After Nearly Six Months...
...still half a mountain to go.
FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers still haven't removed the tons of debris left by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi, and until that debris is gone, reconstruction can't really begin. The problem? The NY Times provides the clues to what's holding things up:
Government officials, contractors and workers all describe a complicated and bureaucratic process that wastes money, slows the cleanup and fails to ensure that the economic benefits of the work go to the people who need them most, the residents of the disaster areas.
Indeed, the problems are now so clear that even the Department of Homeland Security and its Congressional critics have decided that the entire process for cleaning up after storms — and paying for the cleanups — needs to be restructured.
Among the many problems that have plagued the $1.3 billion cleanup program are these:
¶Contractors and workers, ranging from individual laborers to a quality-control consulting firm, contend that they have been abused, underpaid or not paid at all. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which recently filed a federal lawsuit in New Orleans accusing two private cleanup companies of shortchanging hundreds of immigrant laborers, says the federal government is turning a blind eye to violations of labor law.
¶Many local government officials complain about the slow pace of the cleanup, which federal officials concede is only half done in Louisiana. Local politicians are also fuming over their lack of control over what happens in their communities.
¶Congressional leaders from Mississippi say that one large and politically connected debris-removal company, AshBritt Inc. of Pompano Beach, Fla., is trying to thwart a plan to give work to small companies in their state. The company says it is the victim of a politically motivated effort to take away its business.
¶Louisiana contractors are so angry about the small quantity and low quality of the work they are getting that their trade organization is asking the state to take over federal debris-removal contracts being handled by the Army Corps of Engineers. Local people say that armies of middlemen do no work but siphon off money, while some big companies contend that they have been forced to hire contractors on the basis of their political connections.
...Local governments were also allowed to hire their own debris-removal companies, with the cost to be picked up by FEMA. But many local officials complain they were discouraged from doing so by threats that they would be audited or have to cover some costs themselves.
It was in part a desire to get work for local people that prompted St. Bernard Parish, the devastated area east of New Orleans, to insist on hiring its own contractor, officials there say. But five months after basically every building in the parish was flooded, FEMA has yet to reimburse the government or its contractor for debris removal costs, which the public works department says have reached $50 million. Local officials say they are being punished. [Emphasis added]
What I think it all boils down to is that, once again, contracts were directed to politically connected companies with little or no oversight in the execution of those contracts and no connection to the area. Part of the recovery of the region depended on hiring subcontractors and workers from the very region affected so as to start pumping money back into the devastated economies. Instead, outsiders were brought in and the laborers underpaid.
Local governments have had their hands tied by the system, which means they have had no control on how and when the work was done, and by whom. Hundreds of millions have been spent, and yet half the debris still remains on site.
Six months, and the reconstruction hasn't even begun.
Shameful.
FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers still haven't removed the tons of debris left by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi, and until that debris is gone, reconstruction can't really begin. The problem? The NY Times provides the clues to what's holding things up:
Government officials, contractors and workers all describe a complicated and bureaucratic process that wastes money, slows the cleanup and fails to ensure that the economic benefits of the work go to the people who need them most, the residents of the disaster areas.
Indeed, the problems are now so clear that even the Department of Homeland Security and its Congressional critics have decided that the entire process for cleaning up after storms — and paying for the cleanups — needs to be restructured.
Among the many problems that have plagued the $1.3 billion cleanup program are these:
¶Contractors and workers, ranging from individual laborers to a quality-control consulting firm, contend that they have been abused, underpaid or not paid at all. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which recently filed a federal lawsuit in New Orleans accusing two private cleanup companies of shortchanging hundreds of immigrant laborers, says the federal government is turning a blind eye to violations of labor law.
¶Many local government officials complain about the slow pace of the cleanup, which federal officials concede is only half done in Louisiana. Local politicians are also fuming over their lack of control over what happens in their communities.
¶Congressional leaders from Mississippi say that one large and politically connected debris-removal company, AshBritt Inc. of Pompano Beach, Fla., is trying to thwart a plan to give work to small companies in their state. The company says it is the victim of a politically motivated effort to take away its business.
¶Louisiana contractors are so angry about the small quantity and low quality of the work they are getting that their trade organization is asking the state to take over federal debris-removal contracts being handled by the Army Corps of Engineers. Local people say that armies of middlemen do no work but siphon off money, while some big companies contend that they have been forced to hire contractors on the basis of their political connections.
