The federal stimulus bill funded only 4,582 full-time jobs in New Mexico during the last quarter of 2009. Those jobs come at the cost of $484,505 each. And there were fewer jobs credited to the federal stimulus than during the previous quarter, indicating no surge in employment from the stimulus spending.

The latest report on the stimulus impact was released January 30, 2010, by Recovery.gov, the website established by the Obama Administration to track spending and job results from the $787 billion appropriated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The website is administered by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. During the same week, the New Mexico Office of Recovery and Reinvestment released its own results for money channeled through government entities in the state. These latest reports focus on spending and jobs during the last quarter of 2009.

According to the recovery.gov data, $2.22 billion has been awarded to state and local government entities and private corporations in New Mexico. 4,581.80 jobs were funded during the latest quarter with federal stimulus funds. Recovery.gov is no longer attempting to estimate jobs created or saved with federal stimulus dollars. Now recipients report simply any job funded in whole or part with stimulus money.

In the previous quarter, ending September 30, 2009, recovery.gov reported 5,242.94 jobs created or saved in New Mexico from awards totaling $1.645 billion. As we reported, those jobs came at the cost of $314,000 each.

With the new data, it appears that the number of jobs credited to the stimulus funding in New Mexico has dropped by 661.14 jobs, or a decline of almost 13%. And the cost of those jobs has jumped 54% to $484,505 each.

The decline, as Andy Lenderman, the public information officer for the New Mexico Office of Renivestment and Recovery explained, may be due to the change in the way jobs are reported. However, it occurs to us that since recipients are no longer required to determine whether the federal stimulus has saved or created a job, but simply whether it is funding all or part of a job, more rather than fewer jobs would seem to be covered under the new reporting formula. For instance, even a raise for an existing job that was funded with stimulus money would count as part of a job funded. The next reporting period will provide jobs numbers calculated under identical formulations for a more direct comparison of the stimulus’ economic impact over time.

Update Lenderman thoughtfully suggested one other reason the September report claimed higher job numbers than the latest report. The September report, he pointed out, included all jobs “saved or created” since passage of ARRA in February 2009. Therefore, it covered a longer reporting period than the three-month quarter covered in the December 2009 report. That made sense until I remembered this morning that we had written a report about the job numbers tallied at recovery.gov before the September report. On October 21, 2009, we wrote that recovery.gov had reported only 419.02 jobs “created or saved.” Those numbers covered the period from passage of ARRA up to the start of the second quarter of 2009. The report for the second quarter was released October 30,2009. It was that quarterly report that claimed 5,242.94 jobs “created or saved.” So the drop in jobs credited to the stimulus from third quarter in 2009 to the fourth quarter of 2009 cannot be explained away so easily.

Both the state and federal websites have been upgraded. Our analysis thus far has found no repetition of ludicrous data errors in the federal site such as reporting tens of millions of dollars being awarded in nonexistent congressional districts or phantom zip codes. We will provide a follow-up report on the improvements to both sites and further analysis of the data for spending and economic impact in New Mexico.