A drive on just about any major road in Berks County shows that some of the $787 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money is flowing here.

The federal government claims Berks has received $245.8 million in stimulus funds.

But, using a variety of local, state and federal sources, the Reading Eagle was able to identify only $136.9 million in spending.

And while some of the projects funded by stimulus funds are very much in evidence, the jobs that were supposed to come along with the money are not.

In fact, unemployment in Berks rose to 9.9 percent at the end of May, up 1.2 percentage points from May 2009, a few months after the stimulus money became available.

County officials said road and bridge improvements are nice for the community, but what Berks really needs is to get people working.

"The commitment of the (Obama) administration was that this was going to lower unemployment," county Commissioner Christian Y. Leinbach said. "That hasn't happened."

Thomas C. McKeon, executive director of the Berks County Industrial Development Authority, said some businesses have added jobs here and there, but the jobs created for the road projects are likely to be temporary.

"It's not significant," he said. "It's doesn't make a dent in the unemployment rate or the number of jobs we have available for people."

Commissioner Mark C. Scott said he believes the stimulus isn't working because the motivation behind it was political, and the process by which government makes decisions is slow.

A business makes decisions in a few weeks, but government takes much longer because of rules and regulations intended to prevent public corruption, he explained.

"Government spending decisions, in many cases, are political and intuitive as opposed to quantitative and analytical," Scott said. "It's inherently inefficient and tends to be slower.

"It's a suboptimal way of spending scarce resources."

Cutting taxes would have been a better way to put money in the pockets of businesses, Scott said.

Those businesses would return the money to the economy and do it more quickly, he said.

"The turnover of money is slower with government, so the recovery is slower," Scott said.

Some benefits

Still, the stimulus money is doing good things for the community, county Community Development Director Kenneth L. Pick said.

The money is being used to prevent homelessness and for a community re-entry center designed to help prison inmates return to the community, he said.

It's also helping the county pay for improvements that in turn will save taxpayer dollars on energy costs in the long run, Pick said.

A $32.5 million grant to East Penn Manufacturing Co. Inc. in Lyons will have a positive impact on the battery industry and energy conservation, McKeon said.

Alan D. Piper, county transportation planner, said some of the $4.3 million BARTA received will buy four new buses and allow expansion of routes that help people get to their jobs.

Few of these good things - particularly the road and transit projects - would have happened without the stimulus money, Piper said.

"While the road projects may not have increased employment, they kept the people who already had jobs working," he said. "They wouldn't have had those jobs if the funding hadn't been made available.

"None of these projects would have gotten done without the stimulus dollars. The funding wasn't there for them. Every one is a needed project."

By Mary E. Young
Monday, July 26, 2010
URL http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=236963