Stimulus plan includes billions for new construction and jobs

January 27 2009

By BILLY HOUSE and AMY DOMINELLO

Media General News ServiceWASHINGTON -- The ambitious $825 billion economic stimulus plan the House will vote on Wednesday blends new spending on everything from construction projects to unemployment aid with tax cuts for both individuals and businesses.

Democrats who control Congress contend the bill will create or save up to 4 million jobs, provide immediate tax breaks for 95 percent of workers and jumpstart the economy.

Many congressional Republicans oppose the recovery package, however, saying it needs more tax cuts and less spending. Overall, the plan contains about $275 billion in tax cuts, about one third of the overall package.

President Barack Obama, after meeting Tuesday with House Republicans on Capitol Hill, said “there are some legitimate philosophical differences.” But he said his main message to the Republicans was that “statistics every day underscore the urgency of the economic situation” and “the American people expect action.”

Here’s a glimpse of some of the key items in the House bill, according to a synopsis provided Tuesday by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to House members. The Senate has its own stimulus plan that is expected to come up for a vote early next month.

Unemployed workers
-- Helps an estimated 8.5 million people keep health care coverage after job losses.
-- Provides a 65 percent subsidy for COBRA health benefit premiums for up to 12 months for people who involuntarily lose their jobs between Sept. 1, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2009. COBRA currently provides temporary coverage but is expensive. A typical family premium costs over $1,000 a month.
-- Extends through December 2009 unemployment benefits that are scheduled to phase out at the end of March for 3.5 million unemployed workers.
-- Increases unemployment benefits by $25 a week for 20 million unemployed workers.
-- Increases food stamp benefits by more than13 percent.
-- Increases funding by more than $1 billion for other food assistance, such as afterschool meals, food for the homeless and hungry and Meals on Wheels.
-- Provides more than $4.1 billion for job training and related programs.

Infrastructure
-- Creates an estimated 1.5 million jobs, about half the jobs the plan proposes.
-- Rebuilds roads, bridges and public buildings as well as cleans up the environment.
-- States have told Congress they have 5,100 projects – costing $64 billion – that could be under contract within 180 days. States must designate half the highway and transit money for projects within six months or the Department of Transportation can reclaim the funds.
-- Sets aside $10 billion to build mass transit and rail
-- Upgrades federal buildings and makes them energy efficient, saving taxpayers $2 billion a year.
-- Modernizes water systems and strengthens environmental cleanup.

Health care
-- Saves or creates an estimated 250,000 jobs in health care and education.
-- Provides an estimated $87 billion in additional federal matching funds to help states maintain their Medicaid programs in the face of massive state budget shortfalls, over a two-year period. (Medicaid is the health insurance program that serves low-income families and individuals, as well as people with disabilities, pregnant women and those in nursing homes.)
-- Includes $600 million for the training of doctors, dentists and nurses.
-- Provides $3 billion for a new prevention and wellness fund.
-- Includes $1.5 billion for community health centers.

Energy
-- Creates more than 500,000 energy-related jobs.
-- Includes $500 million to train workers for green-collar jobs.
-- Provides $11 billion to improve electricity systems’ efficiency and reliability through a “Smart Grid Investment Program.”
-- Creates temporary loan guarantees for up to $80 billion for renewable energy power generation and electric transmission projects.
-- Encourages states to update energy-efficient building codes and regulatory policies and provides new modernization repair programs for schools and colleges.
-- Provides consumer rebates to buy energy-efficient appliances.
-- Expands tax credits through 2010 for purchases such as new furnaces, energy-efficient windows, doors and insulation.
-- Expands aid per household for more than 1 million modest-income families who improve energy efficiency in their homes through weatherization.

Scientific research and space
-- Creates more than 949,000 jobs through $40 million in investments in IT network infrastructure.
-- Provides $10 billion for scientific research, including investments at the National Science Foundation. That would include supporting 3,000 new NSF research awards and immediately put to work 12,750 senior scientists, as well as undergraduate- graduate- and post-graduate level researchers.
-- Provides $600 million to National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), including $400 million to put more scientists to work on climate change research.
-- Includes $400 million for the construction and development of major research facilities that perform “cutting-edge” research.
-- Includes $2 billion for the National Institutes of Health, including $1.5 billion for expanding biomedical research.
-- Provides $6 billion for extending broadband and wireless services to underserved communities.

