More government waste. More outrage. You decide.
Steve Manser, president of Simon Roofing and Sheet Metal of Youngstown, Ohio, which was awarded an initial $10 million contract to begin “Operation Blue Roof” in New Orleans, acknowledged that the price his company is charging to install blue tarps could pay for shingling an entire roof.
Quick fixes.
The government is paying contractors an average of $2,480 for less than two hours of work to cover each damaged roof — even though it’s also giving them endless supplies of blue sheeting for free.
“This is absolute highway robbery and it really does show that the agency doesn’t have a clue in getting real value of contracts,” said Keith Ashdown, vice president for Taxpayers for Common Sense.
As many as 300,000 homes in Louisiana may need roof repairs, and as the government attempts to cover every salvageable roof by the end of October, the bill could reach hundreds of millions of dollars.
The amount the government is paying to tack down blue tarps, which are designed to last three months, raises major questions about how little taxpayers may be getting for their money as contractors line up at the government trough for billions of dollars in repair and reconstruction contracts.
Simon Roofing, the Shaw Group of Baton Rouge, La., and LJC Construction Co. of Dothan, Ala. — the government’s three prime blue-roof contractors in Louisiana — have spent millions to lease hotels, hire catering companies and set up computer databases to track and bill the government for their work.
“When you have 400 or 500 people staying out of town, you’re paying a whole lot more overhead than you normally do,” Manser said. “I couldn’t imagine being paid any less, well, scratch that, I guess I could. People will do a lot to get work.”
Sheesh- Even I could do this and I sure could use the money. Maybe we should use the Katrina- Rita opportunity to make a quick buck and get some of our taxes back the FEMA way.
Waste not. Want not. Where did I read the duct tape suggestion? Wasn’t that after 9/11? I hope these tarps have a silver lining.
I was about to say; ‘Unbelievable’! – but sadly realized that this is of course the norm in the Republican Brave New World.
I see 5 guys in your picture. So, if it takes them 2 hours per house (it shouldn’t, really) – that’s 10 man-hrs per roof. The materials are provided – so this comes to $248/hr. Let’s for arguments sake say the workers get $18/hr (doubt it) – that leaves a nifty $230/hr for each worker employed by Simon Roofing and Sheet Metal for overhead and profit.
What a racket!
Lies, damn lies, and “average costs”. Front-loading a contract is necessary to get people staged in and setup. Labor hard cost @ 18/hr = 36/hr including medical, taxes and comp. (Roofers have the highest comp rate of all crafts in CA, currently running @ 70 – 90% of payroll). Counting setup and teardown 2 hours is actually close depending on size/shape of the roof. [The one shown is easy money, but I’ve seen some of the more complex roofs in satellite shots. NOT easy money.]
Insurance cos. labor rates as of 5 years ago in CA are 55/hr for “Journey-level”, 65/hr for “Mechanics” (supervisors/contractors). Go with a 4-to-1 ratio per roof = 285/hr for each crew = 570/home labor only. Costs for lodging and food? Give ’em 100/day/person = 500/crew = 1570 per home. Roughly 910 over all costs + profit + overhead = 37% net.
Less profit than your estimate, and @ probably 4 – 5 roofs per day it adds up. OTOH, an unbelievable amount of things can go wrong working in a disaster area.
Not a task for your average 8/hr idiot with a hammer.
I would agree with you if a) they were ACTUALLY installing roofs instead of covering them with tarps and b) if I thought for 5 seconds that these workers were getting decent wages and bennies (remember that there is no longer any reason to pay prevailing wage, and I’ll bet the prvailing wage in NO has gone down a bit in NO these past 4 weeks in any case, eh?)
Do you really think the govt. has hired union people?
And why do the workers need to be staying in $200/night hotel rooms, regardless of who they are? Trailers are good enough for the people whose roofs these ARE, why not for them?
Here’s the contract information:
http://sbeinc.com/pdf/KatrinaAwardedAcquisitions.pdf
<rant>
As an aside, I’m damn tired of lazy media projecting bullshit on the American public. The only real information in that article was: total cost of award, divided by approximate number of units, and the fact the government provided the blue tarps. Brilliant. The people getting paid to report don’t know how to get full stories?
One of the reasons I did the research and tracked the comm failure was precisely because that story was not being told. I’ve f*cking had it with lazy reportage. Operating in a disaster zone is not even close to operating @ home. But that didn’t stop them from making the comparison in the article.
