Oregon Public Broadcasting

As Oregon leaders wait for stimulus money from Washington D-C, one of the biggest questions is: “What does ‘shovel ready’ mean?” A top federal energy official answered that for industrial leaders in Portland Tuesday.

Doug Kaempf is the Industrial Technologies program manager at the federal Department of Energy. He gave a Portland business conference his definition of "shovel-ready" as it applies to energy efficiency projects. Doug Kaempf: “That there’s been due diligence done on the design. You’ve either had an architect engineering firm already did the detailed design for you. You had some kind of due diligence at a bank.”

In other words, Kaempf says the project was ready to go, then ran short of cash.

Doug Kaempf: “Really, that project was stopped because of the economic downturn in America. And what we could do is write them a check, and have them break ground.”

Oregon’s share of energy efficiency money in the federal stimulus package is roughly 30 million dollars. That's just one pot of money for "shovel-ready" projects.