Minn. on track to meet weatherization goals

The Minnesota Department of Commerce says through last month, 2,693 homes in Minnesota had been weatherized with federal stimulus money.

Commerce Department spokeswoman Nicole Garrison-Sprenger says that's 16 percent of the 17,000 homes Minnesota is supposed to weatherize with stimulus money by the spring of 2012.

Garrison-Sprenger says after getting off to a slow start, the state is now on track to meet that deadline.

"We've got everything that we need to have in place to begin moving," she said. "What we did in February and January were about 600 homes in Minnesota, and we expect that monthly number to grow here in the next couple of months."

Weatherization work was delayed because it took a long time for the federal government to determine what wages weatherization workers needed to be paid to meet stimulus requirements.

State officials say so far they are spending less than the maximum of $6,500 on each home they weatherize. They say that will likely mean that they will be able to do more than the 17,000 homes they originally set out to weatherize.