Federal officials wasted more than $12 million on unnecessary repairs by not following their own guidelines for disaster clean-up.
A new report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general said officials tasked with rebuilding Cedar Rapids, Iowa, after a devastating 2008 flood misrepresented the cost of repairing a handful of damaged city buildings.
The resulting figures caused Federal Emergency Management Agency officials to approve scrapping four damaged facilities and constructing new ones for millions more than it would have cost to simply repair them.
FEMA uses a “50 percent rule” when determining whether to repair or rebuild structures damaged in disasters.
According to the rule, FEMA will replace a damaged building if the cost to repair it exceeds 50 percent of the cost to build a new facility.
The DHS IG said FEMA officials included the cost of per diem, air travel, lodging and other inappropriate expenses in its estimate of the repair value, pushing the ratio of costs over the 50-percent threshold needed to justify a new building.
The four new facilities cost taxpayers more than $20.7 million, while fixing the old ones would have required just $8.6 million.
In 2012, another inspector general audit found nearly $150 million in wasted FEMA funds that should have been put to better use, including similar instances of project cost miscalculation and obligated funds that were never even used.
Cedar Rapids received $330 million in relief funds from FEMA following the flood, which covered more than 1,000 city blocks after the Cedar River reached historic heights in the summer of 2008.
