Federal stimulus funds 2,000 jobs for San Franciscans

Last year, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom launched a job-creation program using $32 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. “Jobs Now” offers private companies, non-profits, and city agencies a unique opportunity: hire a new employee, and the city will reimburse you for their wages through September.

Now, Mayor Newsom is trying to expand the program and push it as a model for other job-strapped cities. KALW’s Rina Palta reports.  

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RINA PALTA: In 2009, Mili Mora started a one-man reprographic print shop upstairs from an ice company in the Bayview district. He produces and binds things like blueprints and signs for construction firms, using a gigantic printer.

MILI MORA: This is my printer, which I got myself soon after I started. Banks actually refused to give me money because they have their own guidelines. They said I have to be in business for two years to give me money to get a printer. I had to go to a leasing company and the leasing company said I have no credit.

Mora ended up renting his machine from a competitor for way too much money, a concession to the fact that building a business from scratch in the middle of a recession can be an exercise in jumping hurdles. Which is why Mora says he was surprised when he found out about San Francisco’s Jobs Now program.  

MORA: I was surprised. I was really surprised that the city was doing this. It’s a great thing. It’s one of the most noble things that I have come across in my entire life.  

In what he calls a relatively simple maneuver, Mora filled out a three-page application and doubled his workforce. In San Francisco, hundreds of businesses have similarly taken advantage of the Jobs Now Program. That’s translated to over 1,800 actual jobs, at least until the program expires in September.

The only requirements? That the business be in good standing with the tax board, and that the employee be a San Francisco resident, a parent who meets certain income restrictions, and is eligible to work in the United States. To Mora’s new employee, Louis Ziegler, the process was easy after 8 months of hunting for a job.  

LOUIS ZIEGLER: Oh man, words can’t explain the stress that you feel every day by just clicking the mouse, by sending your resume hundreds and hundreds of times and after that, just going back and check your email inbox to ultimately find that you have no responses.  

Now Ziegler is helping Mora grow his company by taking on smaller assignments, printing business cards and fliers.

Each business that participates in the program does something different with it. Some have used Jobs Now as an internship program, training workers in a new field. Others have used it to fill positions they previously had to close out. The flexibility of the Jobs Now program has made it accessible to a wide array of businesses. Mora thinks the strategy is working.  

MORA: The small business is the key to economic recovery because if you get one million small businesses, that one million will be employing one million people.

Mora says he’ll keep his new employee, even after the city stops paying his wages, but it’s hard to say how many companies will be able to do the same. Which has led critics of the program to wonder if Jobs Now lacks a larger vision of what industries we should be spending public money on to help San Francisco’s economy in the long run.

At an event celebrating the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act with Bay Area politicians, I had a chance to speak with Mayor Gavin Newsom about his local jobs program. I started by asking what sorts of companies he intended the program for.   

MAYOR GAVIN NEWSOM: Small business, medium sized businesses, non-profits have been the lions share beneficiaries of this program. Over 800 non-profits and city departments have participated in creating these jobs for over 1,854 people. And every single day, that number grows and increases.

We’ve had people who’ve been unemployed. One person I met the other day was unemployed for four years until this opportunity fell in his lap and he’s doing energy efficiency audits through the department of environment. And he’s leveraging other portions of the federal stimulus to draw down those monies to retrofit people’s homes and businesses, saving them thousands of dollars. This is a program that works.

It’s a program that’s, though, due to expire September 30th, and we’re doing everything in our power -- and I think the Speaker mentioned some of the work we’re doing in Congress -- to try to get it extended.  

PALTA: So do businesses that are involved have to submit any sort of long-term sustainability plan or are you not looking for that?  

NEWSOM: Well, we are looking for that, but we can’t force a business to commit to something they’re not sure they can fulfill. We’re hoping this will be a bridge as the economy turns around, that they can continue to employ these individuals. That said, the reason we want it extended beyond September 30th is in California particularly, our home state, unemployment remains high and by no means have we crossed that bridge. And so getting it extended will allow us a little more time for businesses to ramp up and feel more confident so that they can get liquidity and credit back so that they can continue to make investments and maintain these jobs in the long-run.

But without this, I assure you, unemployment in San Francisco would go up overnight by roughly half a percent. The overall unemployment rate in the city includes some 41,000 people. Roughly 2,000 people have been employed in this city. You’ll see those numbers grow exponentially and I have made an internal estimate that a full one percent of our unemployment rate at the end of this program will be attributable to this one federal component.

And that’s not insignificant. When you can move an entire percentage point of your unemployment rate because of a federal stimulus program, that’s a program that works.  

PALTA: And I guess the one criticism I’ve heard of this program is that it’s a bit scattershot and that the city could be using the money to sort of invest in industries that the city wants to see grow. Is it possible that a corner store that just primarily deals in liquor and cigarettes could get money from this instead of an industry that you see as being beneficial to the city?

NEWSOM: I see the corner grocer as very important to the city. Someone who’s put their entire life savings on the line and employed themselves or their family members who want to create a job for some neighborhood resident. I find that very valuable. I think anyone who’s willing to put themselves on the line as a small business person should be willing to participate and take advantage of a federal program like this one.

At the same time, we have been very specific in targeting green tech companies, biotech, life science companies, digital media and digital art companies, as part of our broader economic stimulus strategies. But we’re not excluding the neighborhood small business that is making a real contribution to the life of their neighborhood.

PALTA: And did you talk to Speaker Pelosi about getting this thing extended?

NEWSOM: The real question is how many times. She mentioned in our private meeting and number of our conversations. And we’ve been out there all over the halls of Congress and the White House, literally not figuratively, and have been making the case on national networks about the importance of extending this program, and it’s very important that the speaker now recognizes the importance of this program. She heard from individuals who’ve been benefited by this program, people who’ve been employed by it. She’s been a champion now, trying to get it extended.

What we need now is the Senate. And I was with Harry Reid two nights ago and did everything in my power to make this indelible in his mind. And I literally have a card that he gave me that I’ll be calling his assistant to give him all of the information because the senate will be the determinative body that will maintain or reject the funding extension beyond September 30th.

The Human Services Agency, which runs Jobs Now, is still taking applications from job-seekers and employers interested in the program. The city knows it has money for 2,000 workers through September. What’s less clear is San Francisco’s long-term outlook for a healthy workforce.  

In San Francisco, I’m Rina Palta for Crosscurrents.

Note: This report is part of KALW's ongoing Economic Edge Project: Documenting the Downturn and Recovery in the Bay Area.  You can hear the rest of the reports in our series at the Economic Edge project page.