FEMA Stiffs Erath

FEMA has decided to stiff Erath on its new middle and high schools according to a story in today's Advertiser. They want the public to believe it's because they are being careful with money--but believing that involves ignoring the enormous waste FEMA has enabled when the beneificiaries are well-connected corporations instead of struggling small towns.

The community has already had to fight through attempts to move it wholesale to higher ground and had just recently renewed it determination for renewal by making it clear that it wants to rebuild its schools on their old sites.

Plans to demolish and rebuild Erath High and Erath Middle schools - with the federal government paying 90 percent of the bill - are temporarily on hold while another damage assessment is conducted.

Vermilion Parish school officials thought the rebuilding plan was a sure thing, and at a public hearing two weeks ago, the community expressed its support of keeping the schools at their current sites.

They'd gone through all the hoops FEMA required, including getting a second appraisal of the damages done to the old school building. After all the delays they thought they were getting to a spot where--a year after the storm!--they could begin putting their lives together.

FEMA dashed that hope:

...David Phillips, director of FEMA's Lake Charles field office, said Monday that federal, state and local engineers will conduct a joint survey of the facilities to ensure that the amount of damage meets federal criteria for rebuilding....

Superintendent Joey Hebert appeared frustrated with the backward step, saying school officials followed every directive from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"During all the discussions we've had with FEMA ... we were always led to believe that whatever they told us was how it would unfold," he said.

Phillips said the reassessment was ordered because it was impossible to compare the initial assessment of the damaged schools with the follow-up study and determine why there were differences.

FEMA's Phillips is handing out double-talk nonsense. The second assessment was done precisely to correct deficiencies in the initial assessment--which, indeed, was found to be faulty. That the first assessment was faulty most emphatically does not imply that there needs to be third assessment to figure out the differences between numbers one and two. That's already been explained. (By FEMA's apparent logic when this one is done will another assessment need to be done to explore the discrepancies between it and numbers one and two? And a fourth to figure out the difference between one, two, and three? That could go on forever. It is, I repeat, nonsense.)

Bureaucrats being bureaucrats might not make you so mad if you didn't know that the federal bureaucracy has already delayed redevelopment by forcing people to wait for empty promises to be fulfilled. Further delay is really intolerable.

But what should really make us all angry is the contrast between how FEMA treats the people of Erath and how it treats the big corporate friends of the administration. Nobody is checking, rechecking and making those guys wait for their checks while they do. You've heard about Halliburton (Vice President Cheney's company) no-bid contracts for work after the storms? Sure you have. N0-bid contracts are just the opposite of how Erath's being treated: you get to spend anything you want and, under special rules the feds put in place just for us on the gulf coast, you can pay your contractors anything. The Halliburton/ Shaw/ Bechtel/ Fluor-style companies don't actually have to do any work: they just charge FEMA outrageous prices, give the guys who do the work peanuts and pocket the rest. The very idea is an enormous rip-off and it's no surprise that it's been treated as give-away ever since the storms. Here's one nasty example: Those famous blue roofs? The companies involved charged FEMA as much as 10 times the going roofing rate for stretching plastic tarps over roofs--enough, in fact, to get repair the roof with shingles! It's the big no-bid, cost-overrun companies that got all that money--the guys actually doing the hot, sweaty work weren't even protected by the usual guarantees on paying locals a fair wage. (The lousy pay may be why a lot of it wasn't done by locals.)

The same story is told about the clean-up contracts. The well-connected corporations clean up and the folks who do the job get hurt.

You might think that Halliburton and their ilk would be punished for such widely-reported misbehavior. But you'd be wrong. Congressmen find ways to defend them and FEMA has issued the same companies contracts before the current hurricane season.

It's wrong.

FEMA's bureaucrats have a suspiciously selective vision. They seem happy to nickel and dime Louisiana citizen who want nothing more than to get their lives back but issue huge blank checks to those that are politically well-connected.

It's damned wrong.

The current administration has taken cronyism to a level not seen since the Grant administration. And our current congressman doesn't seem to notice any of it and doesn't bother to criticize any of it. He's said nothing about putting a politically connected horse fancier in charge of FEMA. And he's said nothing about the massive no-bid contracts awarded to politically connected companies. Nor has he bothered to complain about their vast overcharges or even the fact that they're being awarded vast new contracts.

Boustany is part of this problem.

We need a change.