ELKHART — Just as it has played a prominent role in the story of the Great Recession, Elkhart has been put in the spotlight again in a new book about the federal stimulus program.

The just-published book, “Money Well Spent?,” was written by Michael Grabell, a reporter with ProPublica, and examines what happened once the Obama administration rolled out the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. To tell the story, Grabell focused on three communities, Fremont, Calif., Aiken, S.C. and the City with a Heart.

Elkhart was selected for special attention because it was the first community President Barack Obama visited outside of the Washington and the unemployment rate rose the fastest in the country, ballooning to 20 percent.

The sheer size of the $787 billion stimulus spending program attracted Grabell’s attention. Adjusted for inflation, the package was nearly five times more expensive than the Works Progress Administration and bigger than the Louisiana Purchase, the Manhattan Project, the moon race, and the Marshall Plan.

“(What) was really interesting to me is that, at the time, it felt like this was going to be a second New Deal, the New Deal of our generation,” Grabell said, referring to the federal program launched to ease the hardships of the Great Depression. “There was a lot of excitement about it so I wanted to go out around the country and see how the money was spent and talk to people about whether they were affected or not affected.”

SKEPTICISM AND THE STIMULUS

One of the people he talked with was Wakarusa resident Ed Neufeldt. Having lost his job when the former Monaco Coach factory closed on Nelson’s Parkway, he gained international fame when he introduced Obama in February 2009.

Grabell described Neufeldt as “exactly the type of worker” the president discussed in his book, “The Audacity of Hope.” These employees would stay at the same company for 30 years and, even without a college degree, be able to make a living. Now, Neufeldt is among the 50- and 60-year-olds who got laid off in the recession and wonder if they will ever find a good job again?

When he first spoke with Neufeldt in March 2009, Grabell found him to be “somewhat skeptical” that the stimulus would help him and his buddies return to work. A key component of the stimulus was “shovel-ready” construction projects and, Neufeldt wondered, what type of jobs would be available for people who had built recreational vehicles.

“So it was interesting to see his evolution,” Grabell said of Neufeldt, “in the way he was thinking about the stimulus, getting excited about the electric car business and then not having it pan out and having to work two, sometimes three jobs to make ends meet and make less than what he was making before.”

JEWELER SIGN CHARTS RECOVERY

Elkhart is contrasted in the book against the other two communities.

Grabell turned his focus to Aiken because it had the largest contract from the stimulus program, totaling $1.6 billion, for cleaning up the Savannah River nuclear site, a relic from the Cold War. Also, nestled in South Carolina, Aiken County is “solidly conservative,” he said, and voted for Obama’s opponent, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., during the 2008 presidential election.

Fremont popped onto Grabell’s radar when the now-bankrupt solar panel manufacturer Solyndra received the first loan guarantee for $500 million. In addition, the community was home to NUMMI automobile plant, the joint venture between General Motors and Toyota, which closed its doors in 2010.

Grabell came to Elkhart for one week in 2009, 2010 and 2011, charting the community’s recovery by the sign on a downtown jewelry store. On his first trip through Elkhart, he noticed Hopman Jewelers was advertising that it was buying old jewelry.

When he returned a year later, he found indications the recession had deepened in that the name of the store had been changed to The Treasure Chest and the sign out front advertised, “Now buying old jewelry, coins and dental gold.”

However, in 2011, the Hopman Jewelers had returned and the sign was more typical promoting itself as a diamond engagement ring center.

“And that to me, was a sign of things getting back to normal,” Grabell said. “A jewelry store is a place where people are buying things now rather than a place where people are trying to sell things and get a little bit of cash.”

DEEP SCARS

Through his research, Grabell highlighted the successes and failures of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The program is estimated to have created and saved 2 million to 3 million jobs nationally and, economists believe, it prevented the U.S. unemployment rate from reaching 12 percent. However, it did not induce a strong, sustainable recovery and the programs awarded money were too small, understaffed or inefficient to receive and spend the funds quickly and effectively.

How history will judge the stimulus depends on the performance of the second part of the package, the reinvestment, Grabell said. The idea was the program would provide a down payment on long-term investments like clean energy, high-speed rail, broadband and electronic medical records.

“So if these things come to be, where we have a thriving electric car and battery industry in the U.S. where we make the change to solar panels and wind farms, (then) the people will look back and say the stimulus is where it started,” he said.

Elkhart recovered, in part, because consumers started buying RVs again and, as Grabell pointed out, that could have been the result of the stimulus with people feeling confident enough to spend. Specifically, the stimulus helped in Elkhart with the low-interest bonds used to refurbish the Lerner Theatre, and the improvements along U.S. 33 and the repaving of the airport runway.

Still, the scars of the Great Recession are deep and Grabell thinks it will be long time before the country fully recovers. To illustrate his view, he goes back to Neufeldt and the three “Green Jobs of America” bracelets he wears. The Wakarusa resident plans to take them off as the U.S., Indiana and Elkhart all fall to 5 percent unemployment.

“He still has them on and they’ve been getting more faded as time goes on,” Grabell said. “And he’s probably going to be wearing them for several more years.”

About ProPublica

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit, online news organization that focuses on investigative journalism. Its mission is to expose the abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business and other institutions.

From its inception in 2007, ProPublica has relied on funding from the Sandler Foundation and philanthropic contributions from individual donors. In 2011, it began accepting advertising although it remains committed to keeping philanthropy is primary source of income.

Headquartered in Manhattan, ProPublica has a newsroom of 34 journalists. It received a Pulitzer Price for Investigative Reporting in 2010 and a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2011.

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