AUGUSTA – Thousands of out-of-work Mainers will get help and Maine’s economy will get a significant boost from the 13-week extension of unemployment benefits passed by Congress last week. The total cash infusion into the state will be about $65 million.

“We are estimating 23,000 people will be eligible for benefits under this program,” said Mike Adams, an economist with the state’s Department of Labor. “Those are people who have exhausted their regular benefits already and those projected to exhaust their benefits over the next year.”

Adams said the estimated cost of those benefits will be about $65 million – money he said will help the state economy recover from the recession. He said it’s expected all that cash will go to pay for the basics of food, transportation and housing.

“This is really good news,” said state economist Laurie LaChance. “This is a really a big shot in the arm that will help the recovery.”

LaChance said the federally paid benefits come at a time when thousands of Mainers have exhausted their regular 26 weeks of unemployment benefits, which are paid for by a tax on state employers. She said the influx of federal cash will help out-of-work Mainers pay their bills until they find new jobs.

“This will also help avoid a reverse snowball effect of people falling behind on their house payments, their car payments and possible bankruptcy,” said Jim Breece, an economics professor at the University of Maine. “We had that in the early ’90s.”

Gov. Angus King signed the paperwork authorizing the extension of benefits over the weekend just hours after President Bush signed the legislation into law. The measure is now in effect and the state has been accepting applications since Monday.

“Our phones were ringing at 8 a.m. on Monday,” said Laura Boyette, director of the state’s Unemployment Bureau. “Unfortunately, there was a long wait on the phones. We had no time to gear up for this.”

Boyette said the state will be mailing a notice and application forms this week to the estimated 11,000 Mainers who have exhausted their benefits over the last year. Applications can also be made over the phone. She said benefit amounts and eligibility are the same for the extended benefits as they are for the regular program.

Payments are based on what a person was earning before he was laid off, with a maximum payment of $272 per week for an individual with no dependents. There is an additional $10 a week added to the maximum per dependent. Average payments are about $210 a week.

“This is really good news,” said Christopher St. John, executive director of the Maine Center for Economic Policy, an Augusta-based think tank. “This helps people that really need the help. The only downside [to the stimulus package] is the business tax breaks in the bill that could reduce state revenues.”

Provisions of the package allow businesses to speed up certain tax deductions, and because Maine income-tax forms are based on federal filings, state lawmakers must decide whether to conform to those changes at an estimated cost of $30 million.

Department of Labor figures from 2001 indicate the impact of business layoffs was not evenly spread across the state. For example, Aroostook County had the largest number of workers who exhausted benefits, 1,096, of any county, even though it only had 74,000 residents in the 2000 census. Penobscot County was second with 1,022. About 65 percent of the nearly 9,000 workers to exhaust benefits in 2001 were in the more rural 2nd Congressional District.

By contrast, Cumberland County, the state’s largest, had just 863 workers exhausting benefits. There were about 45,000 more people living in Cumberland County than in Aroostook and Penobscot counties combined when the 2000 census was conducted.

Neither Breece nor St. John was surprised at the unevenness. They said as layoffs were announced last year, it was clear some parts of the state were more affected than others.

“In Aroostook, I think we are seeing the result of both a structural change in the economy with the population loss and the cyclical job losses that were everywhere,” Breece said. “This extension of benefits will be a big help up there.”

The manufacturing sector had the highest number of workers exhausting benefits, with 2,485, and the services sector ranked second, with 1,861. The construction and mining sector was third, with 1,737 workers using up their regular benefits last year.