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Tuscumbia, Missouri (CNN) -- A town with a population of 218 sitting more than three hours from St. Louis would seem like an unlikely place for the nation's first stimulus project.
Yet the progress is apparent on a new $9 million bridge over the Osage River, and the span is scheduled to receive its first automobile and truck traffic sometime in midsummer. It's replacing a bridge built when Franklin Roosevelt was president on what the Missouri Department of Transportation says is the most direct link between Missouri's capitol, Jefferson City, and a large U.S. Army installation, Fort Leonard Wood.
The earth-moving equipment kicked in only minutes after President Obama signed the economic stimulus bill his administration pushed through Congress 11 months ago.
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Well according to my sources and a recent interview there have been MANY stimulus projects completed prior to this one including two in NJ that were personally overseen by him.
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State and federal officials said at that time that the bridge would create about 30 direct jobs and spin off another 220 "indirect" jobs
But the real issue is exactly how many jobs were created or saved. A year ago, the number was around 30. Today, according to Recovery.gov, the actual number is 24.69 -- a number calculated by the government based on worker time sheets.
But Rick Zimmerman, the area manager for contractor APAC-Kansas, told CNN that many of those jobs were not really "created," just transferred from another project to the Osage River bridge. Zimmerman put the number of "saved" jobs at about 10.
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I'll take the word of the guy in the trenches over the guy in the ivory tower anyday.