Puerto Ricans find a lifeline in recovery jobs

ALIANA ACEVEDO isn’t collecting a paycheck, because the Ritz-Carlton hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, is shut indefinitely. She’s trying to get a job with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a lifeline for the battered island’s tourism industry in more ways than one.

More than 13,000 federal government workers who were dispatched to Puerto Rico for hurricanes Irma and Maria are filling the open hotels — sometimes three to a single room. For those that remain shuttered, the agency is giving idled employees hope until tourists return to the US territory’s beaches, rain forests and colonial Spanish beauty.

“I just need a job,” said Ms. Acevedo, 25, a waitress at the hotel’s Mares restaurant, explaining that she had only $800 in cash. “It’s making me anxious. I’ll do whatever. ”

The recovery after this year’s devastating hurricane season, which is already a slow period for hotels, is providing a welcome, if temporary, boost for a tourism industry worried about its future. The federal government’s hotel reimbursement rate of $167 a night in San Juan, which rises to $195 during high season, can last only so long. FEMA deployments are typically for 30 days, though they can be extended.

Hurricane Harvey’s aftermath gave Houston’s hotels a similar boost. They went from being the worst performers through July this year to leading the nation in occupancy and revenue growth since the cyclone made landfall Aug. 26.

In Puerto Rico, federal personnel are staying not only in hotels, but on cots at the convention center, in sheds and on ships. The work force is still swelling.

On Sunday, Rosario de Liriano spent her day stopping people on the streets of Fajardo who looked like they might work for FEMA in hope of landing a job. Before the storm, she owned a small business on the island of Vieques. She came to Puerto Rico’s northeast corner because she thought she’d have a better chance of tracking down information.

Such job-seekers have shaped the agency’s work force for years. “Many FEMA employees started as local hires in their own states following a declared disaster,’’ Corey Coleman, a FEMA officer, wrote in an e-mail.

The jobs are needed more than ever. Tourism in Puerto Rico is almost “all gone, certainly, through the first quarter, if not the first half of 2018,’’ said Martin Rapp, a senior vice-president at Altour International, Inc., a New York travel agency.

Bookings to Puerto Rico are down about 20% since hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria began in late August, said Donna Cheek, an agent with Bentley Hedges Travel in Oklahoma City. “We do a lot of cruise business and people are concerned about whether or not Puerto Rico is going to be a port of call for them,” Ms. Cheek said.

The drop-off comes amid a broader economic crisis. Puerto Rico in May sought protection from creditors in the largest insolvency of any US municipality, $74 billion. The situation has been deteriorating since 1996, when the repeal of a corporate tax break caused manufacturing and investment to decline and younger people to leave the island. Average weekly wages in Puerto Rico are about half the US average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. —