The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has informed Gov. Rick Perry that it is not accepting the state’s plan for spending the second round of federal funds to help communities recover from the storms of 2008. HUD officials cited some procedural problems with the plan for spending $1.7 billion in community development block grants to help victims of Hurricane Ike and other storms.
Here’s a blunter assessment formula, which we published two months ago: The state’s plan steers money all over Texas but shortchanges the place where Hurricane Ike did the most damage.
The formula that the state’s leaders favored is based on weather models, rather than assessments of actual damage.
The analysis of Gulf Coast Interfaith, which has lobbied for more funding to repair and replace housing in the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Ike, ought to be persuasive.
If you use the formula based on weather models, you have to believe that the 190,921 houses in the Houston-Galveston Area Council of Governments area sustained $27,175 of damage per house.
Meanwhile, you have to assume that the 1,361 houses that reported damage in the so-called Pool of 7 — the areas represented by seven councils of governments that were not hit by the storm — sustained an average of $521,387 of damage.
That’s one example of the many absurdities that the state’s plan leads to. If you’re a fan of the state’s plan, you also have to believe that the 10,112 houses in the region of the Deep East Texas Council of Governments — which includes Lufkin and Nacogdoches — sustained an average of $226,096 damage, about eight times the amount as the average house in the Houston-Galveston region.
If you ignore the rhetoric of state officials and look at the numbers, you see a plan that looks as if it were designed to help cities and counties get federal money for infrastructure projects, rather to help ordinary people replace and repair damaged housing.
Federal officials got this one right. This plan did not deserve approval.
