CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Almost two years after powerful thunderstorms spread damage across vulnerable West Virginia communities, state officials are in renewed debate over whether long-term relief efforts have been swift enough.
“The actual governmental response to this disaster has itself been a disaster,” Delegate Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, said this past week.
Thunderstorms that concentrated over West Virginia created a historic rainfall on June 23, 2016. Some counties were hit with 10 inches of rain over 24 hours.
Twenty-three people were killed. There were 1,200 homes destroyed, and thousands were without power. The flood damaged businesses, roads and water and sewer systems.
The needs were enormous.
Housing repairs and replacement were estimated to exceed $300 million. Damage to West Virginia’s public infrastructure was estimated to top $500 million.
West Virginia was declared a major disaster area by President Obama on June 25, 2016. Short-term recovery efforts began with the help of federal agencies, state agencies and volunteer organizations.
Almost a year later, June 1, 2017, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development approved an action plan to manage $104 million in Community Development Block Grant disaster recovery funds.
That was later augmented with an additional $45 million.
Those funds are meant to push West Virginia’s housing, business and infrastructure toward rebuilding over the long haul. And much of the buildup toward approval had been planning to use the money effectively.
“The planning is so important and it takes time. Sometimes it’s a maddening amount of time,” HUD spokesman Brian Sullivan said this week. “But it’s critical that you spend this time to create a plan for how you intend to recover.”
West Virginia made its request to start using the money this past Jan. 29.
HUD gave its OK on Feb. 20.
And by the time a performance report was put out by HUD covering this past January through March, only $1,138,866.60 had actually been spent.
West Virginia was already in HUD’s spotlight for the pace at which it was processing the federal money.
The Mountain State is listed as a “slow spender” in the most recent grant financial report by the federal agency.
“It is not uncommon for large-scale disaster relief efforts to get off to a slow start,” said Sullivan of HUD. “However, if it strikes us as being slow we’ll say so. And in this case we have.”
That designation means spending less than 10 percent of monthly pace required to fully use the grant by target closeout date.
Of the $149,875,000 West Virginia has available, the state still has $148,736,333 left on hand.
The average of the last three months of spending is $129,961.
HOPPY KERCHEVAL: Millions in flood relief money stuck in the government pipeline
“It’s inexcusable that you have help that is there and it’s just basically sitting on a shelf,” House Speaker Tim Armstead said Thursday on MetroNews’ “Talkline.”
Armstead was one of several state lawmakers this week to publicly question the pace of distributing federal flood recovery dollars.
The speaker and Senate President Mitch Carmichael formally requested and authorized the Joint Legislative Committee on Flooding to begin examining the RISE West Virginia program.
“There are a whole lot of things being said, but we want to get to the bottom of what really took place. We need to make sure this money is getting out where it belongs,” Armstead said.
The Department of Commerce manages the RISE West Virginia disaster recovery program through the West Virginia Development Office and West Virginia Community Advancement and Development Office.
RISE’s own timetable shows that it was to determine needs through February 2017, develop an action plan through May 2017 and allow time for HUD to review the action plan through July 2017.
The timetable included a grant agreement and release of funds last July.
And implementation of recovery programs was supposed to be from last August on.
Members of the legislative flood committee have said recovery money has not reached their communities in an acceptable time frame. They have complained that housing needs still aren’t being met.
Senator John Unger, D-Berkeley, said lawmakers should go a big step farther with their questions. Unger has been questioning how flood recovery money is being used for a couple of years now.
“I say we do an audit on all the funds,” Unger said in a Thursday telephone interview. “Why have we not even started that process? We ought to be accountable for the federal, state and private dollars that were donated.
“We ought to do a complete review of what’s going on.”
Scrutiny of the disaster relief dollars kicked up this week when the Justice administration publicly acknowledged it had paused a contract with Horne LLP, which was managing federal flood relief dollars for state government.
Horne, which had been paid $703,691.95 over the past two fiscal years was to help West Virginia with the action plan to handle the money.
Later duties for Horne to help the state with an implementation phase were worth up to $17 million.
Early this year, the Justice administration started looking at whether that second phase was in line with state purchasing laws.
The administration says this past January it halted work related to the contract during its examination.
“There’s a new sheriff in town and people need to realize that Jim Justice will see to it that West Virginia is not going to be on the short end of the stick,” Gov. Jim Justice stated in a release distributed by the administration.
“We found things that could save West Virginia millions in federal funding. Our flood victims are going to continue to be served. Those people that weren’t doing their jobs have been held accountable.”
The contract with Horne was signed by Josh Jarrell, general counsel for the Commerce Department. Jarrell has since parted ways with Commerce.
Jarrell, in a written statement to the Charleston Gazette-Mail, acknowledged the Governor’s Office had expressed concerns about his association with the project. Jarrell said he did not participate in the bid selection process and did not provide any daily oversight of RISE.
“State procurement is a detailed and technical process,” Jarrell told the Gazette-Mail.
“If any errors were made, they were minor compared to community needs and occurred in haste to bring nearly $150 million in congressionally appropriated federal aid to West Virginia after a major flooding disaster that left many homeless and claimed many lives.”
The most recent progress report from Housing and Urban Development made note of delays related to the contract issues.
“The progress of the program has been slowed this quarter due to an operational pause at the request of the State administration for a review to be completed,” HUD wrote.
“Before the operational pause there were 27 mobile home replacements in progress and they are all still currently in construction.”
At this point, there is an effort to reinstitute the services of Horne LLP, Justice administration general counsel Brian Abraham said in an interview this month with the West Virginia Press Association.
So now, in late May 2018, the flow of relief money may move ahead.
“Any time there was a delay in getting this money out, that was a problem,” Armstead said on Thursday. “But if there were questions about the legality of these contracts that might have placed us in a situation where the state was going to have to pay this money back, I don’t fault someone for taking a look at that.”
“I think we’re at the point now where we feel confident that if this money is distributed now and used to get people back in their homes that will be done properly.”
Armstead said the examination of the contract seems to be only one part of the overall holdup.
“I don’t think the freeze, so to speak, took place until early this year. There were already issues with the money getting out to where it needed to be before then,” Armstead said.
“I don’t know that (halting the contract) was the reason the money wasn’t getting out there, because it wasn’t getting out there even before then.”
Similar comments came from Delegate Hanshaw, who is one of the chairmen of the legislative flood committee.
“There’s been systemic issues with FEMA, with Housing and Urban Development, with dollars flowing since the event happened,” Hanshaw said Wednesday.
“We went through a bit of a lull with frustration probably six months ago. The sentiment became that most people’s claims had been processed and that most issues had been sorted out and that we were simply waiting for the system to do what the system does.”
But in the past 90 days, Hanshaw said, the pace has slowed again.
“Everybody is frustrated,” he said. “Home owners are frustrated. Business owners are frustrated. Members of the Legislature are certainly frustrated because we haven’t been able to direct people to any office to get any kind of help in any kind of meaningful or timely fashion, and that continues to this day.”
Hanshaw, like others, is upset that help has still been held up even as the two-year anniversary of the flood approaches.
“We’re talking right now about an event in 2016,” he said. “We’ve had at least two significant flooding events since then. They weren’t on this magnitude thank goodness. But these things happen. They happen in West Virginia. We’ve got to learn from this. We’ve got to get better at it.
“I’m delighted that the governor’s office is working through the process of doing some kind of an investigation as to how we got where we are, but it doesn’t change the fact that people are still waiting on help to show up that should have been here two years ago.”