AGC members met with Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood on May 20 to discuss the success of the stimulus. Reuters reporter Lisa Lambert covered the event and reported on contractors' stories of saved jobs and projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
WASHINGTON, May 20 (Reuters) - Job by job, the U.S. economic stimulus plan passed by Congress in February is reinforcing the construction industry and keeping workers from sliding into poverty, a group of contractors told the transportation secretary on Tuesday.
North Dakota contractor Paul Diederich, who repaves roads, on Monday started a stimulus project with a crew of three, one of them a 20-year employee of his company and another who has just finished high school.
"This thing cascades to everybody. It's all levels. I've got suppliers furnishing ... the teeth that go into the drums that chew up the asphalt. We're buying more teeth," he told Reuters following a meeting with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.
Vice President Joseph Biden said last week the federal stimulus plan, approved by Congress as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will create or retain 3.5 million jobs by the end of September 2010.
The first accounts of transportation projects, which were expected to generate the bulk of stimulus jobs, were not that promising. A report released by the House of Representatives Transportation Committee in April showed funding for highway and transit works had only "created or sustained" 1,288 jobs.
That report was based on 1,380 projects being put out to bid. As of May 8, there were 2,137 projects scheduled to start, according to the Transportation Department.
But for Illinois highway construction contractor Mike Cullinan, who visited LaHood with Diederich on Tuesday, there are other workers to consider who likely will not be counted, especially those who haul sand and rock to the project sites.
"There's all kinds of peripheral hauling of materials," he said. "Those are a lot of jobs. Plus there are people who are making the materials."
His company recently won the bids for two stimulus projects, and he has already hired 25 people for one of them.
The stimulus is just as important for the jobs it saves for South Dakota highway contractor Mark Knight. His company will bid on two projects next week, giving his company hope it can keep long-time employees on the payroll.
"We had some of those people looking at changing careers and leaving the industry," he said. "We were able to hold onto them. We were committed to them. We knew there was stimulus work coming."
LaHood has said once summer begins a pickup in outdoor construction work will follow. The contractors said they are only now bidding on stimulus jobs or starting them.
Still, the federal government is wrestling with questions about which workers to count, leading to results that may be vague for some time.
Biden said that the Council of Economic Advisers is putting together estimates of total job creation, which includes "direct, indirect and induced jobs."
The Office of Management and Budget is developing a system for contractors to report exact numbers of workers for stimulus projects, and Biden said the data will be posted on www.recovery.gov in October.
Some jobs will be easy to count, as they will come from the federal government directly. A Reuters search on Wednesday on the government's website for ARRA jobs, http://jobsearch.usajobs.gov/a9recoveryjobs.aspx, found 115 current vacancies for laborers.
AGC of America staff and contractor members met with Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood (center) at the DOT headquarters in Washington, D.C.