy. No federal climate legislation. No federal mandates for clean electricity. And when Americans look to incentive-laden Europe or to the huge clean-tech investments being made in China and Korea, we feel like an aged, belching Geo Metro being passed on both sides by sleek bullet trains,”

Brooks wrote, going on to compare the efforts of various states. He finished his piece by noting some of my earlier reporting that as much as 80 percent of the Section 1603 grant money went to foreign owned companies. (That’s an old figure from Nov. 2009 – I have some more recent analysis showing the figure improved, but most money still went to foreign companies.)

The point is, Brooks put my reporting in the context of discussing how weak our domestic green industries are – or totally nonexistent. And, when I started my reporting on the subject, I felt that was the main takeaway – the poor policy decisions of the 1980s and 1990s that neglected or even punished clean-tech industries (like green energy and mass-transit) brought us into the 21st century with a seriously weakened or non-existent industrial base. The Section 1603 program basically hands out money to anyone who lines up to take it and can meet minimum standards (basically – if you can establish you own a renewable energy generation system and if you spell your name right, you’re all set to get a check!), so while it’s interesting that European and Asian companies were primarily benefiting from this program, the big question is: why aren’t American companies lining up to get their share?

Because there aren’t many American companies at all.

Rather naively, I thought that’s what people would see as the “big picture” story behind my reporting. But, this being Washington, D.C., a town where everyone is loathe to admit any kind of weakness, I found nobody wanted to talk about how battered our industry was from past mistakes and that maybe before we promise hundreds of thousands of jobs, we should deal with the fact there isn’t an industry to create those jobs in. This unwillingness to look at the context of the story (or even bitterly deny it) didn’t have an effect on my reporting or the facts of the story, but I think it has done a disservice to the overall discussion and has obscured a huge hurdle to establishing long-term sustainable clean-tech industries (and the jobs that come with them) here in the United States.

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Section 1603 now a $6.4 billion program

March 25th, 2011 by Russ Choma No comments »

A little update on the Section 1603 grant program – one of the stimulus bill’s largest and most direct programs for green energy. The ostensible purpose of the program was to create green-collar jobs for American workers by reimbursing developers of green energy projects up to 30 percent of the cost of their investment – in a direct, cash grant.

While, to a certain degree, it may have done that, it turns out the program rewarded developers of large scale renewable energy projects, and most of the jobs that were created, in the United States at least, were short-term construction jobs. Since the bulk of the companies that received the money were foreign, and the bulk of the equipment (like wind turbines) were purchased from foreign companies, who mostly do their production overseas, very few of the high-skill, high-pay manufacturing jobs that green energy development can bring ended up in the United States.  And, it turns out, quite a bit of the work on a number of the projects was done long before President Obama was ever elected, so what jobs those projects created had nothing to do with the stimulus.

The grant program was originally set to expire on Dec. 31, 2010, but when Congress passed an extension of the Bush tax cuts, they slipped in an extension of this program as well, and so the grant program continues to roll on – and continues to hand out money at a very fast clip.

It is now a $6.4 billion program, that has partially funded 2,194 projects. I’ve broken out some of the interesting facts about the program in the chart below (click for full size), or you can download the latest Section 1603 numbers yourself here (xls).


Treasury has actually released a fairly informative set of analysis updating on the progress of the program (available here in .pdf). But, a warning about the numbers you get from the Treasury site: they’ve stopped announcing recipients by project and are lumping all of a company’s awards together, so it’s increasingly difficult to tell where the money is actually ending up.

I have a FOIA filed with Treasury to try to pry even some basic information out of them about who exactly the money is going to, for what projects and what kind of jobs have been created, but I’m not holding my breath – I started the process 17 months ago and I’m still being stonewalled. Fans of FOIA fights stay tuned, I’ll be posting on that debacle soon!

And as always, if you’re a reporter or regular citizen looking to understand the grant program better, feel free to contact me.