Education
-- Saves or creates an estimated 250,000 jobs in education and health care.
-- Provides $20 billion to modernize schools and colleges nationwide.
-- Increases tax credits, grants, work-study programs and loans for students.
-- Provides Head Start $2.1 billion in additional funding.
-- Includes $2 billion in grants for childcare for low-income working families.
-- Establishes a fund to prevent education cuts and layoffs in states.

Tax credits and cuts for individuals
-- The proposal claims 95 percent of workers would receive a refundable tax credit of $500 per worker or $1,000 per couple filing jointly. The credit phases out at $100,000 for single filers and $200,000 for couples filing jointly.
-- Expands the child tax credit and the earned-income tax credit.
-- Enhances the current $7,500 credit for first-time homebuyers by removing the repayment requirement.

Tax incentives for businesses
-- Allows businesses to write off 90 percent of losses incurred in 2008 and 2009 against taxes assessed over the past five years. Businesses that receive bailout funds would be ineligible.
-- Helps businesses recover costs of new capital investments.
-- Doubles the amount small businesses can write off for capital investments and for purchase of new equipment in 2009.

Tax incentives for energy efficiency
-- Extends and expands tax credits for energy-efficient home improvements
.-- Extends tax credits for producers of alternative-energy sources.
-- Creates a tax credit for alternative-energy research and development.
-- Increases incentives to install alternative fuel pumps.

Contact Billy House at 202-662-7673 or bhouse@tampatrib.com
Contact Amy Dominello at 202-662-7671 or adominello@mediageneral.com
Read the bill online.
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:h1ih.txt.pdf

http://www.mgwashington.com/index.php/news/article/stimulus-plan-includes-billions-for-new-construction-jobs-and-tax-cuts/2461/

MnDOT improves minority hiring record

The Minnesota Department of Transportation says so-called Disadvantaged Business Enterprises - women and minority-owned firms - did bridge work totaling fourteen percent of the price tag. MnDOT's goal was 10 percent. (MPR Photo/Dan Olson)

View full slideshow (4 total images)
MnDOT improves minority hiring record
by Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio
December 8, 2008


Women and minority owned companies had a bigger than expected pay day from the 35W bridge project.

St. Paul, Minn. — The Minnesota Department of Transportation says the hiring of so-called Disadvantaged Business Enterprises - women and minority owned firms - exceeded the agency's goal.

This is in sharp contrast to MnDOT's performance from years past when hiring fell far short of goals.

Hope Jensen, MnDOT's director of the office of Civil Rights said the bridge price tag is $233 million, and nearly $33 million of bridge construction money went to subcontracting companies owned by women and minorities.

Jensen said the value of the contracts exceeds the agency's goal.

Civil engineer Susan Rani
"We had a 10 percent goal. We are currently coming in at about 14 percent," she said.
Federal dollars accounted for a large portion of the bridge funding. Federal rules require that state agencies and the prime contractors they hire make a good faith effort to direct up to 10 percent of federal dollars to women and minority owned businesses or DBE's.

Jensen said Flatiron Manson, the prime bridge contractor, hired a total of 20 DBE's. Contracts ranged from a few thousand dollars for hauling services to $11 million for steel erection among other work performed.

"Everything from a janitorial contractor to excavating. We had quite a few design folks that did quite a bit of work over several million dollars worth of work," she said.

Minneapolis-based Rani Engineering did surveying and civil engineering design work worth $750,000. Founder and president Susan Rani said she and the other women and minority owned firms performed on a par with any other contractor on the bridge project.

Working on the bridge
"I think we've been given a chance to show that if a contractor can value the DBE's experience. . . We can add value to the final product and to the taxpayers of Minnesota," she says.

Rani is Asian American. She received a civil engineering degree from the University of Minnesota. Rani said she put herself through college on a work study program which included selling popcorn at Gopher football games at the old Memorial Stadium.

Rani said she started her company 15 years ago with start-up money raised by maxing out two personal credit cards.

Rani Engineering employs 17, and Susan Rani said about 2/3 of their work is based on their certification as a Disadvantaged Business Enterprise.

Rani said she still meets people who assume she's in business because she gets preferential treatment as a woman and a minority business owner rather than as a competitive bidder.

Trusses
"'Oh you guys must be getting all these contracts because you're female and minority,' to which I told him that if we were that lucky, shouldn't there be more firms out there?" she said.
Lawsuits by white business owners have forced the federal and state governments to rewrite DBE rules.

The new rules do not set a quota or promise that women and minority owned companies will get a slice of federal contracting dollars.

MnDOT's office of Civil Rights director Hope Jensen said there are examples of prime contractors being given additional leeway if they can't find qualified women and minority owned firms.

