“Putting America to Work,” the oversized green sign announces at the razed ferry terminal near the North Bluff in Oak Bluffs, a site now littered with orange cones, hydraulic equipment and rubble. It is perhaps the most visible presence of federal stimulus money on the Vineyard, but the Island has been affected in many other ways both conspicuous and subtle by the recent influx of cash.

Some local stimulus projects have been well-publicized, such as an $800,000 grant to the Vineyard Energy Project to participate in a pilot study on smart grid technology, while others have been less so, such as a few hundred dollars to the county sheriff’s department to aid more effective collection of child support payments. New buses, clean windows, traffic decongestion and smarter appliances have all been targets of federal dollars on the Vineyard.

The ostensible purpose of the stimulus package was to create jobs and promote long-term economic growth, but how successful has it actually been here?

The Vineyard has acutely felt the effects of the global economic recession. Last winter local unemployment hit record levels and this winter promises to be yet another difficult season. Unemployment on the Island reached 5.8 per cent this October, the most recently reported figure, compared with 3.6 per cent for the same period last year, although that was just before the full impact of Wall Street’s near collapse had been felt (Island unemployment jumped to 5.9 per cent in November of 2008 and topped double digits in January).

On Feb. 17 of this year President Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the economic stimulus package. Inspired by the experience of the Depression and subsequent recovery of the 1930s and 1940s, the bill is predicated on the idea that when private lending dries up during an economic crisis, a public injection of cash is necessary to revive the economy (e.g. World War II).

This year’s $787 billion bill targeted education, health care, infrastructure and energy in particular. While some economists felt that the stimulus package was in fact too small to have any meaningful effect on unemployment, most conservative commentators dismissed the entire project as a pork-laden government boondoggle. The success of the controversial bill has been as difficult to assess here on the Vineyard as it has been nationwide.

One of the biggest local recipients of federal stimulus money has been the Martha’s Vineyard school system, which, as of Sept. 30, has received $425,168.86. On the Massachusetts Recovery Web site, users are able to see how this money is being allocated on a local level. At first glance, some of the spending seems to be easy fodder for critics of government waste. Among the school system’s expenditures paid for by federal stimulus money are $12,900 to Sparkle Window Cleaning and $29,097.97 to daRosa’s, a printing company in Oak Bluffs.

But as Vineyard schools superintendent Dr. James H. Weiss explains, last year there was a major shortfall in state education funding. The first chunk of stimulus money that the Vineyard school system received was provided in order to offset this shortfall, in what was known as the Education Fiscal Stabilization Fund. The money has gone to pay for things such as heating and plumbing, as well as custodial work, which Edgartown contracts to Sparkle Window Cleaning, and administrative supplies, which Oak Bluffs buys from daRosa’s.

“The stimulus money has been extremely helpful for us,” Mr. Weiss said. “After the [fiscal stabilization fund], the second amount of stimulus money has been for things that we’ve decided to keep going. For example, the high school has a writing lab that they had on the drawing board but they couldn’t afford to include in the budget. They were able to do so, though, by using the stimulus money.”

The stimulus money has also subsidized speech, psychology and occupational therapy services that would otherwise have been cut.

“This impacted somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 people,” said Mr. Weiss. “We didn’t hire 25 people, but around 25 people would have had to have been cut, or forced to work part-time if we didn’t have this money.”

Another big winner in the stimulus sweepstakes has been the Martha’s Vineyard Transit Authority, which has received $2.24 million for the purchase and operation of 10 new buses. The new buses will help replace an aging fleet that has in recent years swallowed up much of the transit authority budget.

“It’s been huge,” says transit authority administrator Angela Grant. “This is allowing us to replace a third of our fleet. We were a solid three years behind in fleet replacement and this money has been extremely helpful just in terms of maintaining our current service levels. We’ve been making do with an aging fleet and some of our vehicles are well past their useful life.”

She said maintenance costs have increased by as much as 45 to 50 per cent in recent years. “When that happens we become less reliable and customers are unhappy,” she said.

Ms. Grant doubts that the new buses will create or save any local jobs; however, she did have the opportunity to visit one of the factories in Arkansas where the buses were manufactured.

“In March they had laid off 80 or 90 workers and then in June they had just rehired them all because of the stimulus. At the other plant in Michigan where our buses are manufactured it was the same story.”

For the Steamship Authority, the stimulus money received, $5 million in all, has been a lifeline. A total of $3.5 million is going toward the Hyannis terminal slip improvements, and $450,000 will be spent on a monopole dolphin between the two slips at Woods Hole (to help improve landings and make it easier to tie up the vessels during adverse weather conditions, especially for the longer Island Home vessel). And finally, just over $1 million will help pay for the third and final phase of the new and improved Oak Bluffs terminal.

“The work this money pays for is absolutely necessary and we’ve been able to contract and put local companies to work,” said Steamship Authority general manager Wayne Lamson.

In Oak Bluffs, ongoing improvements to the terminal have been carried out by CRC Co., a general and marine construction group from Quincy, so it is unclear what, if any, effect the project has had on local unemployment.

The new terminal plans are an investment in local infrastructure, though, and promise to remove some of the headache from midsummer congestion, improving what was a convoluted queuing and unloading area.

“This is a project that we’ve been working on over three off-seasons,” said Mr. Lamson. “We were never sure as we went along whether we’d have the money to be able to do it year after year. In fact, all of these projects would have had to be put on hold without the stimulus money.”

The effectiveness of the stimulus package will no doubt continue to be hotly contested.

“It’s still too early to accurately quantify the direct or indirect economic impacts related to stimulus spending for several reasons,” said Christine Flynn, an economic planner for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, “but primarily because not all of the stimulus funds have been spent. Even though there are some indications of economic recovery, it’s too soon to tell. There is a lot of economic uncertainty, both globally and nationally. And that uncertainty resonates with the state, regional, and local economies.”

While the recent economic picture has improved slightly (state unemployment numbers have dropped in each of the past two months in Massachusetts), and the collapse of the global financial system has been narrowly averted according to the chairman of the Federal Reserve, neither fact will do much to console the many Islanders still searching for jobs. For a population accustomed to navigating rough December seas this has been one difficult storm.