How can it be that, a year after Hurricane Ike, people living in Kemah and Clear Lake Shores face being thrown off their property because they’ve been unable to make repairs?
The cities are not at fault. Officials argue they have a responsibility to enforce codes forbidding people to live in substandard housing, and that’s true. If Galveston, for example, were strictly enforcing its codes, many others would be in the same situation.
Those officials also argue that people who can’t afford to rebuild after a hurricane can’t afford to live along the coast.
That would be a compelling argument, except the federal government has allocated something like $3 billion in tax money to ease the pain and suffering hurricanes Ike and Dolly caused.
If we were going to declare every man for himself, we should have done so before the federal money began flowing, and we should have applied the concept across the board.
Aside from being killed by a hurricane, losing your property because of one is about as bad an outcome as there is.
So the question remains: How is it that, one year and hundreds of millions of tax dollars after the storm, people are facing that worst-case outcome?
Forget hurricane repairs for a minute. How is it people in the news article on the front page of today’s paper have been living in such squalid conditions for a year after Ike?
Federal taxpayers put up hundreds of millions to prevent just that sort of thing. Where is that money?
Some of it went to nonprofit groups, many of which nobody had ever heard of before Ike.
Some of those groups were given millions of dollars for no other purpose than to find people needing help. We found the people; why didn’t they?
Even if they had found the people, there apparently is no money to help them.
Run that around in your head. We have given millions in tax dollars to nonprofits, which had no apparent local presence before Ike, to hire and train case managers, to direct people toward aid that does not exist. Kafka could not have dreamed that up.
In the meantime, federal money is being earmarked to:
• Buy out high-dollar beach houses on Galveston’s West End;
• Pay for public-works projects that have been on the books for years, decades in some cases;
• Pay for studies of things that have been studied before; and
• Pay for rewriting city codes.
Officials of both public and private organizations managing Ike money always want to lead the conversation about it into a bureaucratic morass.
These dollars must flow through this ditch and past that committee and through these hoops, while those dollars follow an entirely different path.
Which is true, but it’s also true that all of the dollars came from the same place — the pockets of federal taxpayers. Were anyone to ask them, what would those taxpayers think?
