From The Parkersburg News and Sentinel:
In the “here we go again” category, the bureaucrats in Charleston continue to prove to the federal government that they simply cannot be trusted with large sums of money.
One would think, after having been placed on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s “slow spender” list for much of 2018 for its failure to properly spend Community Development Block Grant program funding for disaster recovery, the state Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety/Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management would have made the necessary changes to avoid such an embarrassment.
Simply wanting to do the right thing to help those in need does not appear to be a motivator for these folks.
But Adjutant General James Hoyer, the man Gov. Jim Justice brought in to clean up the mess that had been made of the state’s flood recovery efforts, and Homeland Security Director Michael Todorovich must have a bigger job on their hands than the governor let on.
West Virginia is back on the “slow spender” list for “spending less than 10 percent of monthly pace required to fully use the grant by target closeout.” That would be the $149 million from HUD for recovery from floods that tore through parts of our state nearly THREE years ago.
Meanwhile, West Virginia’s Auditor’s Public Integrity and Fraud Unit says there is still a lot of work to do in correcting the systemic incompetence that has caught the feds’ notice. …
Read the editorial at http://www.newsandsentinel.com/opinion/editorials/2019/04/bureaucracy-changes-needed-for-overdue-disaster-relief/
