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Sonoma County's stimulus tally more than $100 million
North Bay Construction's Tom Lane guides piping into place so that Kimo Kahaulelio can move it for a project connecting Wilson Elementary School to the Petaluma water system. The project was funded with government stimulus money.
CRISTA JEREMIASON/THE PRESS DEMOCRATPublished: Sunday, December 6, 2009 at 5:37 p.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, December 6, 2009 at 5:37 p.m.
The federal government is pumping more than $100 million in stimulus funds into the Sonoma County economy — probably.
Facts
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The government has established a website at www.recovery.gov to provide public access to information on stimulus money projects and the jobs they create. The site offers an interactive map of all funded projects, accompanied by brief narrative descriptions and links to more information.
The impact of the two-year flow of money — in jobs created and saved and in money spent locally — is clear. Except when it's not.
The government has released volumes of data to detail the practical results of the massive federal spending spree formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, $787 billion in tax cuts and spending intended to pull the economy from the brink of a depression.
A summary of stimulus funding in Sonoma County indicates that as of Oct. 30, $105.2 million has been awarded to local projects, creating or saving 397.4 jobs.
But a closer look at the data generates a portrait of the stimulus funds' impact that is, at best, imprecise. In Sonoma County, according to a random survey of 12 projects, the federal government appears to have generally undercounted the number of jobs created or saved.
The data is collected on www.recovery.gov, a government Web site that contains an interactive map of all funded projects, accompanied by brief narrative descriptions and links to more information.
The government is quick to tout the spending's impacts. And certainly, some of the details are on target.
A Nov. 18 article posted on the Welcome to the Fast Lane blog of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation calls attention to $4.2 million in stimulus funds awarded to Santa Rosa's transit system, saying it helped save 10 jobs and prevented fare increases and service cuts.
“That's the everyday value of the Recovery Act in the lives of everyday Americans,” said Transportation Secretary Raymond LaHood in his article.
Santa Rosa officials say LaHood's numbers, both the dollar amounts and the jobs created or saved, are accurate. And at the Sonoma County Airport — which the Web site states got $1.6 million for a remodeling project now underway that created or saved 3.85 jobs — officials said those figures, too, are correct.
For Santa Rosa, the
But elsewhere, the government data points up what in some cases appears to be considerable discrepancies.
In Santa Rosa, for example, officials said 60 jobs have been either created or saved, including public safety positions that were on the chopping block. Meanwhile, the federal government says only 13 jobs have been created through the projects.
At the Wilmar Union School District near Petaluma, which received $1.06 million in federal stimulus funds to connect its elementary school to Petaluma's municipal water system, the government says the project “created/saved” about half of one full-time job.
But a crew of eight to nine people is assigned to the project five days a week for roughly three months, said Jason Griffin, project management manager for North Bay Construction, the lead contractor.
When averaged out over a year, the hours worked by the number of people working on the Wilmar Union project is at least equivalent to about 2.5 full-time employees.
“You go down the roadway and there are like eight guys out there working for at least a month and a half now,” said Eric Hoppes, superintendent of the 200-student school district.
He said that when the district applied for the grant, it used government guidelines — correlating monies spent with full-time employees — to estimate that about 12 jobs would be saved or created.
Even Griffin, who thinks the stimulus act is “smoke and mirrors,” believes the accounting for the project is off. “A job's a job, it's employing up to 10 people,” he said.
The Obama administration has been criticized for the quality and accuracy of data released through the recovery.gov Web site, and for claiming that 640,239 jobs were created or saved by stimulus funds.
In some of the more embarrassing revelations, jobs were reported to have been created in non-existent congressional districts. And some nonpartisan observers have estimated that the government overstated the number of jobs by more than 60,000.
A random sampling of the 228 loans, grants or contracts issued to companies, associations, governments and other institutions in Sonoma County seconds that question about the legitimacy of the jobs numbers.
As in the case of the Wilmar Union project, there seem to be frequent inconsistencies between what the federal government reports and what stimulus fund recipients report.
The problem lies in “the nature of the data — what is reported and how it's reported,” said Craig Jennings, who analyzes the Recovery Act for OMB Watch, a Washington nonprofit group that monitors federal government transparency issues.
“It certainly leaves questions unanswered,” said Jennings who said the law doesn't require the reporting of the type of information that could be used to accurately assess the impact: data about hours worked, for example, or a definition of what qualifies as a job — except that it must be what's termed a full-time equivalent.
As a result, cases crop up such as that found in connection with the government's account of jobs created by a $13.7 million grant for Sonoma County special education programs.
That money saved at least 43 special education jobs, and created about nine, said Deborah Malone-Larson, fiscal analyst for the county school system's special education services, Sonoma County Special Education Local Plan Area.
However, the government site reports that the funding produced or saved zero jobs.
“I don't know,” said Malone-Larsen, when asked about the discrepancy. She said she personally collected the jobs data from the county's 40 school districts. Further, she said, it may have been incomplete, because some districts hadn't yet decided how to spend the money.
On a contrary note, there is the case of Raydiance, a Petaluma-based laser technology company. According to federal authorities, the $100,000 grant to Raydiance through the National Science Foundation created or saved one job.
But Adam Tanous, the company's marketing director, said the money supports the company's engineering and research but “it's probably not accurate to say that the money saved a particular job for a specific person or created a particular job.”
Similar inconsistencies abound.
A private water company of 59 homeowners in a subdivision southwest of Santa Rosa received a $617,000 grant to upgrade its water-well system. The project created or saved no jobs, according to both the federal government and the state, through which the grant was made.
But already the homeowners have spent tens of thousands of dollars — money to be reimbursed through the grant — on civil engineers, legal fees, a biologist, an archaeologist and an appraiser, said Claire Green, secretary of the Yulupa Mutual Water Company.
“It didn't create a new job but it probably helped keep someone employed,” Greene said.
In other cases, it's not clear how many of the dollars reported to have been directed to Sonoma County will be spent locally.
The Wilmar Union School District's job will ultimately cost about $600,000 less than the $1.06 million the district estimated it would, said superintendent Hoppes. That surplus probably will go to a stimulus-funded water-related project elsewhere in the state, he said.
In Cloverdale, the police department received $59,000 to buy new equipment. Some of the money was used to purchase cars from a Healdsburg dealership. But some of the money — for mobile computer units — is going to Arizona, where the manufacturer is based, said Ann Turek, the department's technical services manager.
Such ambiguities mean that whether the stimulus has saved or created jobs or otherwise benefited the local economy is “very difficult to measure unless it's a direct link,” said Robert Eyler, director of the Center for Regional Economic Analysis at Sonoma State University.
Such links are easier to trace in areas such as education or construction, Eyler said.
“Had the money not been spent, somebody might have lost their job because the construction company would not have gained the revenue it needed to pay employees,” he said.
According to recovery.gov, a $374,000 award to San Francisco-based Yerba Buena Construction and Engineering will help fund the replacement of Coho salmon rearing tanks and the installation of an ozone filtration system at Warm Springs Dam.
It will also save or create zero jobs, the government says.
But Miguel Galarza, Yerba Buena's president, said the project will employ six company employees who live in Sonoma County, some of whom would otherwise not be working.
“If I don't have a job, they don't have a job. I don't keep people on the bench,” he said.
Asked about the discrepancies, White House spokesman Adam Abrams said: “Our focus is on creating jobs, not counting them.”
The Recovery Act has directly or indirectly created or saved more than 1 million jobs, said Abrams, compared to 10 months ago, when the economy was losing more than 600,000 jobs a month.
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