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Covering the Green Economy – Western Perspective

March 3rd, 2011 by Russ Choma No comments »

This morning I’m helping out with the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism’s “Covering the Green Economy – A Western Perspective” workshop at the L.A. Times.

For attendees who want to read my PowerPoint over and over again, or at least want the links, a copy of the most recent version (slightly amended from the ones you were already sent) can be found here.

If you just want to jump straight to the spreadsheets of project names and awards they’ve received that I included in my presentation, I’ve got those too. Some of them have a ton of data, which might at first seem overwhelming, but, if nothing else, you can use these documents as jumping-off points – they pretty much summarize anything new/exciting/interesting happening in California (and the rest of the country) right now in the field of green energy.

Keep in mind these are slightly different than the ones in the version of my PowerPoint that you might have already received… each link should download an Excel spreadsheet (2003 compatible):

  • The most recent Section 1603 grants (well over, 1,500 and close to $6 billion in grants, as of late January, 2011): http://bit.ly/MostRecent1603
  • The edited down version with just California’s Section 1603 recipients: http://bit.ly/JustCali1603
  • A list of 48c Tax Credit recipients (for manufacturing facilities): http://bit.ly/48cTaxCredit
  • A list of just about all other recipients of Department of Energy grant money that doesn’t fall under either the Section 1603 grant program or the 48c Tax Credit (also includes explainer info about what each program does): http://bit.ly/AllRecoveryAct
  • The most recent status report of plants participating in California’s renewable portfolio standard (from the California PUC): http://bit.ly/CaliRPSInfo

Good luck, and if any of this doesn’t work or doesn’t make sense, don’t be afraid to get in touch with me.

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How do you end up representing someone like Jared Lee Loughner?

January 11th, 2011 by Russ Choma No comments »

Jared Lee Loughner’s appearance in court yesterday is the first step in what will surely be a very long legal battle.  As a former courts/cops reporter, I think it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. Most people seem to be trying to talk about it in a political context – is Sarah Palin responsible because she “targeted” Giffords? Is the over-heated rhetoric surrounding the healthcare bill the reason? Have we, as a nation, gone to far with our partisanship?

Talking heads will talk, but this case will hinge on something else – something controversial and heated. The death penalty.

Loughner is being represented by one of a close-knit group of well-respected and quite talented attorneys who maybe could’ve made millions as members of legal dream teams representing the wealthy and powerful in criminal cases, but instead have chosen to commit themselves to killing the death penalty. In this case, it’s Judy Clarke.

Clarke and a handful of other defense attorneys have a record of taking on clients with no money, and from the perspective of most legal experts, no hope in getting out of the legal system alive – literally. High-profile death penalty cases representing defendants who, frankly, nobody can stand and nobody thinks needs much of a trial is their specialty. I interviewed Clarke three years ago, while covering a death penalty case in New Hampshire. I called Clarke to talk about a colleague, David Bruck, who was representing the defendant in the case.

The notes from my interview with Clarke have long since gone missing, but in our discussion of Bruck she talked at length, and with great passion, about their shared ethos: the belief that the death penalty is inherently wrong, and the need for every defendant, no matter how loathed by the public, to get a fair trial.

Bruck is an enormously talented anti-death penalty advocate, who now only takes on a few cases, and usually only symbolic ones that make a point. And he’s Clarke’s mentor.

Bruck first made his name representing Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who strapped her children into the backseat of her car and pushed it into a lake, blaming their disappearance on a black man, before eventually confessing. Bruck asked Clarke to join him on the case – and they were successful. Not in getting Susan Smith off, but in getting her life in prison, not the death penalty. Fighting the death penalty became Bruck’s cause, and the case changed Clarke’s life, committing her to the same goal, she told me.

“David Bruck is the reason I do this work, and I alternate between blaming him and thanking him,” she said. “(Working with Bruck) completely changed my career.”

