Recovery act | The latest economic stimulus data is in. But the government's performance in job creation and transparency raises as many questions as it answers.
On recovery.gov, the federal website that tracks stimulus spending across the country, a tagline describes the site as the government’s official online effort to provide “easy access to data related to Recovery Act spending.” But try clicking past the appealing interactive maps and the 595,263 national jobs count, prominently displayed in a shade of dollar-bill green, and making sense of anything but superficial data becomes a full-time job in and of itself.
President Obama has touted the site as a way to provide transparency in the distribution of funding from the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And, yes, there’s plenty of data on recovery.gov. You can find out how much Maine has been awarded, the names of recipients, the types of awards and the number of jobs associated with each allotment. But a few fundamental flaws call much of the data into question.
Perhaps most worrisome, Maine’s job count of 2,082 plunges more than 10% after it’s adjusted for inaccurate and misleading figures attached to just two of the state’s top job creators in the last quarter. MaineHousing acknowledges it submitted outdated figures that led to an overstated job count, and the feds essentially relabeled the University of Maine System’s existing funding for work study as stimulus money.
Recipients, who keep up with ever-changing federal accounting guidelines with varying levels of success, are responsible for the reporting. And in the Maine data, the description field for projects ranges from the nihilistic (blank entries) to the minimalist (“highway improvements”) to the esoteric (“the role of slug in regulation of hematopoietic stem cells”). Then there was the state’s phantom third congressional district, an “unassigned” zone allotted more than $100,000 that disappeared from recovery.gov earlier this month just as mysteriously as it appeared.
Break down
The most recent quarterly stimulus data, which covers Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, 2009, is the result of the second round of reporting required by the federal government. Just days before agencies were due to submit, the feds “simplified” the criteria for calculating recovery act-funded jobs. Recipients were instructed to count jobs only for a single quarter, as opposed to a longer period, told not to bother distinguishing between new and retained jobs, and to base the totals on the number of hours worked to determine full-time equivalent positions.
For MaineHousing, and doubtless others, the last-minute change caused problems. The agency is receiving $42 million to weatherize Maine homes, work that’s performed by Community Action Programs that employ their own people and also contract out. MaineHousing had already collected job hours from the field by the time it got notice of the change. “We didn’t have time to go back and refigure it,” says Dan Simpson, public information manager for the agency. So the federal recovery site attributes 204 jobs to weatherization in the last quarter, while the state’s website, maine.gov/recovery, lists the accurate figure of 140 full-time equivalents, he says.
Stimulus funding has allowed the agency to more than double its weatherization efforts to 4,000 homes over two years, Simpson says.
Also important to note is that one job doesn’t necessarily equal one person, explains Roger Crouse, director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ drinking water program, which is receiving $19.5 million in stimulus funds and reported 180.16 jobs for the quarter. The agency takes the total hours worked, on often more than one project, and divides it by 520 (40 hours per week times 52 weeks a year, divided by four quarters, to equal 520 hours per quarter). So 1,000 hours spent replacing a sewer line equals 1.92 full-time equivalent jobs, work that could have been performed by multiple people or a single worker. “If one employee works 80 hours a week, we don’t know that,” Crouse says.
Without the stimulus funding, “our project list would have been cut in half,” he says.
At the University of Maine System, the longstanding federal allotment for work study jobs was simply relabeled as recovery act funding. University of Maine at Presque Isle Financial Aid Director Chris Bell says the feds notified him that his school’s work study allotment would drop by $81,000. But the amount was simultaneously restored via stimulus funds. “They essentially attributed a portion of our allocation to stimulus money even though our allocation didn’t go up a dollar,” Bell says.
All seven campuses in the system — which received a combined $812,234 for work study programs and reported 161.6 related jobs — experienced similar adjustments, he says. Fortunately, the original allotment is expected to be reinstated after the recovery act money expires. “We’re not spending a penny more on federal work study than we would have before notification of [recovery act] funding,” Bell says.
Jackie Farwell, Mainebiz staff reporter, can be reached at jfarwell@mainebiz.biz.
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