Victims haven’t received any of $1.3 billion in wildfire relief
LOS ANGELES – After her home in Santa Rosa, California, burned down in the Tubbs fire three years ago, Linda Adrain moved into a tiny apartment. She didn’t expect to stay long.
Adrain soon learned about plans for a complex for lowincome senior citizens on the site of the fire-ravaged mobile home park where she had lived for a quartercentury. She quickly signed up for a two-bedroom apartment.
But before breaking ground, developers were relying on funding from a federal disaster relief package approved by Congress a few months after the fire. They’re still waiting for the money. And so Adrain is still waiting for her new home.
“It’s supposed to be a temporary place, and I’ve been here for three years,” said Adrain, 80. “There’s nowhere for me to go.”
California has received more than $1.3 billion in federal aid to rebuild after the 2017 wine country wildfires, the 2018 Camp fire in Butte County and other disasters from those years. But disasteraffected homeowners and renters have yet to receive a single penny. The cause: yearslong federal and state bureaucratic delays.
As a result, renters like Adrain are going without permanent housing while homeowners are unable to cobble together enough money to rebuild their homes. In the Butte County town of Paradise, which was heavily damaged in the Camp fire, disaster victims are still living in cars and recreational vehicles on their properties as they await further financial assistance.
“This was a delay we wished we wouldn’t have had,” said Gustavo Velasquez, director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development, which is responsible for giving out the money. “Families deserve to have this money out to rebuild their lives.”
More than 4,500 homes were wiped out and 22 people died in the Tubbs fire, which began in Napa
County and spread through Santa Rosa in 2017. A year later, the Camp fire killed 85 people and destroyed nearly 14,000 homes, with much of the damage centered on Paradise.
In the wake of the disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency began providing temporary housing and other short-term assistance. Congress began approving further aid for California in February 2018 to permanently rebuild and prevent future disasters. About $300 million of that money is for 2017 relief; the remaining $1 billion is for the 2018 wildfires.
More than $300 million of the total is earmarked to finance new housing for low-income renters. An additional $250 million is dedicated to rebuild homeowners’ single-family homes. A third pot of money, more than $400 million, is set aside to repair roads, water systems and other infrastructure and make other public improvements aimed at lessening the effects of future fires.
To get access to the funding, California housing officials have needed to develop spending plans approved by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. But it took nearly two years after the disasters for HUD to sign off on any of the state’s proposals to respond to the 2017 wildfires. Last week, more than two years after the 2018 wildfires, federal officials finally authorized the state’s plans for that year’s relief efforts.
State housing officials expect Congress to OK additional funding for this year’s wildfires as well, which would again trigger the HUD approval process for the new money.
President Donald Trump and California leaders have fought over wildfire prevention, immigration, climate change and numerous other issues, and the president has at times threatened to withhold disaster funding from the state. But there’s no evidence these disputes have held up this money.
Indeed, massive delays
have beset disaster relief measures across the country, including dollars earmarked for hurricane-ravaged communities in Texas, Florida and Georgia in 2017. Additionally, Congress has approved more than $20 billion for Puerto Rico to recover from that year’s Hurricane Maria, yet the vast majority remained unspent as of this summer, according to a report from an internal congressional research agency.
The spending problems have attracted condemnation from Democrats and Republicans in Congress, with Sen. John Cornyn, R-texas, typically an ally of the president, among those accusing the administration of having intentionally stalled the money nationwide. HUD officials have denied that they prevented the dollars from coming out. Instead, they’ve lamented the complicated requirements surrounding the disaster relief program, which include writing new regulations every time the money is authorized.
Legislation to simplify how HUD handles disaster relief has not advanced despite bipartisan support.
“Our federal government’s disaster recovery system is broken,” said Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a Washington-based advocacy group that has tracked the issue. “These problems we run into every single time.”