South, Southwest get bump from stimulus contracts

WASHINGTON — Businesses report creating or saving more than 30,000 jobs in the first months of President Barack Obama’s stimulus program, with military construction leading the way and states in the South and Southwest seeing the biggest boost, according to a government oversight board.

The numbers in its report, released Thursday, are based on jobs linked to less than $16 billion in federal contracts and represent just a sliver of the $787 billion stimulus package. But they offer the first hard data on the early effects of the program. Until now, the White House has relied on economic models to argue that the program created jobs and eased the recession. Critics point to rising unemployment to argue it wasn’t worth the cost.

Obama has set a goal of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

The construction industry had the strongest job numbers in Thursday’s report, accounting for about a third of the jobs thanks to contracts to repair military bases.

“It’s kind of carrying us, allowing us to retain employees until the economy makes a rebound,” said Matt Rathsack, director of operations at the Kentucky engineering firm, TetraTech, which reported saving 71 jobs thanks to an Army Corps of Engineers construction project at the Detroit Arsenal facility in Michigan. “We’ve already pared back and cut back. The staff is on reduced hours. The feeling is we’re coming around the corner. We’re optimistic.”

Environmental jobs also provided a big boost. CH2M Hill, the contractor in charge of cleaning the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site, said nearly 2,200 jobs, from carpenters to engineers to secretaries, had been created in southwest Washington state.

On paper, Colorado posted the largest increase of any state, more than 4,700 jobs, largely thanks to a contract to set up a call center to field questions about a change to digital cable. But the jobs were spread across multiple states, underscoring one of the many hiccups in the data. Like most contracting jobs, these are were temporary, and most are already over.

California, Florida, Tennessee and Texas also showed strong gains.

New England fared poorly, with fewer than 750 jobs reported across the region. Rhode Island, which has the third-highest unemployment rate in the country, reported the weakest job numbers, both overall and per capita. Businesses there reported creating about six jobs.

Broader numbers on local stimulus spending, for everything from repairing public housing and building schools to repaving highways and keeping teachers off the unemployment lines, won’t be available until late this month. Those figures are expected to show early stimulus money saving thousands of teaching jobs and creating construction work for highway projects nationwide.

Thursday’s numbers represent such a small snapshot, they are unlikely to significantly change the debate over whether stimulus was the right prescription for an ailing economy.

Jared Bernstein, the chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, said it was too early to draw conclusions from the data “but the early indications are quite positive.”

House Republican leader John Boehner said the numbers don’t change the fact that unemployment has climbed higher than the White House ever expected. Since signing the stimulus in February, Obama has watched the economy shed millions of jobs. The White House says things would have been far worse without the stimulus.

“The administration’s continuing assertion that the stimulus is working flies in the face of the harsh reality being faced by Americans outside the Beltway every day,” Boehner said. “While the administration spins its illusion, Americans are asking, ‘Where are the jobs?’”

In the short term, the most significant thing about the job numbers may be that they exist at all. The government has never before attempted to track the effects, in real time, of a huge government program. The data released by the independent Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board allow taxpayers to see not just where their money is going, but what the government is getting in return and how many people are on the job.

The reporting does not attempt to measure jobs created by $288 billion in tax cuts or the sizable increases in spending on Medicaid and unemployment benefits. The White House has said that, when considering those factors and estimating the ripple effect through the economy, more than 1 million jobs have been created or saved so far.

Auditors, fearing businesses would use part-time jobs to inflate the numbers, required companies to convert all jobs numbers to full-time. That means a 20-hour-a-week roofing job is counted as half a job.

On the Net:

Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board: www.recovery.gov