A Place To Call Home…
Dateline: Nashville, TN, September 28, 2005
Headline: Metro’s big question: Where is FEMA?
The City Paper reports today that “Hundreds of displaced families from Houston and Baton Rouge are waiting for Nashville agencies to find interim housing in Middle Tennessee, but local organizations’ hands are tied until they hear from the federal government.”
The article goes on to quote officials from government and various agencies charged with responsibility for tending the needs of the displaced families, some of which have been living in mass shelters for going on 4 weeks! While it is not entirely clear where the responsibility and blame should be directed, it is increasingly clear that FEMA has failed once again to live up to the grandiose vote-getting promises made by the Bush administration.
Everything Bush has said and done, or rather said and not done, seems to confirm his philosophy of “Promise them anything to shut them up and then forget about it. We’ve got wells to drill, countries to invade, and wars to fight.”
Hundreds and thousands of homeless families thank you with all they have Mr. Bush! And what they have is absolutely nothing. Are you so determined to keep them that way that you can’t pull a string or two in Washington to get these folks out of the shelters and into homes. They don’t ask for or need anything fancy right now — just a place to call home!
UPDATE: September 30, 2005
Thanks to Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By for the link to this NY Times article which amplifies and underscores the severity of FEMA’s ineptitude and stumbling. The problems are far broader in geographic scope than my original post covered based on the local source I referenced at that time. No suprise there!
2 Comments so far
Not that I disagree with anything you’ve said here, but why don’t the local agencies just go ahead and find homes without waiting for FEMA? It’s the people who are important; the bureaucratic paper pushing can be sorted out later.
I’m nowhere near an expert on this, so maybe another reader can clear it up. But as I understand it, at least in TN, it is illegal for the State to operate in a deficit, and State agencies and depts are not allowed to spend it if it has not be budgeted or allocated.
The private non-profit agencies all operate on shoestring budgets, most are struggling just to stay afloat. Funding from public and private sources has taken a huge hit on them since 9/11/01. Most of them have such shaky credit records and payment histories that for-profit businesses consider them bad risks and will not sell to them without some guarantee of payment, which is often through proof of a gov’t or foundation or corp grant. Much of the funding for assistance since Katrina has come from private sources; still waiting for the funds to flow downhill from DC.