This just makes no sense, which is becoming more and more the norm when talking about the handling of hurricane consequences.
Two years after Hurricane Rita pushed deep into East Texas with devastating force that damaged or destroyed an estimated 75,000 homes, the state has spent less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the federal grant money set aside to repair or replace many of them.Local and regional officials say the state has been slow in loosening the purse strings. State officials blame restrictive federal rules and a lack of money compared to Louisiana and Mississippi. Advocates of storm victims contend the entire process has been broken from the start.
"It really appears to me that the state has had an overabundance of caution to prevent fraud and abuse," said Walter Diggles, executive director of the Deep East Texas Council of Governments. "Every time we talk to them they say, 'Look, we don't want a Katrina,' or fraud with individual distributions."
The state and three regional councils of governments, or COGs, have distributed less than $200,000 of the more than a quarter-billion dollars available in two separate allocations of federal housing assistance. And more than $210 million has sat frozen for months while a state agency seeks to hire a private contractor, which isn't expected to have initial disbursements done until next summer.
Failing to take effective advantage of federal resources has become a Texas specialty under our current governor.
Posted by Alan at September 23, 2007 08:22 AM