Harvey housing study in works
Bush appointee set to explore ways to maximize efforts
Thousands of Texans are still awaiting housing help after Hurricane Harvey, but Land Commissioner George P. Bush has already hired someone to study how to improve the state’s process for providing it.
Bush, the son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and grandson of former President George H.W. Bush, chose Andrew Natsios to prepare a report on the lessons learned from the land office administering the housing programs. Natsios is director of the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs and a professor in the George H.W. Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.
The Houston Chronicle previously reported that a first-of-itskind experiment to allow Texas state officials to administer short-term housing programs had bogged down in paperwork, legal wrangling and efforts to increase staffing. Texas now expects to spend just $1.1 billion of the $2.6 billion that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had originally thought would be needed for the programs.
After massive undisclosed cost overruns on a Boston highway project known as “The Big Dig,” Natsios, a former Massachusetts state legislator, took the reins of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority in 2000 and got high marks for overseeing reforms. From 2001 to 2006, he was administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and managed reconstruction programs in Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan.
Natsios said those experiences were complex, but what Bush’s state land office has tried to do in adding short-term housing programs after Harvey to its usual role in overseeing federal funding for permanent housing after natural disasters is “complex in an entirely different way.”
He noted there are six levels of government involved in Harvey shortterm and long-term housing efforts — FEMA, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the state, counties, municipalities and councils of government. The councils are regional planning bodies that can award federal disaster recovery funds to local governments.
“The only thing comparable is the complexities of the European Union in terms of understanding all of the decision points,” he said.
He said he hasn’t examined yet whether Texas made the right call in granting FEMA’s request for the state to run the programs in the aftermath of such a massive hurricane as Harvey. Natsios said Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision “created risk, but if I were governor, I’d rather have the power in my own hands rather than the federal government managing it.”
Abbott gave that power to Bush, who last week won the Republican primary in his bid for a second term as land commissioner. Last December, Bush assigned the “lessons learned” report to Natsios, who is working for $1.
“I don’t want to be a paid consultant,” he said.
Natsios, 68, said he is working with Bush on when his report will be completed.
“The only thing comparable is the complexities of the European Union in terms of understanding all of the decision points.”
Andrew Natsios, on the complexities of his new task