The FEMA Fiasco

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It is no wonder that the public never heard about the FEMA fiasco until lately. What does a city do when they have taken money from the government in the tune of $26 million for three hurricanes in 2004 and 2005, and now FEMA wants the city to return multi millions ($8 mil now reduced to right under $4 mil) which FEMA says the city is not entitled? I wouldn’t want that to get out in the public either. Lake Worth has enough problems with its reputation as it is.

Last Tuesday night, the city gave more attention to the Fourth of July event and the raft races as well as a report from one neighborhood association than it did on one single important issue that came before the body. Having said that, not much comes before the commission these days. Their goal is to get the heck out of there by 7:30pm and never let the public know what's going on. This attitude probably reflects why the public NEVER was informed about the FEMA fiasco until management could no longer keep it under wraps.  The city management obviously had made a decision not to discuss this dirty laundry. This seems to be the method of operation on what goes on in the city as management is reluctant to talk about things unbecoming a city government or just about anything specific unless they have to. Eventually the Finance Director was given the direction to go ahead and give a full report a few weeks ago.

As previously stated, if you look over the biggest part of the FEMA claim, the utility is the culprit. This is the one area of our city where no one knows what's going on. I would imagine that management has interviewed every single employee who was working here during the three hurricanes who are still in our employ and all those who signed off on and submitted bills to FEMA—all those who made the decision to include the various materials for submittal, who approved the payroll and who determined the work schedule and levels of personnel.

If the city manager has done that in conjunction with a utility expert that he can rely on to be candid and forthcoming, someone should have been able to readily identify erroneous or even false submissions to FEMA. If he had interviewed staff even briefly, his utility expert would have been able to ascertain what the invoices were for and if they pertained to hurricane damage. We don't expect the city manager to understand what specific equipment was relative to the hurricanes, but staff at the time will know, and there lies the rub. No one is going to fess up and commit themselves to any specific known or faulty submission. It’s a disgrace, and it all started and ended at the top of management at that time.  From what a source told me, they felt that "everyone else was doing it" so it was a-okay.

They had purchased inventory items such as poles and transformers and billed them against the storms, so says a source who was there at the time. 400 poles!  I am also in copy of an invoice submitted to FEMA that was for work on the Lucerne Condo project being built at that time. My source says this had nothing to do with hurricane damage. Some claims were already paid by insurance and still submitted to FEMA. Some people believe, after reviewing the docs, that fraud was committed and some people need to go to jail. Strong stuff.

Now we have a city government and a city commission that has to deal with the ills of the past under Paul Boyer where every damn thing went missing while the city feels that they are forced to claim that no funny business took place back then in order for our city to maintain some sort of credible reputation and more importantly, stay afloat.

In reviewing the current storm plan it does not address the major issues raised by FMEA and how the current staff has put policies and procedures in place to mitigate a reoccurrence of the city’s past failures. In fact the plan is not current even though the cover page indicates it is the plan for 2013.

But just like everything else that is unpleasant, this too will be kept quiet. The city will hope their next FEMA appeal will be favorable too as the number of years that have passed since the hurricanes will be advantageous to their objective. The Commission has a moral duty to get to the bottom of it and the truth. However, this commission has showed no outrage and seems to be acting in open, undeclared, but blatant bureaucratic complacence and is going along with Staff's explanations.