On the day the Obama administration trumpeted its stimulus investments in rural America, equipment was rolling away from Drew Point on the North Slope, leaving a vast and empty expanse of tundra for tens of miles in either direction east of Barrow.

Drew Point was a $15.5 million project funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The "Investments in Rural America" report unveiled by the president's council of economic advisers on Monday lumped it among "Recovery Act Spending Benefiting Tourism on Federal Lands."

"In the short term," the report says, "these investments provide jobs in rural communities that will help them weather the recession." Long term, the projects are supposed to help further tourism, another source of potential income.

The former claim might have some substance. Work at Drew Point was done by Anchorage-based March Creek LLC, a joint venture of Kaktovik Inupiat  Inc. and Anchorage-based Fairweather Exploration and Production Services. Kaktovik Inupiat is the Alaska Native Claims Act-created village corporation for a village of about 280 people on the edge of the Arctic Ocean near the U.S.-Canada border.

Kaktovik and Fairweather joined forces to create Marsh Creek as a so-called 8(a) business. These small businesses qualify for preferential treatment in obtaining government contracts. In the case of Drew Point, March Creek was tapped to clean up a government oil well drilled in 1978.

U.S. Bureau of Land Management project manager Wayne Svenjnoha said coastal erosion along the Beaufort Sea was endangering the well shaft, which was filled with about 12,000 to 14,000 gallons of diesel fuel. There was a risk, he said, that the diesel could leak.

Originally, Svenjnoha said, many of about 134 wells drilled along the North Slope under contract to the U.S. government from the end of World War II into the 1980s "were only plugged back to about 2,500 feet. The well bore was then fueled with diesel so it wouldn't freeze."

The U.S. Geological Survey put monitors down the diesel-filled bore holes so it could track permafrost decay. Unfortunately, some of the bore holes are now threatened by the coastal erosion some blame on global warming.

"This one had a high potential risk of being compromised," Svenjnoha said. The well sits only a couple of hundred feet back from an escarpment that has been falling away.

"It was mass wasting in colossal chunks," he said. "It was sloughing off in chunks of 35 by 50 feet" when waves from summer storm surges hit the beach.

The old well has now been cut down to sea level, drained of diesel and sealed forever. Most of the equipment and manpower done to do that is now off the ice, he said.

As for the impact on tourism, no one should expect much. Svenjnoha admitted, that "personally, no, I haven't seen any (tourists)." Tourism to Barrow itself is limited, and in the summer it is difficult to get to the Drew Point headland 65 miles to the east. There are, however, some local people who come by in the winter when the land is locked in ice and covered by snow, making snowmachine travel easy.

"We do get people dropping in at that site," Svenjnoha said. "We do get a number of visitors at that site."

He doesn't, however, expect the Drew Point project to encourage any tourism business in rural Alaska, and the president's study points out that lack of business is the big problem is rural areas everywhere. Largely because of a lack of jobs, the number of Americans living in rural areas has shrunk from about 40 percent of the population in 1900 to 20 percent today, the report notes. Alaska has mirrored that trend but faces its own special problems.

Much of the population of rural Alaska is primarily Native, and the report notes bigger economic problems in American Indian Areas and Alaska Native Village Statistical Areas than most of rural America. Poverty rates are three times those of the rest of the nation, according to the report, and about a third of the population lacks a high school degree.