Jamie Mitchell, an unemployed 25-year-old mother of five, quickly can sum up the difference between today’s job market and that of a year ago.

“It’s a lot harder,” she said. “There’s no availability.”

Mitchell said she has been looking for work all summer, and her husband has been without a job since January. They’ve mostly been trying to find something in housekeeping and construction, respectively.

Mitchell and her husband are not the only ones searching for work during the recession.

Although Moffat County’s unemployment rate is not as high as other parts of the state, even other rural counties, local unemployment increased dramatically during the last year. In April, the most recent month with available statistics, local unemployment was at 6.9 percent, almost double the 3.8 percent rate in April 2008.

However, a new program funded by federal recovery dollars may help Mitchell and others in the same situation to find stable employment.

Moffat County gets a flat $23,902 from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as part of a formula grant available to all counties based on population. The money can be used for either employment, housing, health or nutrition services.

Local officials opted to partner with the Colorado Workforce Center, Colorado Northwestern Community College and Moffat County Social Services to provide a two-semester work training and job search program for local residents.

“These would be people who’ve lost their job and are looking for work,” county budget analyst Tinneal Gerber said.

The only material qualification residents must meet to enroll in the program is that their annual income is within 200 percent of the federal poverty guideline.

“We want to make sure, also, that if we do get them in, they’re going to be a successful candidate, that they really do want to find a job and/or improve their education,” she added.

Gerber and staff members from the other groups put the program description together in about a week. She said that exemplifies how quickly federal and state government officials want local authorities to spend their recovery funds.

“They want to have this money to the counties by July 1,” Gerber said. “And they want people in jobs by next August. It was just the first part of May when they rolled out trainings for how to spend this money. We thought for a while we would have to turn the money back because we didn’t know how to spend it, but then the Workforce Center called with this idea.”

The Workforce Center offered to cover the program’s administrative costs, which initially was a big hurdle for the county, Gerber added.

“One thing about these stimulus dollars are there is no administrative costs that can be taken out of them,” she said. “It has to be absorbed by our current staff and resources.”

The program’s recovery dollars are the first recovery dollars the county has received.

Gerber said Moffat County is doing better than most other areas, and its population is so small that it is not eligible for many of the formula-based grants made available by the legislation.

County officials plan to actively pursue competitive recovery grants, which all counties can apply for, but the state has not yet created a system for local governments to apply.

The city of Craig has not received any recovery funds, either formula-based or competitive, City Manager Jim Ferree said, with the exceptions of $20,311 granted by the U.S. Department of Justice to the Craig Police Department for equipment and some money for the Ridgeview Trail.

The Colorado Department of Transportation originally granted the city about $130,000 for the trail, but that grant has been transferred over to recovery funds, Ferree said.

“There’s no real difference for the city,” he said, “but it does free up some money for CDOT to do other projects.”

Collin Smith can be reached at 875-1794 or cesmith@craigdailypress.com.