After working on the Smith case, Clarke went on to represent the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Zacarias Moussaoui (the “20th Hijacker), and Eric Rudolph. It’s interesting to note that several of her clients, like Kaczynski and Moussaoui, had bizarre, nonsensical or outlandish personal/political philosophies, and fought their own attorneys. But, ultimately, like most of Bruck’s clients (he has a nearly flawless record of getting his clients life sentences instead of death penalty, including the case I wrote about) most of Clarke’s highest-profile clients have not gone to the death chamber.

My article — “Legal Legend Heads to NH” – New Hampshire Union Leader, Feb. 19, 2008

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Powerful Democrats help Chinese energy firm chase stimulus money

January 11th, 2011 by Russ Choma No comments »

I’m a little tardy in posting this, but in early December we published my most recent story on how stimulus dollars for green energy are being spent.

Since I first wrote about the issue, one project in particular has really driven the story in the national media: a proposed Texas wind farm that backers hope to build with Chinese-built turbines. The backers also hope to cash in as much as $450 million in stimulus grants for the project – despite the fact that most labor-intensive work, and the most highly-skilled jobs, will be created in China with the manufacturing of the actual turbines.

In my latest piece, I investigated the background of the project developers – as it turns out, the American investment firm driving the project consists of four very well-connected Democrats, including two registered lobbyists. You can read the story here, on the Investigative Reporting Workshop’s website, or the version published by our partners on the project, MSNBC.com.

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Five Local Green Stimulus Stories You Can Do Right Now

October 27th, 2010 by Russ Choma No comments »

I just finished speaking at a workshop on, “What’s next for the economy in your town?”, organized by the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism. I spoke at a conference on covering the green economy for them back in June, and wrote an article for their blog earlier this month, about drilling down into stimulus numbers for good local stories. Once again, I had a great time, met a lot of interesting reporters – both in the audience, and among the other presenters who included Matt Apuzzo, an investigative reporter with the AP’s Washington Bureau and Jennifer LeFleur, who has helped spearhead ProPublica’s comprehensive coverage of the stimulus.

I talked about five local green stimulus stories you can do right now (archived video and a copy of my PowerPoint are on the Reynold’s Web site), and I said I would post at least two important links.

First: The latest list of Section 1603 grant recipients (.xlsx). And a link to the Treasury Website where the list is updated weekly and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

Second: I noted a bunch of businesses and projects – like big boxstores and schools – who received grants, but noted that because of a recent change in the way they post the information, they aren’t explicitly listed (the company that helped them get the grant might be instead)… So, here’s a version of the Section 1603 recipients from May 28, with the old-style of listing names that includes schools, big-box stores and universities (.xlsx).

And if you’re a reporter working on a story, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. And thanks again to the Reynolds Center for inviting me talk!

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Blown Away Looks Back

October 26th, 2010 by Russ Choma No comments »

My Blown Away series for the Investigative Reporting Workshop has looked at how much money the stimulus grant programs for green energy sent overseas twice now (here and here), but last week we came out with most recent entry, which took things in a slightly different direction: a close look at the administration’s own claims on how the money was spent and how many jobs were created… here in the United States.

We followed our tradition of getting some pretty big name “old-media” partners to work on the story with us and help us with distribution (we went with the Financial Times and ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer on the last two, respectively) and this time, MSNBC.com partnered with us. I worked closely with their main investigative guy, Bill Dedman, on some close edits of the story, and in the end, they ran a version of the story and so did we.

Their version, which ran with the rather provocative title, “Hot Air? White House takes credit for Bush-era wind farm jobs” sat on top of their front page for most of the morning – which is pretty great, considering it’s routinely the number one most read news site. It also racked up over 1,600 comments on their site.

Or, you can read the more modestly-headlined version that ran on our Website (and a pretty nice looking interactive map put together by our data guy, Jacob Fenton.)

For those who are here looking for more info on the subject, I would highly recommend reading a series on the effectiveness of stimulus money put together by Anne C. Mulkern. It’s a big three-parter that goes far beyond what we wrote, but definitely start with the first story, in which Anne went after a similar question that I did (coincidentally, at almost the same time I did) focusing on how much and how effective the money spent on wind farms that were completed before the stimulus ever arrived o the scene really was.

