BAD SCHMIEDEBERG, Germany — Rainer Kaspar takes home only $850 a month for keeping the town fire engines ready to roll with charged batteries and full air tanks.

But after two years out of work in Germany's stagnating east — where prospects are few — the mechanic says he was grateful to get the post under an experimental program in which this small town's long-term unemployed take community service jobs in return for jobless benefits.

Kaspar needed no push.

"When you're out of work for two years, it's not about money anymore," he said, standing in blue coveralls in the engine shed at the edge of town.

"You're just glad to find something and be around people again and feel needed."

The "Civic Work" jobs experiment by the regional government of Saxony-Anhalt, where Bad Schmiedeberg is, has put the town of 4,200 people in the spotlight by slashing its jobless rate from 15.6 percent to 6.4 percent.

That stands out amid the jobless rate of 16.9 percent in the former communist East Germany — compared with 8.4 percent in the former West Germany. Nationwide, it's 10.1 percent.

The program relies on "intensive counseling" that steers unemployed people to jobs with companies, retraining, or community service like Kaspar's work at the fire station that otherwise wouldn't get done.

Its success has Saxony-Anhalt getting ready to roll it out in other depressed towns; large-scale application would require legislation from parliament.

The program is no substitute for a booming economy creating highly paid jobs, but officials say it has the moral and psychological advantage of getting people out of the social isolation of long-term joblessness.

Bad Schmiedeberg lags economically along with the rest of eastern Germany since the nation reunified in 1990 and the communist state-planned economy disappeared.

Several hundred people work at three rehabilitation clinics, with a few hundred more are employed at a ceramics factory and a business that fills aerosol cans. But Germany's major employers are far away, and many young people desert the town.

Kaspar, 48, once repaired military vehicles at an East German army base that was taken over by the reunified German government and closed in 1993.

"There's no big companies here," he said. "You'd have to go to Leipzig or Halle," two towns 30 miles away.

With his wife employed at one of the clinics and a 10-year-old son at home needing dinner and looking after, "I needed to find something locally, and that's not easy."

Ineligible for jobless pay because of his wife's income, Kaspar went through the "Civic Work" program's key first step — intensive counseling in which workers from the Federal Jobs Agency talked to all of Bad Schmiedeberg's more than 300 unemployed.

They were presented with a stark choice: find a real job, go into training, or do a make-work project.

A few suddenly found work — a sign they may have been collecting unemployment benefits illegally. Some went into training, and 104 people were put to work doing things like keeping the town's historic churches open for tourists and reading newspapers to residents of the old-age home.

They get 30 steady hours of work a week, plus state pension contributions. Saxony-Anhalt funded the program by bundling all the various unemployment benefits into one single paycheck, meaning no additional budget money was needed.