"If the price is not competitive, if they don't have the equipment or if they don't have the capacity then we will look at that and see if we believe it was a legitimate and reasonable reason," she says.

MnDOT working with the 35W bridge project's prime contractor, Flatiron Manson, also points to partial success in another hiring category.

MnDOT hiring specialist Ashanti Payne said the goal was to have 11 percent of the bridge construction workers be people of color and six percent would be women.

"Flatiron achieved 14.7 percent minority employment...and they were about 3.4 percent for women employment," he said.

The numbers are welcome news for MnDOT. On several high profile projects in recent years, including the rebuilding of a stretch of 494 and construction of the Hiawatha light rail line, the agency fell well below women and minority hiring goals.

A study by outside consultants three years ago showed Minnesota had enough qualified women and people of color for the agency to do much better.

As a result MnDot for 2009 has set a higher goal. The agency will encourage contractors to direct up to 15 percent of the value of contracts awarded to them to businesses owned by women and minorities.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/12/03/mndot_minority_contractors/

Hard Hatted Women hopes to snag jobs from Obama construction program

Hard Hatted Women hopes to snag jobs from Obama construction program
by Alison Grant/Plain Dealer Reporter
Saturday December 06, 2008, 4:03 PM

John Kuntz/The Plain Dealer

Carpenter Rocky Hwasta, president of Allied Cleveland Tradeswomen, works Friday at the construction site of the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Justice Center in Cleveland.The poor economy and a loss of private donations are battering Hard Hatted Women, an organization that promotes women in high-wage, blue-collar careers.

The group is bracing to lose as much as $225,000 in funding next year, chopping 40 percent off its 2008 budget of $550,000. It's cutting employees and has no money for pre-apprenticeship training.


But Hard Hatted Women is hardly laying down the tool belt.


The Cleveland organization is expanding a pilot project to consult on diversity and sexual-harassment at construction sites. A partnership with the Ohio Department of Transportation helps place skilled tradeswomen in highway construction jobs. And the non-profit group has snagged a coveted federal grant.


Now it's watching for an even bigger prize to emerge -- a New Deal-style, explosion of public construction work proposed by President-elect Barack Obama.


"That's where we want to connect the dots," Executive Director Terri Burgess Sandu said. "How do we get women and girls into those jobs?"


Obama has outlined a plan to rebuild roads and bridges and modernize schools while developing alternative energy sources and more efficient cars. The economic recovery plan aims to create 2.5 million jobs by January 2011.


It's important for women to get a foothold in such federal enterprises from the outset, Sandu said. When construction gets an infusion of public dollars, the mechanism for women and minorities to get in on the action has to be in place at the beginning -- when terms of the work are nailed down, studies show.


Elaine Bernard, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, said any massive undertaking will face the stubborn question of how many women are in the pipeline. Traditionally, it has been few. Women represent about 3 percent of the workers on construction sites nationwide.


"Women in the trades will be hired like anybody else," Bernard said. "The issue is who's coming into the skilled trades?"


Sandu said Hard Hatted Women is slashing expenses so it can survive and continue helping women into non-traditional occupations.


It's laying off three of five staff members and moved out of a restored mansion on Superior Avenue to plainer digs a mile away in the one-time hall of Laborers Local 860 on Prospect Avenue. The move will save about $80,000 in rent over five years.


The budget cuts are meant to make the group viable without foundation support, even though Sandu will submit grant proposals as usual.


"It's not a desperate plea, 'Please give us money or we'll close,' " she said. "We really want to be able to say that we're on ethical and fiscally responsible ground and anything that our foundation partners can give will allow us to build more."


Hard Hatted Women had several tumultuous years after founding Director Kathy Augustine was ousted amid claims that the group's finances were in disarray and it was losing focus as a champion of tradeswomen.


The group on its Web site describes the discord as the growing pains of a grassroots collective evolving into a more mainstream, professional organization.


Hard Hatted Women has hung onto outside support even as other donors have faded away.
In 2007, it was one of three groups nationwide to win a two-year Department of Labor grant -- $300,000 -- for a "women in non-traditional occupations" program.


This year, it was one of 21 new recipients of United Way funding in Greater Cleveland. It was awarded $60,000 annually for three years to support training of low-income women.


"They have encountered some bumps along the way," said United Way Executive Vice President Bill Plato. "But they have a generally good track record."


http://www.cleveland.com/news/index.ssf/2008/12/hard_hatted_women_hopes_to_sna.html