Eideard

Roof still leaking after 3 years

Homeowners affected by the hurricane and dissatisfied with rebuilding efforts filled a Houston City Council meeting last month on the storm’s anniversary.

But the damage was done three years ago, in September 2008, when Hurricane Ike devastated a wide stretch of Texas with 110 m.p.h. winds, killing dozens of people and causing more than $12 billion in damage in what is considered to be the costliest storm in state history.

The storm was the first insult, delivered suddenly by nature. The second, greater insult…is all man-made, delivered over these many months by a state bureaucracy that has paid out roughly 10 percent of the $3.1 billion in federal aid that it has received…

The $3.1 billion allocated for Texas in three rounds by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development was intended to repair and reconstruct single-family homes for poor and moderate-income families, among other projects. Chambers County, where Anahuac is the county seat, and other jurisdictions agreed to rebuild or repair 3,537 hurricane-damaged homes using the first round of money. Of those, only 712 have been completed, with an additional 766 under construction.

State officials originally expected to have the $3.1 billion spent by 2013, but they have now pushed that date to December 2015…

State officials repeatedly changed the rules and guidelines that cities and counties had to follow after the local agencies had already processed applications, forcing residents to redo their applications and the cities and counties to reprocess them…

In addition, those federal officials expressed concerns about the two state agencies that had overseen the program — the Department of Housing and Community Affairs and the Department of Rural Affairs. In a June report, federal officials found that the state housing agency had not developed written procedures for processing the applications it received from local jurisdictions. The report also found that the rural affairs agency had spent more money on administrative expenses than on actual work projects, spending 98 percent of its administrative money from the first round — $12.3 million — but only 17 percent of the money designated for projects.

RTFA. Between incompetent state officialdom, corrupt local and county government, bigots and footdraggers at every level, ordinary working people – especially those who are non-white – have received about 10% of the aid dedicated to that purpose by the federal government, ultimately American taxpayers.

How’s that Republican mantra about states rights doing folks in Texas?