Lardaro

WASHINGTON — At Rhode Island’s hub of traditional public works spending, state Transportation Director Michael P. Lewis has a list of projects ready for bids — from bike paths, to long-running jobs on Route 95 to the $2.4-million renovation of the Wyoming bridges over the Wood River.

In Cumberland, School Supt. Donna Morelle is all set to plug projects into her town’s share of school construction money in the $819-billion bill that Congress passed last Wednesday to jump-start the economy.

The town’s special education account is slated for an injection of $641,900 — better than 58 percent of this year’s entire budget for the nearly 800 disabled students in Cumberland’s school population of 5,000. Cumberland will be hard-pressed to spend that kind of money efficiently, Morelle said, unless the school system is allowed to spend a lot of it on children who are not eligible for special education.

At the Rhode Island Quality Institute, which is attempting to create a system of computerized health records for doctors, patients and medical facilities, Laura Adams and her staff of six are under the gun to enroll 20,000 Warwick residents for a partial launch of their electronic network this summer.

“I’d like to know yesterday” how the stimulus program will administer billions of dollars of grants for such medical technology, Adams said. “I could put 50 people to work” on signing up patients for her institute’s new system.

Such are the practical challenges to state and local officials as President Obama and Congress strive with uncommon speed to enact an emergency spending bill unlike any in modern memory.

The measure, widely referred to as an economic stimulus bill, may better be viewed, in the words of Bryant University economist Edinaldo Tebaldi, as a “hodgepodge” of spending and tax-cutting initiatives to be launched through dozens of well-worn federal pipelines — and a few that don’t yet exist.

Mr. Obama and his congressional allies predict the bill will put at least 3 million Americans to work and will pump three-quarters of the cash into the economy by the end of next year. But those who envision battalions of laborers with picks and shovels will be surprised. Less than $60 billion of the money will go to such traditional public works — in some ways the simplest raw spending programs to execute because they rely on time-tested bureaucratic machinery.

Some local projects, from a middle-school fire alarm system in Cumberland to the twin bridge repairs in Hopkinton, have been long in the works. Transportation director Lewis said state planners have done enough planning to cope with a stimulus bonus that might equal a full year’s spending under normal circumstances.

But even supporters of the bill are less than certain about whether the money will penetrate markets and create jobs quickly enough to make a difference before the economy begins to cycle out of the recession.

The nonpartisan Congessional Budget Office got some attention last week when it published an estimate more pessimistic than Mr. Obama’s prediction that 75 percent of the package would be spent by the end of next year. CBO says perhaps only 64 percent would be spent by then.

Bryant’s Tebaldi says he’s skeptical of pump-priming but not opposed to it. And he says people should be prepared to see very little boost from the stimulus bill until the third or fourth quarters of this year.

Leonard P. Lardaro, an economist at the University of Rhode Island, has more confidence in the system’s ability to absorb money and put people to work quickly, but he said that issue might be less important than the need for government to build public confidence by mounting a big federal intervention with some urgency.

As Rep. James R. Langevin put it while the House prepared to vote last week, “doing nothing” would be a worse course of action

Lardaro defends the fact that the bill is unconventional. It would spend a lot less on traditional public works than it would put into programs for the poor, the unemployed and into state budgets.

“These may not be stimulus funds in the strict sense,” Lardaro said, but they convey the sense that government is attacking the crisis head on.

To Tebaldi, the separate streams of money expanding unemployment insurance, food stamps and home heating aid for the poor are necessary parts of the stimulus blend. “You cannot let people suffer if it can be avoided,” he said.

And according to supporters of the bill and observers of the debate, much of that nontraditional spending can help the economy by shoring up public employment at the state and local level. The former dean of URI’s business school, Edward M. Mazze, said the bill’s emphasis on pouring money into Medicaid (the federal-state health-care program for the poor), job training programs and education subsidies will all help to stave off layoffs in state, county and municipal governments around the country.

Sen. Jack Reed also supports the heavy spending on Medicaid and other health-care programs. The health-care industry, he notes, is Rhode Island’s fastest-growing employer.

But William Poole, a onetime Brown economist and member of President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors, warned that some kinds of spending in the bill may actually clash with the goal of putting Americans to work.

A new program to extend Medicaid to the unemployed at all income levels might have the perverse incentive of prompting people to pass up job opportunities that do not carry health insurance, Poole said.

Such programs could thus contribute to what he described as a substantial popular resentment of spending that does not clearly put people back in the work force, Poole said, echoing one line of attack on the bill last week by Republicans — who did not provide a single vote for the House stimulus package.

Poole and others worry, moreover, about the bill’s subsidies for environmental and energy-saving projects, as well as the electronic networks for health-care records.

All such programs could be essential parts of the future economy, Poole argued, but they should not be parts of an emergency job-creation bill.

Democrats disagree, of course, and some, including Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy fear that the stimulus bill — far from being too expansive — is too timid.

“We need a bolder vision,” said Kennedy.

He argued that political support for Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress will never be higher. So they should push for a lot more spending on bricks and mortar programs now, Kennedy said, and for innovative environmental, energy savings and medical technology programs later.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com