General Land Office plans to take control of funds for Harvey

Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush on Wednesday said he is moving forward with a takeover of federal funds granted to the city for Hurricane Harvey housing recovery, prompting a sharp rebuke from Mayor Sylvester Turner.

In a letter to Turner, Bush said General Land Office officials are drafting an amendment to the agency’s spending plan that will “eliminate all funding” to the city and “transfer all responsibility for administering disaster assistance to City residents to the GLO.” The letter applies to more than $1 billion in grant funding allocated to the city for housing recovery.

Bush told Turner that if he gives up control of the funds within a week, the city could “negotiate the possible retention” of its multi-family rental and home buyer assistance programs, among others. But he indicated that the GLO would seek Department of Housing and Urban Development approval to take control of the city’s largest program, a more than $400 million effort to repair or replace single-family homes damaged in the storm.

“While we assumed we would fulfill this responsibility with the cooperation and assistance of the City, all attempts by GLO to assist the City in meeting its performance goals and, more recently, to renegotiate the Contact to allow for more timely disbursement of allocated funding have been met with consistent opposition by the City,” Bush wrote in the letter.

Turner promised to use “all necessary legal steps” to fight the

move. He said a GLO team sent a letter Friday indicating they were satisfied with the city’s actions. A March 31 program status report showed repairs had begun on 59 homes and 44 homeowners had been reimbursed for work they had paid for themselves.

“There’s only one answer why Commissioner Bush would draw a different conclusion than the one carefully reached by the GLO’s Monitoring and Quality Assurance team — politics,” Turner said in a statement.

Brittany Eck, a GLO spokeswoman, said the letter “clearly states the

monitoring review of Houston’s performance demonstrated ‘the lack of timely expenditures.’”

“All communications from the GLO to the City of Houston regarding performance in administering disaster recovery funds articulate the city is not on track to expend the more than a billion direct allocation by the federally mandated contract” by the deadline in August 2024, Eck said.

Turner said the GLO had failed to give written guidance for the documents it needed to approve home applications, constantly changed the process and forced the city to redo hundreds of processed files, refused to cover three-bedroom homes, and swiftly went from approving more than 75 percent of applications to rejecting the same amount.

“Let me note that in the face of unrealistic, frivolous requirements, the City has quietly worked to correct our issues, expecting the GLO to do the same,” Turner said in his statement. “Instead, the GLO’s lack of capacity for reviewing our files, their ongoing technical issues, their failure to provide clear and consistent guidance for what they needed up front, and their slow-walking of many of the other documents required for our recovery programs contributed to the delay Commissioner Bush now uses to attempt to strip the City of its funding.”

The move is the latest in a series of public feuds between Bush, a Republican, and Democrat Turner over Harvey aid. In December, the state threatened a takeover, asking interested companies for proposals on how they would administer the funds.

A GLO spokeswoman said at the time that the agency had not decided whether to take control of the housing repair program but was putting itself in position to act if the city continued to lag. She said the takeover had been threatened in part because the city had balked at a state proposal to embed a team of recovery experts with city staff, an idea the city then agreed to in January.

Bush and Turner also traded barbs over the city’s effort to skirt a GLO rule barring local governments from using federal Harvey recovery funds to rebuild a home with more bedrooms than the number of people living there. The GLO denied Houston and Harris County waivers that would exempt them from the guideline, fearing Texas would face the risk of an audit by HUD.

Last October, Gov. Greg Abbott gave Bush control of $4.3 billion in post-Harvey mitigation aid instead of letting city and county officials oversee the funds. Turner accused the state of making a “money grab” so they could spend the funds outside the Houston area, while Abbott blamed Turner for the slow home rebuilding process.