'Reinventing a wheel': Little movement to address federal process that delays hurricane recovery money

After Congress approved money in October 2018 to rebuild homes destroyed by Hurricane Florence, it took the federal government 15 months to publish detailed rules for spending that money — a delay that contributed to people being out of their homes for years.

Congress could cut that time significantly for future natural disasters by passing legislation, but so far hasn't done so. Federal lawmakers are expected to renew a push to do so this session. Without that legislation, grant rules have to be written every time a new disaster strikes and new rebuilding money passes.

“It's almost like every time we're reinventing a wheel,” U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis told WRAL News.

During the 15-month span it took federal officials to release Hurricane Florence rebuilding money, affected state and local governments had money from other federal programs to clean up debris. They had money to keep people in emergency housing.

But to get funding to rebuild homes long-term, through a program called CDBG-DR, they had to prepare a detailed plan. They couldn’t submit those plans until the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had written and published all the rules for that round of grants.

Once that was done, according to the state’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency, it took another several months of HUD review before the funds were released.

Less has been said about a change at the federal level that could shave months off the process at the front end.

Unlike many federal programs, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency programs that state and local governments rely on in the initial phases of hurricane recovery, these rebuilding funds aren’t part of a permanently authorized program. Congress creates them anew via legislation each time. Then the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development writes the detailed rules states have to live by if they want the money.

A bill to change the process by authorizing the program is expected to be filed soon, and Tillis' office said he will co-sponsor it.

That, the governors wrote, “is only the first required step in a lengthy and bureaucratic approval process setting out how that money can be put into action.”

Some reforms have passed, but authorization has not. Asked why not, Tillis said last week that he hadn’t spoken to other members of Congress about it, though he could predict their concerns.

“You always have to look out at how well-intentioned policy can be gamed,” Tillis said during a wide-ranging interview last week. “You’ve just got to be right in the tailoring. And billions and billions of dollars are involved, so we've just got to get the technical aspects right.”

A HUD spokesperson didn’t provide answers last week when asked why Congress hasn’t approved the change and why the department’s current process takes as long as it does.

Tillis also said each state has different priorities. Rules that might work for hurricane recovery in the Carolinas might not be right for wildfires in the West. There’s also resistance in Congress to permanently authorizing the program at HUD because some lawmakers think FEMA should have oversight over the program instead.

The CDBG-DR money is typically the last federal money spent in disaster recovery, meant to rebuild communities long-term. Other large pots of this money took less time to roll out in North Carolina. After 2016’s Hurricane Matthew, for example, the rule-making process took one month for a first $199 million, then three months for a second, smaller allotment.

But the 15-month delay after Florence ended in January of 2020, pushing that phase of rebuilding into the COVID-19 pandemic.

“One of the challenges of these long wait times is that the circumstances facing communities can change while states are still waiting to get federal recovery programs off the ground,” Cooper spokesman Ford Porter said in an email. “When the federal register for Florence was published in [January] 2020, no one expected a global pandemic that would contribute to severe supply chain and labor shortages in impacted communities.”

The governors’ letter also called on Congress to create a universal application for disaster survivors: One process to get help from FEMA, HUD and the Small Business Administration. In their 2019 letter, the governors’ called this a “critical reform.” The National Emergency Management Association says the change “would immediately improve the process.”

This reform also hasn’t passed, though House and Senate proposals exist. Tillis said some improvements have passed, though. He said that, in the past, federal officials would warn local governments hit by flooding not to remove storm debris too quickly, lest they fail to qualify for a coming federal reimbursement.

“Can you imagine the lunacy of saying you were eligible for that program, but you cleared the debris too soon as a reason for not getting that funding?” Tillis said. “That's why we worked on a bill in the last Congress to fix that.”

Tillis acknowledged more work remains.

“We've tried to dig into the plumbing of disaster recovery and unclog it,” he said. “And there's a lot of opportunities to do that.”