WASHINGTON — In an effort to cut the unemployment rate among veterans, President Barack Obama is calling for a new conservation program that would put veterans to work rebuilding trails, roads and levees on public lands.
The president also will seek more grant money for programs that allow local communities to hire more police officers and firefighters.
“Let’s get more cops on the beat, let’s get more rangers in the parks, let’s get more firefighters on call, and in the process, we’re going to put more veterans back to work,” Obama said Friday at a fire station in Arlington, Va., that was one of the first to respond to the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
The efforts, which Obama first announced in his State of the Union address, are particularly geared to those veterans who served after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a group experiencing an unemployment rate of 9.1 percent, versus 8.7 percent for non-veterans, according to the government’s jobs report for January.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the Civilian Conservation Corps that operated during the 1930s could be viewed as a model for what the administration will try to accomplish through its “Veterans Jobs Corps.” He said the administration will propose spending $1 billion over five years that would be used to put an estimated 20,000 veterans to work restoring habitat and eradicating invasive species, among other activities.
Communities that hire veterans to work as police and firefighters will be given preference in the grants competition. Obama will also seek to increase spending for the grants programs. He is proposing an additional $4 billion for the Community Oriented Policing Services program, or COPS. He will propose an additional $1 billion for the firefighter grants.
