Back in February, when Congress approved President Barack
Obama’s mammoth plan to stimulate the economy and create jobs, new
spending on roads, bridges and other transportation projects was
supposed to be one of the fastest-acting pieces of the $787 billion
package. And initially, states moved quickly to qualify for their
share of the money.
But since then, the pace has slowed considerably _ especially in
big states such as California and Florida, where the impact of the
economic crisis has been most severe.
– McClatchy News Service
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Back in February, when Congress approved President Barack Obama’s mammoth plan to stimulate the economy and create jobs, new spending on roads, bridges and other transportation projects was supposed to be one of the fastest-acting pieces of the $787 billion package. And initially, states moved quickly to qualify for their share of the money.
But since then, the pace has slowed considerably _ especially in big states such as California and Florida, where the impact of the economic crisis has been most severe.
As of July 10, almost 2,000 of the 5,600 road projects approved by Washington had been assigned contractors and given the green light to start construction. Yet six of the 10 largest projects have yet to be given the go-ahead, and bottlenecks are appearing from coast to coast.
“What we’re seeing is a significant level of bidding activity,” said Anne Lloyd, chief financial officer at Martin Marietta Materials, a nationwide supplier of stone, asphalt and other construction supplies. “But the big thing we’re not seeing is work on the ground.”
A variety of factors are contributing to the delays. Part of it is the time needed to get heavy equipment and crews ready for jobs. Also, overburdened state officials have sometimes had trouble sustaining the early momentum.
Even where projects have begun, they haven’t always brought with them as big a burst of new hiring as might be expected.
In southern Louisiana, engineer Kevin Charrier is leading one of the largest bridge projects in the country: a $33 million, 160-foot-long structure crossing Bayou Lafourche. It will replace a pontoon bridge long considered unsafe.
“It’s definitely a blessing,” he said, for the public, for his firm, James Construction, and for minority subcontractors in the Gulf Coast area. “We’re using the hardware store in the community, we’re buying ice from the local icehouse, we’re paying local truckers to haul off busted trees.”
Yet Charrier said he hasn’t hired any new people. Rather, he has brought on an initial crew of about a dozen veterans from another job nearby, so they don’t have to work far from their homes when the other work finishes.
“If we have people who have experience, we would rather work them overtime _ not that we don’t want to train or hire new people,” he said.
Federal and state officials expect the pace of construction _ and hiring _ to pick up substantially in coming months.
If it doesn’t, it will only sharpen the complaints from critics who, focusing on the soaring unemployment rate, say Obama’s economic stimulus package isn’t working.
Officials at the U.S. Department of Transportation estimate that stimulus-funded highway projects had directly saved or created 6,000 jobs through May, the latest month for which they have data.
The White House calculated that every $1 billion spent on highway work would create 11,000 direct and indirect jobs. Private estimates are as high as 35,000 jobs per $1 billion.
Either way, the progress of highway projects is seen as an important symbolic measure of whether Obama’s Recovery Act is succeeding.
Lawrence Summers, the president’s top economic adviser, said the program shouldn’t be judged by short-term results. “Given lags in spending and hiring,” he said Friday, “the peak impact of the stimulus on jobs is expected not to be achieved until the end of 2010.”
However, all of the highway and bridge works approved for funding under the act were required to be “shovel ready,” meaning they had to be ready to go in 90 days. The first shovel on a project, a $2.1 million resurfacing job in Maryland, hit the ground in early March.
Contractors, especially in the northern states, worry that if things don’t move faster, they’ll have to sit out until next spring because of the onset of cold weather. For some, it’s already too late.
On June 12, Vice President Joe Biden went to Kalamazoo in Michigan, the state with the highest unemployment, for a groundbreaking ceremony for a $43 million project reconstructing part of Interstate 94.
“We are quite literally repaving the road to recovery right here in Kalamazoo,” he was quoted as saying, with an unemployed construction worker near his side. But construction won’t really get going until next April.
