.HUDgov accused Texas’ land office in March of discriminating against Black and Latino Texans in its plan to distribute Hurricane Harvey aid. In a newly revised plan, Texas is again on track to send a higher share of funds to whiter, inland counties.
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Nevertheless, Coryell is slated to receive $3.4 million under the plan by the Texas General Land Office and its commissioner, George P. Bush., the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development accused Bush’s office of discriminating against Black and Latino Texans. The land office had an opportunity to correct these inequities as it developed a new spending plan.
John Henneberger, co-director of the low-income housing advocate Texas Housers, whose complaint set off the federal investigation, said the land office is failing to meet the most basic requirement for the money: to spend disaster aid in the areas at highest risk for disasters. The following year, Congress gave $4.3 billion in disaster mitigation aid in response to the storm, as well as floods in 2015 and 2016. Of that total, Texas reserved $2.6 billion for preparedness projects in Harvey-damaged areas. Gov. Greg Abbott tapped Bush and the land office for the job.
Though permitted by federal rules, the move decreased the likelihood that projects in coastal counties would be funded. the day the competition results went public, each tailored to a different county that had projects funded. Eleven days later, Bush announced he was seeking the Republican nomination for attorney general. The timing struck some on the coast as more than a coincidence.
Whatever goodwill Bush may have built inland came at a cost. Republicans in Houston were irate at how little money Harris County received. Republican Harris County Commissioner Tom Ramsey, a retired civil engineer, said that before the land office announcement, he had “never seen a more dysfunctional attempt to evaluate projects than this.” He accused Bush’s team of inventing criteria to justify diverting aid from Houston.
Bush’s impromptu plan for Harris County meant scrapping a second $1 billion scoring competition. And HUD would need to OK any changes to the original plan it had approved, a monthslong process that delayed the distribution of further aid. This is because a sizable chunk of the councils of government’s $1.2 billion will flow inland. Even if the land office spent all of it in HUD counties — the plan only requires the councils to spend half their allotment there — it would still not close the per-person spending gap created by the initial funding competition.
Of the nine states that received disaster mitigation funding from the same federal appropriation, only Texas has received such a sanction. HUD gave the state two options: Enter into a voluntary agreement to correct the disparity or face a civil rights lawsuit from the Department of Justice.In a letter to the land office on March 18, HUD Office of Block Grant Assistance Director Jessie Handforth Kome said the agency was required to approve the new plan because it was “substantially complete.
The land office has since shown few signs it is open to compromise. In a blistering 12-page letter in April responding to the discrimination findings, attorneys for the agency called HUD’s objections “politically motivated” and “factually and legally baseless” and noted that HUD had approved the state’s plan for distributing the money.
The county sustained damage from hurricanes Harvey and then Hanna in 2020. It ranks 10th in the disaster index of Texas counties but received zero dollars from the land office scoring competition. “My only concern is that by not recognizing who’s really getting hit [by storms] first and where the damages are, you’re really not fully addressing the fiscal responsibility of it all,” Canales said. “If you look at our damage assessments, they’re not inland.”
Peggy Bull’s home has flooded three times and now worries about her son, who recently bought a house that promptly had stormwater spill into the garage. Bobby Chesnutt, who also lives in the floodplain, worries if he’ll be next. Eddie Aguilera, who in 2019 caught a 3-foot gar in floodwater in his front yard — and has a photograph to prove it — mostly frets about his parents. They’re 84 and shouldn’t have to wade through floods to get to doctors appointments, he said.
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