Obama Touts 10,000th Infrastructure Project

President Obama touted the 10,000th road project funded by last year’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act at an event Thursday in Columbus, Ohio.

The road improvement project in downtown Columbus marks the beginning of the administration’s “Recovery Summer,” a six-week focus on the surge in infrastructure projects funded by the act, sometimes referred to as the stimulus, which the White House expects will have created 3.5 million jobs by the end of the summer.

The administration said the summer of 2010 will be “the most active Recovery Act season yet,” with more than 10,000 highway projects in progress in July — six times as many as in the same month last year.

Obama said he was “under no illusion” the economic recovery was complete but added he was generally optimistic about the effects of the stimulus, stating that the country had added jobs for the past six out of seven months largely due to infrastructure investment.