Months after millions of federal stimulus dollars started pouring in to Georgia to weatherize the homes of low-income people, state contractors have done little of the work.
Several of the contractors have weatherized fewer than 10 houses. Among them are agencies serving Cobb, Gwinnett, DeKalb and Forsyth counties, where residents have struggled with frigid weather this month.
As of Nov. 30, the latest period for which the state released figures, contractors had completed work on about 430 houses, or 3 percent of the 13,617 homes the state wants to weatherize by March 2012. More than 11,000 people are on waiting lists, though that only reflects those who have asked for help and who may or may not qualify for it.
Georgia officials said one of their biggest challenges has been supersizing a state program that recently had a $7 million annual budget but is now eligible to receive $124.7 million in federal stimulus funds. The state is contracting with community organizations and nonprofit agencies that have done weatherization projects in the past. But most of the money spent during the first year of the program has been for “ramping up” to do the work, rather than doing the work itself.
“Frankly, we didn’t obviously jump on spending [the stimulus money] right away,” said Phil Foil, executive director of the Georgia Environmental Facilities Authority, the state agency overseeing the federal spending. “We wanted to take a very steady approach to this project. It is a lot of money. And we want to be good stewards of the taxpayer dollars.”
The weatherization program will cost $5 billion nationwide and was supposed to take three years. Nearly one year is already gone, and Georgia is not the only state that was slow out of the gate, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report in December. As of Sept. 30, the states had spent 2 percent of the $5 billion available — weatherizing 7,300 homes, or 1 percent of their goal of 593,000. The delay has partly been caused by a Recovery Act requirement that weatherization contractors pay their workers at least the prevailing wage as determined under federal law, the GAO report says.
Signed by President Barack Obama on Feb. 17, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act pays for efforts to weatherize homes for low-income families. The federal government sends grants to the states; the states divide the grant money among local or regional agencies; and the local and regional agencies hire people to do the work. The goals: create jobs while cutting utility bills, energy use and pollution.
Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan watchdog group in Washington, called the program a “Rube Goldberg operation that siphons off money at every level.”
“Some of these states are not even close to being up to speed and already lots of money has been spent,” said Leslie Paige, the group’s spokeswoman. “I can see getting to the end of this three-year trajectory and having people screaming bloody murder that they didn’t get their houses weatherized and the money is all gone. I just think this thing has been so poorly crafted.”
Such criticism notwithstanding, the program has helped many of the people it has reached so far.
Mary Rogers, who owns a house on Bridgeport Drive in northwest Atlanta, lost her job at a local mattress plant in May. She applied for weatherization assistance in November, and a crew from Southeast Energy Assistance started doing the work last week.
Rogers said she has had trouble heating her home — built in 1959 — particularly in recent weeks when the temperatures reached the teens.
“It was really cold in here,” she said as she watched the crew work. “I thank God for them helping me.”
The Southeast workers laid new insulation in Rogers’ attic, insulated her hot water heater, put up a new smoke detector and thermostat in her hallway, placed a thick plastic vapor barrier in her crawl space to control moisture and installed new ductwork there. Total cost: About $3,300, according to Darren Maguire of Southeast Energy, who notes that the final figure won’t be calculated for another week or so. The government’s maximum average cost per house is $6,500.
Nonetheless, for every home like Mary Rogers’ that have been weatherized with stimulus funds, another 32 in Georgia are waiting for help.
Foil, head of the Environmental Facilities Authority, said the pace should pick up in February, when Georgia’s contractors must start meeting regular goals — about 500 homes weatherized per month. The federal government is withholding half of each state’s funding until they complete at least 30 percent of the homes they have targeted and meet other requirements. In Georgia, that number is about 4,085 homes.
State officials raised concerns in April about the ability of their contractors to deal with a weatherization program that had suddenly grown so large. And they asked for a waiver of federal requirements that they contract solely with them and certain other organizations that have been doing such work through federal programs.
“The State of GA has concerns about the ability of Community Action Agencies to absorb and effectively manage large numbers of weatherization requests in a short period of time,” Celeste Osborn, then Georgia’s state accountability officer, wrote the U.S. Energy Department on April 30.
