CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The Legislature will take a closer look at a bill meant to change the way West Virginia bids out housing contracts for disaster victims during the regular session.
The bill was under consideration this month during special session, but lawmakers had a lot of questions about how it would work, whether there might be unintended consequences and if it would truly increase the pace of housing relief for disaster victims.
“While we do believe this bill identifies an important issue that needs corrected, we would prefer to have more time to study it and perfect the proper solution,” stated Delegate Dean Jeffries, co-chairman of the Joint Legislative Committee on Flooding.
State officials have said there are 43 cases that are not yet under contract under RISE West Virginia, the program meant to get 2016 flood victims back in homes.
That number of cases could go up as case managers go back through the files that were closed under a previous consultant.
Right now, there are 409 cases in RISE West Virginia overall.
During a Tuesday afternoon meeting of the Joint Legislative Committee on Flooding, officials with the disaster relief effort described a goal of getting all the remaining cases under contract in August.
“After the Flooding Committee heard testimony Tuesday that said all contracts for housing construction through the RISE recovery program would be let by the end of August regardless of the passage of this bill, we decided it would be best to wait to address this issue in the next regular legislative session,” Jeffries stated.
Officials in the Justice administration were wanting a step toward making the contracting more efficient.
Right now, as they described it, homes represented by specific addresses are eligible to be grouped into a contract as they are approved through case management.
In other words, a home isn’t ready to go into a contract until the family has already gone all the way through the case management process.
State officials wanted to change the system to allow a contract to go out for a group of generic homes — not specifically tied to a specific address.
That way, they said, a bundled contract would be awaiting as cases were considered ready.
“Rather than identifying the individual address upon which to build the home they could bid for a block number and go out to bid and receive bids on that, the house would be fully designed and all would be the same,” James Meadows, general counsel for the state Division of Purchasing, told the flood committee.
“Once an individual completed the process, the Guard could say we want a home over here and over here and over here. The idea is, we could expedite the building and construction.”
As the bill has been considered during two different rounds of a special session, lawmakers asked a lot of questions to try to understand the intent. They also asked whether “open ended” language in the bill might open the door to fraud.
Work by the Governor’s Office and the Auditor’s Office, plus amendments offered by legislators, were aimed at refining the bill to address those concerns.
“It has been limited in a lot of good ways,” said Berkeley Bentley, deputy general counsel for the Governor’s Office.
In a press release announcing amendments to the special session call, Gov. Jim Justice suggested the bill would cut red tape.
“I have mandated that our National Guard and General Hoyer get every single person who is still waiting on help from the floods of 2016 back in a home, and I’ve mandated that it has to happen as soon as humanly possible,” Justice stated.
“The General and the entire National Guard have truly done an incredible job, but they are being slowed down by red tape outside their control and they need help. This bill will do just that.”
Jeffries suggested the bill might improve the state’s ability to issue contracts for future disaster recovery activities, but would have minimal effects on the current situation.
“Given some of the past concerns with aspects of the 2016 flood response, it’s incumbent upon us as legislators to act diligently in a way that helps restore public trust in this process,” Jeffries stated.
“We are encouraged by the progress being made and we look forward to continued efforts to move the recovery process forward.”