By Adam Allington, St. Louis Public Radio
St. Louis, MO – Officials from the Obama administration are criss-crossing the country this week to mark the one-year anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Among the $787 billion stimulus package, $35 million is being spent rehabilitating a World War II-era munitions factory into a new, energy efficient office building for the Social Security Administration in St. Louis.
Alderman Jeffrey Boyd says men working on this job right now are local St. Louis workers who might otherwise be unemployed.
"Any times you see contractors swinging hammers and tool guns you know jobs are being created and sustained," said Boyd. "From my understanding there are over 400 construction jobs that are being created for this job and the excited part for me is how many jobs will be permanent after the construction is complete."
The White House estimates that as many as 40,000 jobs have been saved or created in Missouri as a result of the stimulus package.
Stephen Leeds is a Senior Sustainability Officer for the General Services Administration. Leeds toured a stimulus-funded construction site on Goodfellow Boulevard.
But Leeds notes that the stimulus is doing much more than creating construction jobs.
"Some of those were tax cuts that went to 95 percent of American taxpayers," said Leeds, "there were a large number of dollars that went into extensions of unemployment benefits, extension of COBRA benefits."
Leeds claims that the stimulus package has bulled the American economy back from the brink and saved as many as 2 million jobs nationwide.