Invisible Recovery

The economic stimulus package did create jobs in Washington; but if you blinked, you missed most of ‘em.

By Carol Tice | March 2010 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Credit: Illustration by Headcase Design

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,