Invisible Recovery

Joe Gill wasn't any luck finding other work in the Seattle area after Alcoa closed its Auburn plant in January 2009 and his plant-manager position vaporized. So when he heard about an April job fair in Richland for opportunities at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, he got up at 3 a.m., drove east and stood in line for eight hours to talk to recruiters. Employers in the Tri-Cities received nearly $2 billion in funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the federal stimulus bill.

Today, Gill works for a subcontractor of CH2M Hill, overseeing a building destruction-and-demolition crew at Hanford. As last year wound down, he was busy moving his wife and three grade-school-age sons to the Tri-Cities. He says he enjoyed the hazardous-waste training and feels good about his work protecting the public from toxic waste. He's also hoping that after the stimulus funds run out in 2011, more federal money will come along to keep him employed.

"There was no opportunity to replace a job with my experience or pay level in Seattle," he says. "Here, the training is spectacular and hopefully, they'll get more funding."

Gill may not know it, but he is a lucky man-one of relatively few unemployed people who found a new, full-time, ongoing job courtesy of the stimulus money coming into Washington. 

Our state was a big stimulus winner, with state agencies and other Washington-based institutions receiving more than $5.5 billion all told (that's $828 per capita). As of the end of October, we'd created or preserved more than 34,500 jobs, ranking our state third in the nation.

So why aren't there more stories like Gill's? A closer examination of the figures reveals the stimulus funding to be less of a jobs bonanza than it initially appears. The vast majority of what's been tallied as stimulus-related work in our state was for existing positions that were retained-in most cases, for just a few months.

Many of those jobs might not have been preserved and our state would have been deeper in debt had Washington not received the stimulus money. Or state services would have shrunk more. For people who kept their jobs, that's the good news. But it's little comfort to the unemployed. Despite much White House rhetoric about employment figures, much of our state's stimulus funding didn't create work at all-it just kept vital services going.

Teasing out the true impacts of the stimulus funding requires wading into a dense thicket of state, federal and local data. We've penetrated the numbers fog to find where the biggest lumps of stimulus money went,

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