The creation of jobs is a main part of the stimulus legislation. Seeing how many jobs were created and maintained in local areas is key to evaluating the effectiveness of funds and the taxpayer investment. Tom Cusak from Oregon Housing blog, decided to see what his local community looked like after the funds were released and since the Recovery Web site doesn’t let you find the answers in one easy place, he created his own excel spreadsheet with the information.

By now most have seen the headlines saying that Recovery Act funding recipients (Grants, Loans, or Contracts) have reported creating or saving 640,000+ jobs by September 30th. Various news accounts have reported some state or recipient specific jobs data, but getting a comprehensive picture by locality, recipient, or by program has not been possible.

That just changed.

Using data from Recovery.gov I created an Excel workbook that allows users to explore down to the zip code level, 156,000 recipient records that provide the details that add up to the 640,000+ jobs, or the 1,900+ Oregon records that contain the details that add up to 9,600 Recovery Act funded jobs.

This Excel 2007 workbook contains ALL Recovery jobs (and spending) data for the US, for Oregon, and for HUD and includes jobs as reported by recipients of Recovery Act grants, AND loans, AND contracts.

Using filters or pivot tables, the workbook will help answer many questions down to the zip code, city, and state level (inexplicably, a county level data field is not included in the Recovery Act funding data).

1. How much money are recipients reporting they have spent? 2. How many and what specific kinds of jobs are recipients reporting they have created? 3. How many jobs are being created by HUD Recovery Act funding, and by which programs?

Read the rest here.