Bury Me Broken

Bush Evacuee Deadline Costing $11 Million a Night

Deadlines. Deadlines. Deadlines. [No this isn’t the Iraqi constitutional process, implementation of permanent tax cuts or the forestalling of environmental safeguards.]

From the NYTimes:

Straining to meet President Bush's mid-October deadline to clear out shelters, the federal government has moved hundreds of thousands of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina into hotel rooms at a cost of about $11 million a night, a strategy local officials and some members of Congress criticize as incoherent and wasteful.

[snip]

The reliance on hotels has been necessary, housing advocates say, because the Federal Emergency and Management Agency has had problems installing mobile homes and travel trailers for evacuees and has been slow to place victims in apartments that real estate executives say are available throughout the southeast.
Hotel costs are expected to grow to as much as $425 million by Oct. 24, a large expense never anticipated by the FEMA, which is footing the bill. While the agency cannot say how that number will affect overall spending for storm relief, critics point out that hotel rooms, at an average cost of $59 a night, are significantly more expensive than apartments and are not suitable for months-long stays.

The criticism is not solely partisan as is always the claim with this administration.

Even conservative housing experts have criticized the Bush administration's handling of the temporary housing response. "I am baffled," said Ronald D. Utt, a former senior official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Reagan administration aide who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative research organization. "This is not incompetence. This is willful. That is the only way I can explain it."

Willful. Really. You mean to tell me that in the aftermath of Katrina that actions taken, actions negating the possibility of progress or saving lives could be seen as willful. You mean like this post and this post. Is it a surprise after the shining example of no-bid contracts in Iraq that we saw Halliburton licking their lips in the Big Easy? Is it a surprise to anyone that the labor desperately needed by the citizens of the area would be outsourced to KBR?

I will not make the error of attributing a motive to the Heritage Foundation senior fellow other than his stated surprise but I will say that folks there and at the American Enterprise Institute have been doing Titanic-style, perfect 10, pike two and a half, no splash dives off the deck of the USS Bush Administration when it has been their scholarship, their economics, their foreign policy, world view and ivory towered machinations that are responsible for this administration's failures. Theoretical, unempirical policies begat this stagnant economy, privatization and outsourcing of everything, the great capitalist venture that was Iraq, the attempted ambushing of Social Security, tort reform, corporate protection against lawsuit and a host of others.

posted by niteskolar @ 5:30 AM