Nothing succeeds like success (well, maybe some influence, too) in government contracts for McNeely Pigott & Fox

Fresh off their bid to overbill Metro as convention center pitch men (including $10,000 to monitor local bloggers) and to charge the airport authority $10,000 to generate a holiday e-card and set up a Twitter page, McNeely Pigott and Fox is getting an infusion of almost $2 million from the White House.

According to Recovery.gov, the contract with the PR firm "creates/saves" zero jobs and it involves pitching a "Green Outreach initiative":

The contractor will provide support to the National Office of Job Corps and its Green Outreach initiative, which is focused on increasing green training offerings for students and to upgrade center facilities and build new centers. The contractor will support the National Office in all "ARRA/green" communications efforts, internal and external; develop and distribute "ARRA/green" marketing materials to drive program-eligible youth to contact Job Corps; provide "ARRA/green" outreach support to assist the six Regional Offices in marketing their "green" training goals; support the National and Regional Offices in all appropriate "green" conference and training efforts; and support the Job Corps office stimulus spending plan. Tools used to reach those goals may include: e-newsletter from the National Director, Web-specific content to be placed on the existing Job Corps Web site, "green" jobs toolkit for use by staff, event support for events such as Earth Day 2010, talking points and research materials. The contractor will also provide meeting and National Office support for training and information-sharing as part of this program. A final report will be compiled and created to share information regarding Job Corps' ARRA projects.

Given MP&F's overexpenditures on the Mayor's convention center project that did not come to light until NewsChannel5 exposed them, let's hope that someone is monitoring the federal contract and that they will expose any PR overages on the latest. But it seems curious that this PR firm can so milk contracts in Nashville and get a new money pump from Washington DC.