...the panel’s Democrats. Committee Chairman James Oberstar (D-Minn.) continues to push such a six-year bill, which would total $500 billion. In the Senate, Assistant Majority Leader Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) has raised the idea of “front-loading” funds for a new highway-transit bill in its initial year.

Shoaf says a second possibility is “a quick-spending, additional recovery act.” A third option would be to add more funding to the omnibus fiscal 2010 spending bill, expected in December. It may wrap together several still-uncompleted 2010 appropriations measures.

Shoaf says if the administration is “going to put any political capital into it, it’s got to be a must-pass bill. They’re not going to do it and have it hang out there and not be enacted. They’re trying to weigh all their options.”

In the meantime, the ARRA tax and benefit extension measure will provide some help. For instance, it extends the $8,000 first-time home buyers’ tax credit to housing contracts through April 30. It also would provide a $6,500 credit for those who have lived in their principal residences for at least five years and seek to buy a new house. The National Association of Home Builders estimates the home buyers’ credit provisions will produce 211,000 jobs over 12 months. About 25% of those jobs will be in construction, according to Robert Dietz, NAHB director of tax issues for economics and housing policy.

The legislation also continues ARRA’s provision allowing companies to “carryback” current operating losses to offset income realized in the past five years, thus providing a liquidity boost. Moreover, the legislation expands the carryback to all companies; ARRA limited it to firms with up to $15 million in annual revenue. Among those benefiting from the carry-back will be many banks, says Basu.“That’s of course one of the ingredients to a private-sector-led recovery of construction, which is the restoration of health and confidence among the banks,” he notes.

Any such help can’t some soon enough for construction. Its 18.7% October rate remains the highest among major industries and is a big jump from the year-earlier 10.8%. With the winter construction slowdown coming, “It’s quite likely that the nation will be staring at construction unemployment rates in excess of 20%,” Basu says.

Robert Murray, McGraw-Hill Construction vice president for economic affairs, says construction activity will continue to lag behind the results for the overall economy (see story, p. 26). He says the first stage of the industry’s decline came in housing. In 2008 and 2009, “We’ve seen the second wave of the downturn, meaning nonresidential building, take hold,” Murray says. This year, commercial building starts, in dollars, are estimated to fall 43%, compared with a 22% drop for single-family housing.

Construction continues to show large job losses despite an injection of billions of dollars from ARRA since February. “The stimulus act has cushioned the extent of the employment decline but only to a small degree,” Murray says. The White House said on Oct. 30 that ARRA had preserved or created more than 80,000 construction jobs through Sept. 30. But that’s a small number compared with the industry’s 1.6 million jobs lost since December 2007.

Congressional Republicans, such as House GOP Leader John Boehner (Ohio), have been blasting Democrats for the stimulus program, which Boehner contends is not working.

One of the bright spots is transportation. Murray says ARRA “has helped to lift the amount of highways and bridge construction, with the pickup noticeable starting in July.” Oberstar’s panel reported on Nov. 4 that 7,594 ARRA highway and transit projects, worth $18.2 billion, were under contract as of Sept. 30. The number of projects is up 17% and dollar volume up 8% from Aug. 31 levels.

ARRA aid in other sectors, such as wastewater-treatment projects, has been slower to hit the street. The House panel says Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia. Mississippi, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington, D.C. had not put any ARRA clean water state revolving fund projects out to bid.