Vice President Joe Biden said the $787 billion federal stimulus passed in February has created thousands of jobs and jump-started the economy in a roundtable discussion at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport on Monday morning.

Biden spoke to an exclusive crowd that included state and local officials such as Rep. Harry Mitchell, D-Ariz., and State Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Phoenix. He stressed the successes of the stimulus, which has created about 12,000 jobs in Arizona alone.

“Behind every one of these statistics is a real-life story,” Biden said. “A mom and a dad struggling [between] paychecks, making mortgage payments, helping to rebuild the economy and helping to rebuild the country.”

Also featured at the roundtable was a panel of local educators and businesspeople who said they had benefited from the federal funding. The panel included officials from Sky Harbor — the airport received roughly $11.7 million in stimulus funding — a local entrepreneur, a schoolteacher and the CEO of a Valley-based engineering company.

Jane Morris, Sky Harbor’s assistant aviation director, said much of the stimulus money the airport received went toward repaving the taxiway used by airplanes to move between runways, which will make the airport’s operations smoother and more efficient.

“That was a huge investment for us,” Morris said. “We’ll be able to move more air traffic on that [taxiway], which is the most important part of our airport … and get people in and out of Sky Harbor faster.”

Biden stressed the importance of investing in the nation’s infrastructure, which he said has been neglected in recent years.

“We have let our infrastructure crumble and degrade over the last 35 years,” Biden said. “Other nations invested considerably larger portions of [their] GDP, starting with China, in infrastructure.”

Of the roughly $6 billion Arizona received from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, about $623 million went to the Department of Transportation, including about $522 million toward highway and road construction, according to azrecovery.gov.

Other infrastructure-related investments include $57 million toward weatherization of low-income homes and about $81 million toward the construction of new water treatment and wastewater facilities across the state.

W. P. Carey School of Business economist Tim James said the stimulus was a success overall but added that the U.S. needs to continue to improve its infrastructure in order to stay competitive in the global market.

“Capital moves to that part of the globe which it finds attractive,” James said. “What would make it unattractive is having a decaying infrastructure.”

One contentious issue over the past two weeks has been the White House’s claim that the stimulus saved or created more than 650,000 jobs nationwide, which has been scrutinized and criticized by various politicians, experts and media outlets. A Wall Street Journal report from earlier this month said the Obama administration had overstated the number of jobs created or saved by “at least 20,000.”

Byron Schlomach, economist at the conservative Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, said some of the administration’s proposed measures, including carbon emissions restrictions under a cap-and-trade system and health care reform, may have hurt growth, which he said was not included in the administration’s numbers.

“If you take into account cap-and-trade [and] the debate over health care, these things haven’t been passed into law but created a lot of uncertainty in the market,” Schlomach said. “These things have stymied growth that otherwise might have occurred.”

Biden acknowledged the economic difficulties still facing the country but said the stimulus dollars provided the country an important economic safety net during the recession.

“We still have a ways to go and there’s still too much pain … but we’re making genuine progress,” he said.

Reach the reporter at derek.quizon@asu.edu.