More terrible contracting and funding
decisions leave island adrift
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| Trump returns to take back paper towels from ungrateful Puerto Ricans |
The contract awarded to the fledging Montana company Whitefish
Energy, which has now been
canceled, is not the only
case of millions in business being awarded by President Trump’s FEMA to a
company that has no infrastructure, no significant history and little ability
to do the job it promised to do.
In the case of Whitefish, the federal government blamed the
government of Puerto Rico for giving a $300 million contract to a recently
formed company with few employees and no real headquarters, let alone
experience doing the job for which it contracted.
FEMA can’t make the same excuse about
Bronze Star LLC, , a newly created Florida company that it awarded $30 million
in contracts to provide emergency tarps and plastic sheeting desperately needed
to cover homes and buildings where the roof was torn off and there was other
damage when the hurricane made land on the island in September.
About a month after the contract was granted in
competitive bidding, Bronze Star had still not delivered the badly needed
supplies, and FEMA was forced to terminate the contract and then restart the
entire process of finding reputable vendors while the people of Puerto Rico
continue to suffer.
Besides the hurricane, the island has been drenched by severe
rainstorms which have caused extensive flooding, while the lack of the tarps
and plastic covers left homeless Puerto Ricans, to paraphrase an old
joke, literally up the river without a paddle.
At least 60,000 structures island-wide still need the “blue
roofs” with only 350 being installed each day. “One of the limiting
factors is the availability of the material,” admitted Michael
Byrne, Puerto Rico’s FEMA coordination officer.
These tragic mistakes have raised
new questions about the process FEMA has used to award contracts to quickly
provide what Puerto Ricans need to restore electricity and clean water, fix
roads and buildings, and other badly needed services and materials. One
criterion FEMA uses is to favor contractors who are owned and run by veterans.
That may have been a factor in awarding the contract to Bronze
Star, which makes it an, even more, egregious case of mismanagement since
neither of the two Jones’ brothers who run the startup out of single-family
house in a residential neighborhood in St Cloud, Florida, had ever got a Bronze
Star, although both are veterans.
You might think another tipoff might have been that Bronze Star
had never before won any kind of government contract and has no history of
being able to deliver tarps or plastic of the kind needed in Puerto Rico, but
you would be wrong.
Yet on October 10, FEMA awarded two contracts to Bronze Star,
one to provide 500,000 tarps and the other for 60,000 rolls of plastic
sheeting.
“The award of a government contract to a company with absolutely no experience in producing the materials sought obviously raises very bright red flags,” Dan Feldman, professor of public management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University in New York, told the Associated Press.
“I would hope and assume,” adds Feldman, “that the
inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security would begin
immediately to take a very hard look at this process.”
Instead, Ron Roth, a spokesman for FEMA, had a litany of
excuses. He said that due to the emergency FEMA expedited the process to
respond quickly to the crisis, but he insisted the agency still did its due
diligence.
“Submissions from potential contractors are objectively evaluated,” insists Roth, “and a contract is awarded based on the highest-rated submission.”
That is supposed to take into account a contractors ability to
deliver what it promises, its past performance and the best value available in
terms of price and items that can meet specific specifications.
Alan Miller, an attorney with nearly two decades of experience
advising federal contractors, told the AP that FEMA must look at whether the
company has the right infrastructure, “do they have the inventory process, the
production process, the financial capability, for performing the work?”
After the cancellation of the Bronze Star contract, FEMA quickly
awarded the contract for plastic sheeting to OSC Solutions Inc of West Palm
Beach, Florida, that has two decades experience handling government contracts
and has produced the kind of supplies need a number of times in the past.
Bronze Star was not paid for the work it did not do.
The contract was written, as in the case of Whitefish, to prevent
serious government oversight of the agreement, which raises, even more,
questions about how FEMA operates.
Cobra Acquisitions, according to The
Intercept, which started as a
business this year, is a subsidiary of an oil industry services company in
Oklahoma.
“Unlike the Whitefish contract,” reports The Intercept, “the Cobra deal with PREPA involved heavy input from (FEMA), which – according to a recent conference call convened by Mammoth Energy Services – was “in the room” and there “every step of the way.”
The article says that it believes the Inspector General of the
Department of Homeland Security is investigating the Cobra contracts.
When President Trump visited Puerto Rico Rico he praised FEMA
for its quick action even though weeks had passed, and now months, without the
basic services like electric, water, medical and communications being fully
restored.
An emergency of this scale is certainly a challenge, but FEMA
seems to have been much better at addressing the needs in Texas and Florida,
which were also hit by hurricanes, than it has done in Puerto Rico.
It has been suggested that is racism because the population of
Puerto Rico is mostly Hispanic, and the failure of Congress to properly fund
the effort there seems to back that up.
Ultimately, however, it is up to
Trump and his administration to make sure FEMA is doing the job in Puerto Rico,
and as of now, that remains a very serious question.
Trump doesn’t seem to care much. After his brief visit to San
Juan to provide pictures to prove he is doing something, little has been heard
or done by the president to actually solve the problems and relieve the
suffering of some three million Americans on the island.
While Trump is concerned about protests by pro football players,
playing gold and jamming through tax cuts for big corporations and the
super-rich, the on-going, unsolved, tragic problems of Puerto Rico continue.