...Local governments were also allowed to hire their own debris-removal companies, with the cost to be picked up by FEMA. But many local officials complain they were discouraged from doing so by threats that they would be audited or have to cover some costs themselves.
It was in part a desire to get work for local people that prompted St. Bernard Parish, the devastated area east of New Orleans, to insist on hiring its own contractor, officials there say. But five months after basically every building in the parish was flooded, FEMA has yet to reimburse the government or its contractor for debris removal costs, which the public works department says have reached $50 million. Local officials say they are being punished. [Emphasis added]
What I think it all boils down to is that, once again, contracts were directed to politically connected companies with little or no oversight in the execution of those contracts and no connection to the area. Part of the recovery of the region depended on hiring subcontractors and workers from the very region affected so as to start pumping money back into the devastated economies. Instead, outsiders were brought in and the laborers underpaid.
Local governments have had their hands tied by the system, which means they have had no control on how and when the work was done, and by whom. Hundreds of millions have been spent, and yet half the debris still remains on site.
Six months, and the reconstruction hasn't even begun.
Shameful.
posted by Diane at 3:46 AM
1 Comments:
After Hurricanes Come Tempests Over Cleanups
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By LESLIE EATON
Published: February 24, 2006
PONCHATOULA, La. — When a big contracting company hired him to clean up this small town northwest of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Matthew Lopez saw it as a way to help his neighbors and to make decent money: $9 for every cubic yard of hurricane debris he delivered to a dump.
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Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times
Matthew Lopez, foreground, with his lawyer Jed Cain, says out-of-towners are stealing his cleanup work.
But as soon as he started clearing downed branches, there was a problem: out-of-town contractors that also worked for the larger company were sneaking into his territory and snatching up the loose debris.
"You'd push up a pile with a Bobcat, turn your back, and their truck would be right there," he said. That left him and his small crew to do the hard, not very lucrative work of cutting up big trees with chain saws.
So Mr. Lopez did what a lot of small contractors here say they are trying to do: he found a lawyer and sued the big company that had hired him for breach of contract, saying it favored his out-of-town rivals and had let them steal his work.
The case is just one of dozens of courthouse disputes and public controversies that have erupted over the still-gargantuan task of removing tons of debris in Louisiana and Mississippi, almost six months after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Government officials, contractors and workers all describe a complicated and bureaucratic process that wastes money, slows the cleanup and fails to ensure that the economic benefits of the work go to the people who need them most, the residents of the disaster areas.
Indeed, the problems are now so clear that even the Department of Homeland Security and its Congressional critics have decided that the entire process for cleaning up after storms — and paying for the cleanups — needs to be restructured.
Among the many problems that have plagued the $1.3 billion cleanup program are these:
¶Contractors and workers, ranging from individual laborers to a quality-control consulting firm, contend that they have been abused, underpaid or not paid at all. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which recently filed a federal lawsuit in New Orleans accusing two private cleanup companies of shortchanging hundreds of immigrant laborers, says the federal government is turning a blind eye to violations of labor law.
¶Many local government officials complain about the slow pace of the cleanup, which federal officials concede is only half done in Louisiana. Local politicians are also fuming over their lack of control over what happens in their communities.
¶Congressional leaders from Mississippi say that one large and politically connected debris-removal company, AshBritt Inc. of Pompano Beach, Fla., is trying to thwart a plan to give work to small companies in their state. The company says it is the victim of a politically motivated effort to take away its business.
¶Louisiana contractors are so angry about the small quantity and low quality of the work they are getting that their trade organization is asking the state to take over federal debris-removal contracts being handled by the Army Corps of Engineers. Local people say that armies of middlemen do no work but siphon off money, while some big companies contend that they have been forced to hire contractors on the basis of their political connections.
Meanwhile, government investigators have opened at least five inquiries into debris removal, and federal prosecutors have filed two criminal complaints involving it.
Officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, which handle much of the contracting for debris removal, say the agencies are satisfied with the cleanup's pace, given the magnitude of the task. They note that Hurricane Katrina created twice as much debris as the four 2004 hurricanes in Florida combined.
In Louisiana, of an estimated 60 million cubic yards of debris, about 32.7 million cubic yards of debris were picked up by early February, 18 million of them by contractors hired by the corps, according to FEMA data. In Mississippi, where local governments have been more prone to undertake their own removal, almost 32 million cubic yards out of 43 million have been removed.
The corps says it has spent about $1.3 billion so far, and FEMA is spending hundreds of millions of dollars more reimbursing local governments for the debris removal for which they contract directly.
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