The economic stimulus plan will help create new Atlanta construction jobs.

The Recovery and Reinvestment Act recently passed by President Barack Obama could help create 10,000 construction jobs throughout Georgia. The state Department of Transportation has issued a list of 130 road projects that have been approved under federal stimulus money.

According to an article by WXIA, construction in cities and suburbs will begin within the next few months. The State of Georgia will receive 70 percent of the stimulus money, while the other 30 percent will go to local governments through 15 metropolitan planning organizations.

“We consciously decided to focus on smaller jobs,” GDOT spokesman David Spear said in the article. “And spread them out across the state so we could generate more jobs for more unemployed people, as opposed to two or three mega jobs in the metropolitan area that would benefit one sector of the economy but not spread the job creation out across the state.

“We specifically solicited requests from local governments,” Spear continued. “Things they wanted done in addition to the things we had on our own state system of roads.”

Fulton County will receive money for 34 projects, followed by DeKalb with 31, Cobb with 22, Clayton with 12 and Gwinnett with 10.

“We got (a total of) $932 million for highway and road projects,” Spear added. “So we’re still going to have on the order of $400 million to spend between ourselves and the metropolitan planninga organizations like the Atlanta Regional Commission. We have to spend it all over the next year that’s our intention.”

The added jobs should help Atlanta’s declining construction industry. The Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta area’s construction industry employed 113,200 workers during January, according to the United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is down from 115,900 workers during December 2008 and a 14.7 percent decrease from last year.

As a whole, Georgia’s construction industry employed 190,800 workers during January, the same as during December 2008 and an 11.6 percent decrease from last year.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 11:21 am and is filed under jobs, Construction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.