SACRAMENTO — Two years ago, California voters approved the sale of nearly $43 billion in state bonds for housing, transportation, education and water projects. Today, the borrowing is beginning to pay off, one job at a time.
A pot of bond money is now delivering road jobs in Santee in San Diego County, in Lincoln in the Sierra foothills and in Marysville in the Sacramento Valley. Hundreds more projects are in the works in Southern California now that the governor and the Legislature have agreed on a state budget, almost three months after the constitutional deadline.
These bonds -- OKd by voters in November 2006 -- are part of what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger considers a state economic stimulus program. The governor said he was working to shove billions of dollars "out the door as quickly as possible" to stimulate California's sputtering economy by building highways, housing, schools and flood control levees.
The spending -- about half a billion dollars in contracts so far -- is just starting to roll through the economy, and the rest of the $43 billion is expected to start soon now that the budget impasse is over.
At least $9 billion more in borrowed money could go into the construction pipeline if voters in November approve a bond to build a bullet train system between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
In his annual State of the State speech in January, Schwarzenegger pledged to put Californians back to work in the spirit of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Depression-era Works Progress Administration.
The works administration "built 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges and 125,000 buildings. All of those things we are still enjoying today," the governor said. "So we must act boldly on behalf of the people and the state."
Schwarzenegger's program may be only a fraction of the size of the works administration, which gave jobs to 8.5 million people in 1934, but it could be a big help to a state that's been hit by a downturn and an unemployment rate that reached a 12-year high in July, economists say.
The money is crucial for the Golden State's construction industry, which has lost 83,000 jobs, almost 10% of its workforce, in the last year after being rocked by a housing bust and mortgage credit crunch.
Without this money, "the construction industry would be out of business," said Rich Gates, president and general partner of Silva Gates Construction in Dublin, Calif. "This is kind of the drip of the IV to keep us going."
