Strickland's Green Jobs push takes another hit.

We've been had.

In Governor Strickland's state of the state speech in January, he loudly proclaimed a focus on green jobs to be the key to turning around Ohio's economy.


As we detailed many times, that focus reflected backwards thinking and had already proven to fail.

But it turns out the Governor's braggadacio was even more undeserved than initially thought.

Earlier this year, state officials touted the 2,485 jobs they said the Home Weatherization Assistance Program created in October, November and December. But they said yesterday that the fall number was inflated by about 1,100 jobs.

They reported that weatherization supported 1,310 jobs in January, February and March.

The fall number was too high mainly because some grant recipients had counted the number of people working in weatherization jobs instead of counting the hours they worked, said Don Skaggs, an administrator in the Ohio Department of Development who helps oversee the program. That means, for example, that part-time workers could have been counted as holding full-time jobs even though they worked only 20 hours per week.

In a letter to be sent to federal officials, state officials said such errors meant that the reported number of jobs was inflated.

Governor Strickland's team fudged the data in order to enhance their political standing. And that's shameful to no end.

But now that we have more accurate data, let's look at the math again.

Ohio received $267 million in stimulus dollars for its weatherization program. Being generous, let's assume that half that goes to materials designated for completion of the job. The other half, $133,500,000, specifically funds each individual job. That means each of the 1,310 jobs costs taxpayers almost $102,000 each.

$102,000 for each job.

Is that the kind of massive taxpayer spending per job that Governor Strickland wants to base our entire economy upon?

It's very simple. The market is not yet interested in a green job economy.

The sooner Ohio has a Governor that focuses instead on attracting ALL businesses to the state, the better of we all are.