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HOME > ABOUT > PRESS > OUR SHARE OF STIMULUS: $91 MILLION
Article published - May 17, 2009
Credit: PRESS DEMOCRAT
Our share of stimulus: $91 million
By Guy Kovner
Southwest Community Health Center in Santa Rosa will hire more child health care providers.
Santa Rosa police officers will receive training; Cloverdale patrol cars will get new computers and video systems.
Rent subsidies will help economically challenged Sonoma County residents stay in their homes.
Public schools will get by far the biggest chunk, two-thirds of the $59 million in recently announced federal stimulus funds coming to Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties for education, health care, law enforcement, housing assistance and energy conservation.
That money comes on top of $32 million earmarked in March for road repairs and other transportation projects.
In all, the federal government is pumping at least $91million into the three-county region to stem the economy’s downward spiral.
“It’s greatly helpful, especially when we are able to pool it with other potential revenue sources,” said Nina Regor, Cloverdale’s city manager. “It’s hard for everyone. From a small-town perspective, it is hard because of the finite funding.”
The Southwest health center already has hired some of the 11 staffers it is adding with $344,767 in stimulus funds.
“We are putting that money to work immediately,” Naomi Fuchs, chief executive officer, said.
The money is the North Coast’s share of the $787 billion economic stimulus package approved by Congress in February and hailed as one of the largest economic rescue programs since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
“We have begun the essential work of keeping the American dream alive in our time," President Barack Obama said at the ceremonial signing of the bill in Denver after traveling 1,700 miles from the partisan skirmishes on Capitol Hill.
Billions were cut from the final measure, but Republicans still shunned it. In the final votes on Feb. 13 in the House and Senate, only three Republicans voted for it and only seven Democrats voted against it.
Critics said the bill was heavy on “pork barrel” spending for special interests; advocates asserted that federal spending in the midst of a deep recession is essential to stimulating the economy.
The controversy lingers.
Greg Jahn, chief financial officer at Exchange Bank, said the stimulus spending — along with government steps to stabilize the banking industry — are the right medicine for an economy caught in the worst downturn since the Great Depression.
“The more stimulus right now the better,” Jahn said, adding that hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent.
“The government is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at reinflating the economy, and that’s what you have to do,” he said.
Creating jobs is the key to success and doing it quickly is essential. “In my mind, that is the critical piece of this picture,” Jahn said.
But critics say too much federal money is being squandered, not enough jobs are being created and government will take too long to make it work.
Fred Levin, executive director of the Sonoma County Taxpayers Association, said he supports the stimulus package in principle but questions some of the particulars.
“Is the money getting into the economy?” Levin asked.
Instead of supporting government bureaucracies, stimulus funds should “pass through to private industry” to create jobs. “That’s what drives the economic engine of the country,” he said.
For example, Levin questioned whether training for Santa Rosa police officers bolsters the economy.
Ideally, stimulus money should be spent on capital projects, like roads and bridges which are “in dire need of upgrades,” he said.
Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, said she voted for the stimulus bill to rebuild public facilities, invest in alternative energy and create millions of new jobs.
“The Recovery Act wasn’t just about physical infrastructure projects, but human infrastructure as well,” Woolsey said. “It allowed us to keep teachers in the classrooms, and cops on the streets.”
Woolsey, who advocated a $1trillion stimulus program in December, said she will continue to work in Washington to “make sure that local governments have the resources that they need to not only get our economy running again, but care for the thousands of families in Marin and Sonoma that have been caught in the downturn.”
Only a fraction of the money has been released so far, and more will be distributed over the next few months, she said.
“The money is just now going out the door,” Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, said. But the spending has already preserved jobs and created new employment on the North Coast, he said.
The stimulus also appears to have “stopped the free-fall” of national job losses, which registered 539,000 in April, the lowest in six months, Thompson said.
More than $232 billion in individual tax cuts were included in the stimulus package, extending its reach to millions of Americans whose jobs are secure, he said.
Thompson said he hopes the economy will recover without additional stimulus funding.
Don Sebastiani, a conservative Republican and former state legislator from Sonoma Valley, said the stimulus program is misguided.
Instead of throwing money at the recession, government should let the marketplace right itself. “The economy is a pendulum,” he said. “It does swing on its own weight.”
For example, Sonoma County’s housing market is gaining strength because prices have fallen so low that people have started buying again, Sebastiani said.
Turning to history, Sebastiani rejected the argument that today’s stimulus program is validated by Roosevelt’s aggressive federal spending in the 1930s.
“What ended the Great Depression was not the New Deal, it was World War II,” Sebastiani said.
Thompson agreed that the economy “probably would” recover without government intervention, but the nation would endure a deep depression.
The current downturn, with national unemployment near 9percent, is not comparable to the Great Depression, when one-fourth of American workers were idle, Jahn said.
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