OBAMA HOPES BURST OF BUILDING WILL WARM VOTERS TO STIMULUS (This article is part of TIMES EXPRESS. It is a condensed version of a story that will appear in tomorrow's New York Times.) Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Columbus, Ohio. The shovels are finally ready. But is anyone paying attention? With a flurry of stimulus construction work getting under way some 16 months after the $787 billion package was signed into law, the Obama administration has billed the coming season 'Recovery Summer.' This week the administration issued a report on the stepped-up pace of work, rolled out Vice President Joe Biden to brief reporters on its progress and President Barack Obama went to Columbus, Ohio, on Friday to laud the 10,000th stimulus-financed highway project. For all the talk of 'shovel-ready' infrastructure projects when the stimulus first passed, construction projects made up a comparatively small slice of the package, and many required considerable administrative spade work -- planning, permitting and contracting -- before actual dirt could be turned. The stimulus initially injected money into the economy mainly through tax cuts and aid to states and individuals. Now that the long-promised 'road work ahead' is here, in big numbers, the question is whether voters will warm to the stimulus. The stakes for the Obama administration and Democrats are high, with the midterm elections approaching and many voters, Tea Party supporters and otherwise, incensed about spending. Stimulus-financed construction is set to explode this summer: 10,700 highway projects should be under way next month, up from just 1,750 in July 2009. States expect to weatherize 82,000 homes this summer -- 27 times the paltry number of homes that were weatherized last summer, when the program got off to a slow start. And there will be 2,828 clean-water projects under construction, a 20-fold increase over last year. But with the recovery uneven at best, getting anyone excited about that may be tough. The stimulus has been credited by many economists with helping the economy grow again and creating jobs; the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan agency, estimated last month that it had created between 1.2 million and 2.8 million jobs. There will be 218 federal buildings under construction next month, nearly four times the amount last July, according to the White House tally. California will have 450 stimulus highway projects under way this summer, up from nine last summer. Roughly 29,244 miles of road will be improved this summer, officials said, up from just 9,185 miles last summer. By initially comparing the investment in public works projects in the stimulus to the creation of the Interstate Highway system, Obama may have raised expectations for transformational change too high. Now industry groups and officials are already wondering about what happens when this burst of money is spent. In Ohio, Obama spoke of the need to invest more in infrastructure projects in order to compete globally. 'We've got to get serious,' he said, 'about our infrastructure.' 