Stimulus working? Well, yeah. How? Uhh ...

More than $100 million has poured into the Athens-area economy since President Obama signed his federal economic stimulus package into law a year ago.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act created or saved up to 2.4 million jobs nationwide, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, and more than 40,000 in Georgia, according to the state Office of Stimulus Accountability.

But those figures are really just guesses. No one knows exactly how many more jobs would have been lost during the worst downturn since the Great Depression if not for the stimulus, especially at the local level.

"There's no way to know," said U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Athens. "You could get any kind of number you could possibly pull out of the air."

Stimulus recipients report how many jobs they create or save based on a federal formula. In Oconee County, for example, the school district received a $1.7 million grant last year to plug a budget gap created by falling tax revenue. The district divided the amount of the grant by teachers' $55,000 average salary to come up with 31 teaching jobs saved, Assistant Superintendent for Finance Randy Morrison said.

Other grants for preschool and disabled students created one teaching job and three paraprofessional positions in Oconee County, he said.

If Oconee County had not gotten federal help to pay teachers - other school districts received similar grants - the district might have laid off 31 teachers, or it might have furloughed teachers or cut other costs to save the same amount of money, Morrison said.

"The alternative would have been to somehow reduce expenses by an equivalent number," he said.

An ocean of data on state and federal stimulus-tracking Web sites provides detailed information about who got how much money and what it's used for. But tracking job reports is nearly impossible on the city or county level.

Groups that get stimulus grants directly from the federal government report the jobs they created or saved to the feds. Groups that are in line for a share of Georgia's $6.2 billion in stimulus funds report to the state agencies that distribute the money. Those agencies aggregate the recipients' reports and send them to Washington. The jobs figures are not broken down geographically within the state, said Sid Johnson, Gov. Sonny Perdue's stimulus czar.

Finding the number of jobs stimulus funding created or saved in Athens "is going to be really tough to get," Johnson said. "We can't get it."

Barrow, Jackson, Clarke, Madison, Oglethorpe and Oconee counties received a combined 204 stimulus grants totaling $148 million, according to the federal stimulus Web site Recovery.gov. About three-quarters flowed to Athens, the largest city in the region and home to the University of Georgia.

Those grants created only 163 jobs, according to Recovery.gov. If that number seems too small to be true, that's because it is.

Hard to count

The Recovery.gov job figures do not include tens of millions of dollars given to the University of Georgia to offset lost tax revenue, which saved 217 jobs, according to the University System Board of Regents. Nor does it include research grants won by individual UGA professors, $2.6 million for the Athens Housing Authority to renovate public housing units, $15 million given to the Athens-Clarke government for water and sewer lines, energy efficiency, social services and new buses, multi-million-dollar grants that pay employees' salaries at local school distr

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