Federal Emergency Management Agency officials awarded Los Angeles County $780,000 to build a wall, then another $945,000 for the same completed work after the California jurisdiction went way over the original budget.
The inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the emergency agency, blamed the loss on the California county because officials there decided without authorization to change plans to build the wall along a road that would minimize damage from future wildfires.
Los Angeles lacked federal permission to build that type of wall and didn’t follow “hazard mitigation” standards for doing so.
At the time of the flooding disaster in late 2004 and early 2005, the road in question had no supporting wall and collapsed after heavy rains and mudslides pummeled the pavement.
County officials entreated FEMA for the additional $945,645 to build the wall in 2006, basing their appeal off a geotechnical report the county had commissioned. The federal agency had initially approved the construction of the wall at a cost of $780,511.
“The county ultimately built a wall that was different from what FEMA approved … and different from what the geotechnical report recommended,” the inspector general found.
FEMA’s regional office denied the county’s appeal for the funding increase “on the basis that the county performed unauthorized improvements.” County officials had already forged ahead with $1.7 million of improvements anyway.
In October 2007, FEMA approved the county’s second appeal for both the initial $780,000 and the extra $945,000. The agency did so by overturning its regional office’s decision to deny Los Angeles that money.
“Our concern was not that FEMA headquarters officials acted improperly in reversing the region’s decisions,” the inspector general wrote, “but rather that they had done so without providing reasonable justification.”
Although the watchdog recommended FEMA recover the $945,000 in unauthorized payments, the agency refused to do so in comments on the report.
The federal agency disputed the inspector general’s claims that the cost overruns were solely the result of the county’s decision to change the materials with which it planned to build the wall.
Los Angeles County received $54.9 million in FEMA grants overall to repair damages caused by the heavy rains and ensuing mudslides that began in 2004. The grants provided funding for 218 projects.
In the years since that disaster, the inspector general has levied a litany of criticism at FEMA and the California county for allegedly mismanaging federal dollars. A September 2013 report found the county couldn’t account for $14,000 it spent on labor and equipment in just two of those projects.
The inspector general also found $16 million in unused and unnecessary funds in March 2012 that had been left over from 79 projects, most which were completed by 2006.
Instead of giving the money back to FEMA, however, California officials initially argued they should be allowed to keep those funds to cover the cost of other projects that might go over budget, which violated the agency’s rules.
“These officials told us that, although they agree that the projects we identified were completed — and that a significant amount of unneeded funding remains obligated — they have chosen not to submit the necessary documentation to FEMA at this point because they feel that there would be unnecessary financial, time- and effort-related costs associated with doing so,” the inspector general wrote.
Even so, emergency agency officials subsequently recovered the $16 million.
An April 2013 report found more than $100,000 in unauthorized “fringe benefits” that the county had paid to its employees went to staff that had nothing to do with the disaster repair work.
The inspector general discovered $2.4 million in additional unnecessary funds tied up in completed projects in June 2013, which it demanded be taken from the county and put to better use.
The next month, yet another report revealed Los Angeles had awarded a series of sole-source contracts to companies from an “on-call list” of preferred contractors it had written years before the flooding.
Not only were the non-competitive contracts awarded long after the urgency of the disaster had passed, but they were written without “project-specific cost ceilings” to keep spending under control, the inspector general said in July 2013.
“Contractor expenses were not carefully and consistently monitored,” the inspector general said.
The inspector general has written a total of six reports in the course of what it has called a larger audit of the $54.9 million FEMA gave to Los Angeles County as a result of the 2004-2005 flood, which it has broken down into segments “because of the size of the award and number of projects.”
“The findings described within this series of audit reports on the county derive from, or are exacerbated by, insufficient grant management,” the inspector general said in one of the reports.