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Did Green Stimulus Dollars Create Jobs in China?

October 1st, 2010 by Russ Choma 1 comment »

My series of stories on stimulus money for green energy going abroad made a splash when I wrote them last fall and spring. Now, they’re making a comeback as out-sourcing becomes a major campaign issue.

In West Virginia’s third congressional district, Republican Spike Maynard released a new campaign ad last weekend challenging incumbent Nick Rahall on his vote for the stimulus package, which Maynard’s ad claims created jobs in China building wind turbines. Rahall wants the story pulled for being factually incorrect, and Maynard is refusing.

The controversy over the ad was first picked up Politico, and I attempted to put a little context in with a blog post over at the Investigative Reporting Workshop’s Shop Notes blog. And now, the accusation of using green stimulus money to create jobs in China is surfacing in other races, like in the Illinois race between Republican Bobby Schilling and Democrat incumbent Phil are.

In both cases, the accusations are at least partially based off the story we did with ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer in February, that reported as much as 80 percent of the green stimulus grants are going to foreign companies. The ABC story in particular focused on a plan to build a giant wind farm in Texas using Chinese turbines and up to $450 million in stimulus.

Based on the reporting I’ve done on the subject, neither the Republicans making the accusation or the Democrats trying to argue it’s a non-issue are getting it right. And both are using badly outdated numbers. I’ve put together a short FAQ to help answer questions raised by these ads and the defense against them.

Did foreign companies get money from the stimulus to build wind turbines?

Yes.

I’ve recently recalculated the numbers and found:

  • Of the 1,100-odd projects funded under the stimulus green energy grant program, 75 were major wind farms.
  • Those wind farms picked up $4.4 billion worth of grants.
  • 54 percent of that  – $2.38 billion — has gone to foreign developers. A total of 4,232 turbines were erected on those 75 farms, and 2,760 were built by foreign manufacturers – that’s 65.2 percent. Some of those foreign manufacturers have factories in the U.S., but not all of them and geography and the difficulty in moving giant turbine parts means that even some companies with factories here have still brought equipment from overseas. (See my February story to see how we tracked one Indiana wind farm’s parts to Vietnam and Denmark.)

But, isn’t it true that 100 percent of the projects were built in the United States?

This is a fact being offered by Democrats, who cite a rebuttal to my stories from the American Wind Energy Association. This is true, and AWEA is correct in stating that, but it has nothing to do with the issue – it’s a red herring. What’s at issue is who owns the companies who are benefitting from the stimulus dollars, and even though the numbers have shifted dramatically in the favor of American developers (see above) more than half of the money has still gone to foreign-owned developers, and 65.2 percent of the turbines built were still built by foreign manufacturers.

So, did the stimulus send money to China to create jobs building wind turbines?

Yes, but it’s not fair or true to say that most or all of the money went to create jobs in China. Respected independent fact-checking website Politifact dealt with this question last spring, when Sarah Palin incorrectly claimed in a Facebook post that 80 percent of stimulus money for alternative energy went to China.

Of the 4,232 turbines that have been built under this program, only three have been purchased outright from China. And the wind farm in Texas has not been built … yet. So, it hasn’t gotten any money… yet. But if a certain amount of work is done on the project by Dec. 31 of this year, it can still qualify for the money. And the Texas farm is very much still on the table. In fact, the Chinese manufacturer of the turbines announced they have built the first turbine to send to the United States.

That said, many of the turbine manufacturers (foreign and domestic) rely on a supply chain that’s partially-based in China. So, except for those three turbines in Minnesota, no whole turbines have come from China, but parts almost certainly have. We don’t know how many unless the companies that brought them in decide to share that information, so we can’t say for sure how many Chinese companies have benefitted and how many Chinese jobs were created.

It is safe to say far more jobs were created in the United States and Europe, than in China.

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