With 3,000 transportation construction union members out of work in Minnesota, such a stimulus couldn't come too soon. It would do much more for our economy than the unearned federal stimulus checks last spring that went largely unspent. And it would leave a lasting legacy of public improvements that would help fuel prosperity for years to come.

Estimates of the size of the forthcoming stimulus have ranged as high as the $700 billion Congress and President Bush approved to bail out the financial sector. But there's much less bipartisan accord when it comes to putting the unemployed to work chipping away at a $1.6 trillion national infrastructure investment deficit documented by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

In a September blog, Jack Wells, the chief economist for Bush's U.S. Department of Transportation, branded transportation spending "an inefficient way to create short-term jobs." He said a frequently cited projection of 47,500 new jobs for every $1 billion spent on infrastructure was hugely inflated, pegging it instead at 27,800 jobs. 

To counter that kind of objection, transportation advocates have identified a $26 billion national backlog of designed but unfunded projects, more than $200 million of them in Minnesota. And some in Washington have suggested restricting infrastructure stimulus funding to projects that can be bid within 90 days and started within 120.

Minnesota leaders think that would be unwise and unworkable.

"For a federal aid project, that's almost unheard of," said Dave Robley, Douglas County engineer and president of the Minnesota County Engineers Association.

To Margaret Donahoe of the Minnesota Transportation Alliance, too short a timeline would actually cripple the economic stimulus. "We'd like to see a little more flexibility," she said. "We need to think about bigger, more important projects. Otherwise, it won't have the impact people think it's going to have."

If the calls for quick stimulus prevail, the result will be a lot of road overlays that need little planning, employ relatively few workers and last but a few years, Donahoe said. One exception could be a long-delayed new interchange of Hwys. I-494 and 169, a major traffic bottleneck in the southwest corner of the Twin Cities, she said.

Policymakers should realize that, amid predictions of a long and deep recession, not every stimulus dollar has to be spent immediately. Besides, the process of planning, designing and environmentally vetting long-term projects with long-term economic benefits creates jobs in the short run, too.

In Minnesota, the infrastructure deficit extends far beyond the transportation sector. According to the civil engineers' report from 2005, Minnesota's needs included more than $3 billion for drinking water systems, $2.3 billion for wastewater and $20 million for dams, 40 of which were designated by the state as deficient. The same report said 57 percent of Minnesota's schools had at least one inadequate building feature and 66 percent had at least one unsatisfactory environmental feature.

"If we treated our own homes like we treat our infrastructure, we'd all live in shacks," said the former president of the 137,000-member civil engineers society, William P. Henry. 

Minnesota's neglected infrastructure offers myriad opportunities for real, job-creating economic stimulus that will make the good times, when they return, even better. State policymakers should do all they can to make sure that any stimulus dollars aren't used in the same short-sighted manner as our lack of investment in the bricks and mortar of modern life has been for decades.