Special to The Morning Journal
Stimulus funds are making jobs, like this road work in Mentor, but the effect has been called only a 'drop in the bucket' for Ohio. (Photo special to The Morning Journal)
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act shares at least two similarities with other large-scale federal undertakings of recent years. Like the war in Iraq or health care provisions, the debate regarding its merit and the justification for its creation will likely never end. And, people will have to wait several years to definitively know whether the stimulus package’s goals will be fully or partially accomplished.
That latter parallel is especially painful for some Ohioans, given the second word of the $800 billion-plus package’s proper name. By far, jobs are the chief concern of citizens tracking the ARRA. Through June, or the end of the quarter with the most recent available data, the number of jobs in Ohio created by the act amounts to a little more than 15 percent of the state’s unemployed population.
Since the stimulus was enacted nearly 20 months ago, Ohio has created 91,726 recipient-reported jobs funded by the contracts, grants and loans awarded to employers. The state’s 25,896 new jobs in the April-through-June quarter of this year were good enough to rank the state seventh behind the likes of California, Georgia, New York and Virginia.
Though Vice President Joe Biden released a report defending the program in recent weeks, many have soured on the stimulus, including 52 percent of Americans polled in a USA Today/Gallup study this summer. Most economist estimates have the ARRA creating at least 2.5 million jobs since last February, but some deem the package less effective here.
In the most recent quarter, Lorain produced 32 new jobs and Elyria had a robust 136 jobs during the three-month period. But the job impact was much lower for many communities west of Cleveland. The same was true east of Cleveland, where Painesville, Euclid and Richmond Heights were the only municipalities with recipients reporting a total greater than a single-digit new job count.
Predictably, most of the jobs, along with the biggest awards, went to agencies near the center of the state’s bigger cities, especially Columbus, with more than 20,000 jobs last quarter. Cleveland created about 830 jobs between April and June with its awards.
“Looking at those numbers, that’s only a drop in the bucket,” said Patricia Hoyt, dean of Workforce Development and Continuing Education at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland. “A lot of those jobs are seasonal, but are any of those jobs sustainable?”
It can’t be much of a surprise that smaller counties like Lake and Geauga would receive $62.6 million and $13.9 million, respectively, compared to Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties, which all received $400 million or better. Still, that money has gone toward jobs, infrastructure projects, educational aid, health care and energy and environmental spending that did not previously exist.
Here are a few awards given to public and private entities in Lake and Geauga counties, large and small. In some cases, all of the funds may not have been received yet.
• The Navy awarded Willoughby-based Pinnacle Construction and Development Corp. about $2.5 million for the demolition, minor asbestos abatement, architectural repairs, roofing, plumbing, lighting, HVAC renovation and construction and other modernization work at the Navy’s operational support center in Cincinnati. The firm selected a couple of small area firms for two of its sub-contracts. Russell Flooring Co. of Willoughby will receive $78,500, and Summit Painting in Eastlake will get about $1,000 more than that for its work.
Overall, 33 jobs have been reported for the project. A Pinnacle executive declined to discuss the award.
• The City of Mentor received $512,200 from the Department of Energy to retrofit traffic signals, street and parking lot lighting throughout the city with high-efficiency LED bulbs.
Mentor Public Works Director Matthew S. Schweikert said that money was presented to the city in spring 2009 for any projects it wanted to undertake that would conserve energy. The city has some funds left over to take bids for a boiler at its civic ice arena, but “a good chunk” of the funds went toward energy efficient lighting at the city’s 85 signalized intersections.
The city will do some of the installing but also contract some of the work, Schweikert said.
• The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s ARRA Capital Fund Program paid for the Geauga Metropolitan Housing Authority to renovate the parking lot and road surfaces at its Chardon facility, along with money to make various repairs at low-income housing facilities throughout the county.
The reward totaled about $432,000 and created about four jobs. The work is mostly complete, including replacing the building exit doors at Harris House in Chardon and replacing the exterior electric meter boxes at Cloverdale Estates in Middlefield and Strickland Arms in Bainbridge. The funds also covered concrete driveway and sidewalk replacement at Scranton Woods in Newbury Township and the administrative costs for the ARRA projects.
The projects were on the GMHA’s five-year plan, with some deemed shovel-ready, but the stimulus funding helped to expedite the process, said Mel Kirschnick, the agency’s modernization coordinator.
“You want to be a high performer, maintaining that status,” Kirschnick said. “HUD comes out every other year to look at our physical properties, and we get rated on that, and that’s part of a score that determines if we’re high performers or not. This parking lot, it was kind of an embarrassment before. That was really a project we were thankful to get done.”
One doesn’t have to travel far to see physical manifestation of the ARRA, as the familiar green signs with stimulus notation are scattered throughout Ohio’s interstates, routes and bridges.
“In Ohio, we look at the stimulus as something very important,” Ohio Department of Transportation District 12 spokeswoman Jocelynn Clemings said. “The governor and our director always say, where you see orange barrels, you should think jobs. It’s clear we’re putting people to work and folks who wouldn’t otherwise be working because of these dollars — not only people who we have on (construction) sites, but people behind the scenes, like haulers of materials, producers of materials, those who have a hand in fabricating, welding or doing things that you don’t see on a day-to-day basis.”
There were 11 ARRA-funded road projects between Lake and Geauga counties.
They are part of the $44.2 million share that the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency got from ODOT’s ARRA funds, NOACA spokeswoman Cheryl Onesky said.
The most expensive project is easily a Regional Intelligent Transportation System to include seven counties in the greater Cleveland and Akron areas.
The $21 million system will include traffic cameras and the informative, real-time highway message boards motorists have seen in other cities and states.
The cameras and radios provide the information for the boards and Web platforms that will give drivers an idea of congestion before they leave home or work. The system will be completed by the end of 2011.
“The system has been up and running in other cities, but ours is the best of the best, most updated and light years ahead of other systems,” Clemings said of the Dynamic Message Boards, manufactured by Brookings, S.D.-based Daktronics, which produces LED billboards and sports scoreboards.
That project is one of the 388 stimulus-funded transportation construction initiatives in the state, Clemings said. As of mid-September, 146 of those projects have been completed, including the $9.3 million rehabilitation of Interstate 271 from Wilson Mills Road to Interstate 90 and the resurfacing of State Route 700 in Troy and Burton Townships, worth $987,570 of ARRA investment.
Everybody, from the funding agencies to the recipients themselves, is aware of the criticisms of the ARRA and the perception that some of the projects are not important in today’s economically-depressed United States of America.
GMHA Executive Director Nancy Sadler knows those opinions will probably be coming her way as more people learn about the funds her agency received for the parking lot and facility repairs in Geauga County.
She has very different thoughts about the stimulus, at least as it affects her community.
“It’s actually brilliant when you think about it, for HUD, especially,” she said. “They’re actually dumping the money into their own federal assets.
They’re killing two birds with one stone: Supplying jobs and investing in their own properties. I really think that’s smart. It flowed just like it should have.”
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