Funds under the government’s Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which will help create Nevada construction jobs, have been released.

President Barack Obama recently announced that $28 billion in highway funds from the Act are being released and will arrive in states soon. The State of Nevada should receive about $201 million for road repairs and construction. States have 120 days to use the funds by assigning them to specific projects or they will lose the money, according to an article by the Las Vegas Sun.

“Altogether, this investment in highways will create or save 150,000 jobs by the end of next year, most of them in the private sector,” Obama said in the article. “And just to give you a sense of perspective, that’s more jobs being created or saved in one year than GM, Ford, and Chrysler have lost in manufacturing over the past three years - combined.”

The White House estimates that 95,000 jobs will be saved or created nationwide through highway spending by the end of 2010, and another 55,000 jobs will come from the multiplier effect of workers spending money in the economy.

Nevada’s construction industry has been hit hard by the current economic recession. The state’s construction industry employed 109,300 workers during December 2008, according to the United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is down from 112,000 workers during November 2008 and a 15.1 percent decrease from last year.

As a whole, Nevada’s unemployment rate increased from 8 percent to 8.4 percent during December. The state had a total non-farm employment of 1,261,100 workers during December, down from 1,269,300 workers during November and a 2.5 percent decrease from last year.