At first glance, it looks as if it's raining money in Davenport.

The Obama administration's Web site for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, best known as the stimulus package, recently posted maps showing where the money is going.

Here in the Quad-Cities, it doesn't look like the biggest recipient is any of the usual suspects: the Rock Island Arsenal, the school districts or Davenport City Hall.

Instead, the government says, more than $41 million has been obligated to online college Kaplan University in Davenport.

But nobody is stuffing money into vaults at Kaplan's rather nondescript building at a strip mall at 1801 E. Kimberly Road.

"That is not the case," said Michele Pore, Kaplan's director of public relations.

Instead, the money - federal Pell Grant funds approved in the stimulus law - is going to thousands of students across the country.

The appearance that the money is coming here is because Kaplan, a subsidiary of the Washington Post, is based in Davenport.

Also, the federal government has to attribute the funds to the entity that is benefitting, said Elaine Quesinberry, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education.

"Even though Pell goes to students first, it then goes to pay tuition for the school, which is headquartered in Davenport," she said in an e-mail.

This isn't just a reporting oddity, however. Categorizing the money as going to Davenport has had at least one other effect.

It has given the impression that Scott County is benefitting from stimulus money far more than it actually is.

ProPublica, an investigative journalism Web site, this month analyzed the stimulus money each of the country's 3,000-plus counties is getting per person.

Scott County, at $473 per person, got nearly three times the national average. However, more than half of the $77 million attributed to Scott County is tied to Kaplan.

Other large stimulus spending here includes $3.9 million for the Davenport School District and $5 million for road projects overseen by the state of Iowa.

Kaplan has 59,000 students across the country, most of them online, Pore said. Its tie to Davenport stems from its purchase of educational institutions over the years that were linked to the old American Institute of Commerce.

After inquiries last week, the stimulus Web site, www.Recovery.gov, changed the map so that on Tuesday the Kaplan money no longer showed up in the Quad-Cities. Instead, it appeared in northwest Iowa, as did Scott County.

There was no immediate explanation for the change.

To be fair, trying to pinpoint on a map a broad array of federal spending is a monumental task.

ProPublica noted in its report that it could assign to specific counties only $55 billion in the $120 billion in grants, loans and contracts it tracked. The stimulus package itself amounted to $787 billion.

Locally, previous analyses conducted by the Quad-City Times of federal money flowing to the area has had to account for these types of issues.

For example, federal salaries being paid to Defense Department workers often show up as going to Rock Island County residents, even though the recipients - most of them Rock Island Arsenal employees - live throughout the Quad-City area.