City hopes to build on post-Harvey volunteer effort
Donated time, money would contribute to cost matching
Houston leaders hope to turn residents’ rush to volunteer after Hurricane Harvey into a sustained, coordinated program that could also save taxpayers millions in disaster recovery costs.
The city’s “recovery czar,” Marvin Odum, for weeks has been negotiating a pilot program with FEMA that would expand the city’s ability to count volunteer hours and donated materials toward the money it otherwise would need to put up as a local match to receive federal disaster grants.
Typically, local governments must match 25 percent of the federal government’s contributions during a disaster and its aftermath, and can only count volunteer hours and donated materials toward that match in the removal of storm debris and in immediate emergency response efforts, such as sheltering victims.
For Harvey, the Trump administration agreed to drop the local match to 10 percent, but even those costs could run into the tens of millions of dollars — money “that we don’t have,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said — as Houston repairs damaged facilities and tries to prepare for the next storm.
That is where Odum’s proposal comes in.
If federal officials agree to count volunteer hours and donated materials toward the city’s local match as it repairs roads, drainage systems, utilities and parks, and begins investing in projects to make the region more resilient to future floods, it could significantly help the city’s bottom line.
“The spirit of Houstonians is volunteering,” Turner said. “This would allow us to capitalize on that spirit and stretch the dollars allocated to Houston even further.”
FEMA, in a prepared statement issued Thursday, said it is “reviewing” the proposal. The statement confirmed the agreement would be the first of its kind, but did not address how the talks are progressing or when they might complete.
Stretching the definition
Odum said the details of what would qualify under the expanded rules and how that would be documented still are being worked out. Thus far, he said, federal officials have indicated they may be willing to let the city count volunteer hours and donated materials toward its local match on “permanent work” without the need for congressional action.
That likely would cover architects or engineers donating their time to design repairs to damaged city buildings, Odum said, or donated hours from electricians hired to carry out those repairs. The hours volunteers spend helping repair damaged community centers in parks also could count, he said.
Odum readily acknowledges there are gray areas: Volunteers could be trusted to paint newly repaired city facilities, but would a coat of paint qualify as sufficiently “permanent”?
“Depending on how far we can stretch the definition, we’ll pull in as much of that work as we can,” Odum said. “Are you going to have an amateur from west or east Houston working on electrical circuits? No way.”
Tennessee-based disaster recovery consultant and former FEMA deputy director Glen Hitchcock praised Odum’s idea, but cautioned implementing it could require formal policy changes on FEMA’s part. Auditors not privy to the current negotiations could wind up forcing the city to cover its full local match, he added, unless Odum’s team gets a commitment in writing from FEMA brass in Washington.
“Just because FEMA officials in the recovery division say they’re going to look at it and pilot it doesn’t mean that can be done,” Hitchcock said. “I wish them well, I hope they can do it, but it’d be a big change.”
Hitchcock said he would encourage a client to ask companies to donate their services, but not try to present that charity as a local match. For instance, he said, securing $100,000 in donated work toward a $700,000 repair would drop the cost to $600,000 — thus cutting the city’s match from $70,000 to $60,000.
Ultimately, Odum said, Congressional action likely would be necessary to achieve his broader goal of gaining the authority to apply volunteer outreach to flooded seniors or volunteer home repair efforts in one corner of the city toward the city’s match on repairing, for example, its flood-damaged courthouse downtown.
One hammer, two nails
The current talks also would apply only to infrastructure work that would be supported by FEMA: primarily road, drainage, utility and parks projects.
The FEMA dollars now flowing into housing repairs across the Texas Gulf Coast come with no local match, so the volunteer proposal would not apply. Future housing repair programs will be funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which would require a parallel negotiation about Houston’s local match to that agency.
Ideally, Odum hopes to tie a newfound federal flexibility to an ambitious, city-coordinated volunteer effort he expects to be rolled out soon, letting residents help their neighbors and the city’s budget with the same swing of a hammer.
“This is not just the city starting up something — there are thousands of people out there doing amazing things right now. So, it’s building on that effort and then doing what we can to even better coordinate that effort by matching the need with the capability,” Odum said. “And then, as far as this FEMA program goes — and potentially expanding it beyond that — it’s making sure that work is defined and recorded and documented in a way that it would apply to a match offset.”
FEMA’s current regulations require local governments to show the number of volunteer hours worked, the work site at which they were logged, and a description of the work performed by each volunteer.
That labor is valued at the rate paid for comparable work in the local labor market; donated materials are valued by multiplying the number of hours each donated item was used by an equipment rate determined by FEMA.
Houston, thus far, has submitted paperwork covering only the first month of volunteer activities at the George R. Brown Convention Center, when it served as the main shelter for Harvey victims.
The city tallied $2.4 million in donated goods and 956,862 volunteer hours — valued at $12.2 million — between Aug. 28 and Oct. 10 at the GRB, said Gloria Moreno of the city finance department.