Success in stimulus spending is measured primarily by more jobs and less fraud. But while easily quantifiable, these criteria don't help recipients show taxpayers the long-term benefits of their $787-billion investment.

Given the infinite variety of public works projects, quantifying the value of the legislation's $130-billion infrastructure allocation is particularly difficult. To help infrastructure managers collect 'standardized' information they can share to produce local, regional, and statewide analyses of the impact of stimulus dollars, investment, the International City/County Management Association developed common metrics for measuring:

street resurfacing

water and sewer service expansion

water line replacement

sewer line replacement or rehabilitation

water reuse and desalination projects

broadband initiatives

energy efficiency

public transit

Because the individual specifications for these projects varies so widely, the organization's performance measures are broad-based, designed to gather the minimum required information necessary to quantify total outcome. By aggregating this data, public works managers and elected officials will be able to address questions on the local, state, or regional level for any given sector.

Success in stimulus spending is measured primarily by more jobs and less fraud. But while easily quantifiable, these criteria don't help recipients show taxpayers the long-term benefits of their $787-billion investment.

The proposed measures will allows spokesperson eventually to declare, for instance, the average percentage decline in line loss among local governments using Recovery act funds for water line replacement and the average reduction in fuel consumption among local governments using Recovery Act funds to bring greater energy efficiency to public facilities and equipment, rites David Ammons in Measuring the Results of Economic Stimulus Investments: Local Government Leading the Way.