Georgia proposed hiring additional contractors to do the work. But the Energy Department denied the request, a state official said. So Georgia signed $99 million in stimulus contracts with its existing network of 22 community action agencies, nonprofits and local governments that have been doing home weatherizations. The state, however, has lined up other agencies that could help out in case any of those contractors fail to perform.
The AJC contacted several of the state’s contractors about the work they’ve done so far. Here’s what they said:
Gainesville-based Ninth District Opportunity Inc. contracted with the state in August to spend $8.8 million weatherizing 1,223 homes in Cobb, Forsyth and 12 other Georgia counties by March 2012. So far, Ninth District has completed none. But many are in the progress, said Mary Nell Gooch, the agency’s energy director.
There are 618 homes on the agency’s waiting list, 424 of which are in Cobb. Gooch said her agency has been hiring workers and has spent $491,000 of its stimulus funds training contractors and buying equipment. She said she believes her agency can meet the goals in its contract: “I want it done, but I want it done right.”
Gwinnett County finalized a contract with the state to spend $3.2 million weatherizing 461 homes. On Nov. 17, the county entered into a contract with Clarkston-based Partnership for Community Action to do the work for it. The partnership has completed four homes in Gwinnett and is scheduled to do 10 more this month, said Tanikia Jackson, a county grants manager.
The Partnership for Community Action is also responsible for completing 956 homes across DeKalb, Rockdale and Newton counties through a separate contract with the state for $6.9 million. So far, the partnership has completed nine in those counties. PCA officials said they have been hiring contractors and lining up training for them. “I want to assure you that we will be at the mandated requirement level by February,” Mohammad Saleem, the partnership’s president and CEO, said in an email.
Community Action for Improvement Inc. in LaGrange, which serves Coweta, Douglas and four other counties, has completed seven homes after signing a $4.1 million contract with the state in August. Its contract requires it to weatherize 569 homes. The organization has been busy weatherizing homes through other programs and hiring more workers and lining up training for them, said Jerome Anderson, the agency’s executive director.
Southeast Energy Assistance, which did the work on Mary Rogers’ home and which serves Atlanta and Fulton County, has weatherized 31 homes with federal stimulus funds and has 55 more in progress. It has an $8.1 million state contract to weatherize 1,112 homes with stimulus funds. There are 1,551 homes on the agency’s waiting list.
Although contractors in Georgia have completed just a fraction of the work they are to do, the U.S. Energy Department told the AJC last week that Georgia is a top performer.
“The Department of Energy is encouraged by the overall performance of Georgia’s weatherization program,” said Matt Rogers, the Energy Department’s senior adviser for Recovery Act implementation. “The weatherization network in the state has been among the top 20 percent of states nationally in terms of efficiency and weatherization spending. ... We look forward to working with Georgia to continue accelerating the pace of weatherization and ensure they remain a top service provider across the weatherization network.”
The federal stimulus dollars first became available here in April, when Georgia received an advance of $12.4 million for training, planning and ramp-up purposes. And then in June, the Energy Department awarded the state $49.9 million more to begin weatherizing homes. The state has spent $3 million so far.
In July, the state entered into a $769,945 stimulus contract with Southface Energy Institute to train workers in weatherizing homes. And in October, the state approved an $892,977 stimulus contract with the University of Georgia’s Cooperative Extension College of Family and Consumer Sciences to inspect 10 percent of the homes weatherized by each contractor with federal stimulus dollars. The federal government requires 5 percent of each contractor’s work to be inspected.
A big emphasis in the stimulus program is to help keep people in jobs amid the recession. So far, 164 jobs have been created or retained through federal stimulus spending on home weatherizations in Georgia, according to GEFA. State officials expect that number to rise over the next two years as more homes are completed.
The Journal-Constitution has requested records showing the addresses of the homes on the waiting lists in Georgia and the addresses that have been weatherized with federal stimulus dollars to date. State officials said last week they were considering the AJC’s requests in light of a request from the Energy Department to keep these records confidential.
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