|
Mysterious ways of spending $24M
By Michael A. Smith
The Daily News
Published October 31, 2009
The strange case of Hurricane Ike case management was baffling at the start and has gotten more so as time has passed.
Broadly what happened was that the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave Recovery for Ike Survivors Enterprise, operated by Lutheran Social Services, $24.3 million to hire case managers from six local charities.
Case managers are charged with finding people who need help repairing or rebuilding houses, buying new appliances, paying their rent or seeking treatment for mental or physical health problems.
The first bafflement is that none of the $24.3 million was intended to actually help people, but only to find and direct them to help from other organizations. Some of those other organizations say they have little help to offer, not having gotten millions in federal money.
The second bafflement is the six groups charged with finding the people are having a hard time doing so.
This week, the charities that got all those federal dollars to find people needing help asked mayors, constables, firefighters and postmasters to help them track such people down.
It seems a bit late for a surge, being more than a year after the disaster.
So far, the six groups have processed about 800 people. That works out to about $30,000 a person.
At the meeting where they asked for help finding people from groups that didn’t get $24 million to find people, the charities implied that FEMA and the needy were at fault.
They complained that FEMA’s lists of people needing help were inaccurate. It is not unreasonable, however, to think the groups should have come up with a workaround for that before now.
They noted that many people who need help had not asked for it.
It could be that people are disinclined to go through hoops seeking help from groups that have none to offer, but that’s just speculation.
The clear implication, however, is that $24 million buys the taxpayers only a very passive response — give us a bunch of money and we’ll be here if anybody comes looking for help.
The final bafflement is that these case mangers are not the only case managers working in the county.
FEMA has about 20 of its own. Galveston Housing Authority also has case managers on its payroll to administer the Disaster Housing Assistance Program.
It will be interesting to see how many people got help through these efforts and how much providing it cost the taxpayers.
Maybe it will turn out to have been a slicker operation than seems from this distance.
Share |
Save |
Mail |
Print |
Letter |
9
Comments
|
|
|
