When the stimulus funding package was being rushed through Congress, there was a lot of talk about the need to get the money into the economy quickly.

Democrats and the Obama administration said they would target "shovel-ready" projects.

Apparently not everyone in federal government got the memo. The money is caught in a thicket of rules.

In Nebraska, most communities will not be able to spend their money until next year. So far only one local project in McCook has been approved.

About $78 million worth of stimulus funding for 23 city projects and 18 county roads is being held up, including about $9.4 million for rehabilitation of arterial streets in Lincoln.

Fine help that is going to be in stimulating the economy in a timely fashion.

The slow pace of stimulus spending on road projects might be an extreme case in Nebraska, but it also has been evident elsewhere.

So far only 8 percent of the $789 billion stimulus package approved in February has been specifically committed, according to Obama administration officials.

The reason for the delay in Nebraska is illuminating.

The federal government decided in 2007 that the system for local monitoring of federally funded road projects needed improvement.

That's certainly a worthy goal. Hopefully improvement would guard against waste. Naturally, state officials embarked on revisions to the the system.

And so it happened that last week the federal government gave its approval to a 540-page rewrite of the state rules manual.

One requirement is that local communities have a local project manager who has received three weeks of training. And there are other complexities. Rule changes require that environmental impact documents be redone.

"The level of review and oversight is to the point of being ridiculous," said Greg Woolfor, a project engineer who is a member of Nebraska's Highway Commission.

Allan Abbott, an aide to Sen. Ben Nelson who is a former state roads director and Lincoln Public Works director, may have zeroed in on one reason for the complication.

"No doubt you have to follow the rules. But is this one-size-fits-all the proper solution?" Abbott asked.

After all, Abbott pointed out, some of the local communities in sparsely populated Nebraska may have only one federally funded road project every five or six years.

In the long-run, the new system may offer safeguards. But it's disappointing that federal officials could not find a way to be more flexible in disbursing stimulus money that's supposed to be spent quickly.

Federal officials should consider the possibility of waiving some of the rules in order to meet the objective of the stimulus funding. It's time federal officials got on the same page - even if there are 540 of them in the rule book.