Georgia says stimulus funds created or saved more than 23,000 jobs

By Jeremy Redmon

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Federal stimulus spending on road projects, schools, public safety and other areas has created or saved more than 23,000 jobs in the state, Georgia officials say.

In all, 18 state agencies have spent $702 million of the $3.2 billion allocated to them since President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in February, resulting in 23,879 jobs created or retained in Georgia, according to a state report obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday evening. That breaks down to $29,380 spent per job across the state.

According to the study, 12,923 jobs were retained – mostly in local public school systems -- after the state spent so-called “fiscal stabilization” funds, stimulus money intended to shore up local and state government budgets amid the recession.

State officials have cautioned not to draw strong conclusions from the numbers yet, as only a fraction of the $6.4 billion set aside for Georgia has been spent.

“They are what they are and we are still looking into them to see what they mean,” Sid Johnson, Gov. Sonny Perdue's director of stimulus accountability, said about the statistics. “I think we are on track with the spending.”

Under the bill that created the $787 billion stimulus program, states, counties and school systems that receive the taxpayer money are required to report quarterly to the federal government on how they are spending it and how many jobs they have created or retained. The first reports were due Saturday.

Georgia’s figures do not include statistics from local governments, nonprofit agencies and businesses. The federal government is expected to release statistics for all the states by the end of this month.

Federal and state officials, meanwhile, expect questions about how they are tallying the jobs. One method being used to total "full-time equivalents" involves calculating the cumulative number of hours worked in jobs created or retained through stimulus projects and dividing that by the hours in a full-time schedule.

For tracking fiscal stabilization funds, Georgia is taking the total amount of stimulus funds allocated to a local school district, for example, and dividing that by the district's average salary.

“I remain a little concerned about our ability to accurately measure jobs that were retained,” said Roger Tutterow, an economics professor at Mercer University. “It requires us to essentially benchmark and estimate what kind of cuts would have been made but for the spending coming in. I remain cautious about that component of the impact.”

In January, the White House projected stimulus spending would create or save as many as 3.6 million jobs nationwide. Of those, 106,000 jobs would be created or saved in Georgia over the next two years, according to the Council of Economic Advisers. In September, the council estimated that about 1 million jobs had been created or saved through the spending so far.

Critics have scoffed at those numbers, noting that the nation has continued to lose hundreds of thousands of jobs each month since February, when Obama signed the stimulus legislation.

Some economists say the spending has at least reduced the severity of the recession.

“It’s clear that any spending related to infrastructure efforts will certainly add to employment and output,” Tutterow said. “I don’t think anybody would argue the stimulus spending makes things worse. Where the debate is going to be is over the magnitude of the positive effect.”