Disengenuous as best, plain dumb at worst. And they get paid for that shit.
</rant>
I’m sure they could actually replace the roof covering for the price – if they were working in Ohio with their established network of suppliers and tear-off crews. Yeah the feds are throwing money like water, but they’ve been raked over the coals for a solid month, and Congress just gave them carte blanche to “git ‘er done”.
The right way to proceed would have been to allow the adjusters in immediately, get the bids out to local companies through the insurance companies, and actually replace the roofs. That would add substantial time to the process, and the public wouldn’t stand for the delay.
Ah yes – that would have been the intelligent thing to do, wouldn’t it? The Congressional Black Caucus put out a “Call to Action” to Rebuild Gulf Coast Region on Sept 15. Number three on their list:
3. Ensuring that Local Residents have First Choice at Reconstruction Jobs and Contracts.
No indication that anything like that is going to happen, of course.
BTW, rba, I really appreciate your insight into the complexities of these issues. I often quote you IRL. I don’t think anyone else here at the site has your particular experience and knowledge on this. Please keep it up! Even those of us (like me) who rarely comment on these topics are reading and learning . . . .
Thanks. We all learn from each other here, that’s what I think keeps this place “comfortable”.
On local labor the DOL has set up HurricaneJobs. Links workers to jobs in the affected areas. Looks like a dedicated front-end to http://www.ajb.dni.us [America’s Job Bank], the national database for employment development departments (also links to unemployment insurance).
Ass/u/me
Is a basic necessity of every hurricane survival kit, even ours. After Ivan last year there were plenty of tarped homes here for awhile, but the owners had done that themselves. Who knew there was so much money to be made in tarping a roof. My husband is in the wrong field right now.
Wrong field if he’s willing to travel into a disaster zone in say, Ohio, and pull minimum 10-12 hour shifts, 6 days a week until the job winds down. (Civilians Trace, not the military. Wearing a uniform by definition is shit pay.)
.
As soon as it was a news item —
by Oui on Sat Sep 3rd, 2005 at 11:15:40 PM PST
KSLA News 12 Latest Headlines Katrina Catastrophe
The governor of Texas worries that his state may not be able to take many more evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. Governor Rick Perry says Texas is committed to doing everything it can to help, but wants to be sure it can provide the services needed, including medical care and education. Perry says local officials “are beginning to notify us that they are quickly approaching capacity.” Louisiana and the FEMA. have been alerted.
Texas has taken in over 220,000 evacuees, with more on the way. Nearly 19,000 are in the Houston Astrodome. Over 120,000 are in 97 shelters in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and dozens of smaller cities. Another 100,000 are in hotels and motels, with still more in churches or private homes.
Carnival Cruise Lines has canceled voyages for three of its ships so they can house victims of Hurricane Katrina. The schedules of the Ecstasy, the Sensation, and the Holiday have been cleared for the next six months. Two will dock in Galveston, Texas, and the third in Mobile, Alabama. Together, they can hold about 7,000 passengers.
The request for the cruise ships came from the FEMA. The cost of the charters was not disclosed. Carnival is apologizing to those whose cruise plans have been canceled. The number is believed to be in the tens of thousands. Anyone who re-books will get a one-hundred-dollar-per-person shipboard credit.
Previous link, reads as follows —
“With the chartering of the cruise ship Holiday to the Military Sealift Command (MSC) on behalf of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as part of Hurricane Katrina relief efforts … “
Mmmm … housing for evacuees?
~~~
Barack Osama Demands an Investigation --FEMA Spending ● $236 Million Cruise Ship Deal Criticized
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
On Sept. 1, as tens of thousands of desperate Louisianans packed the New Orleans Superdome and convention center, the Federal Emergency Management Agency pleaded with the U.S. Military Sealift Command: The government needed 10,000 berths on full-service cruise ships, FEMA said, and it needed the deal done by noon the next day.
The hasty appeal yielded one of the most controversial contracts of the Hurricane Katrina relief operation, a $236 million agreement with Carnival Cruise Lines for three ships that now bob more than half empty in the Mississippi River and Mobile Bay. The six-month contract — staunchly defended by Carnival but castigated by politicians from both parties — has come to exemplify the cost of haste that followed Katrina’s strike and FEMA’s lack of preparation.
Government contracting officials defended the deal. “They were the market,” Capt. Joe Manna, director of contracts at the Sealift Command, said of Carnival. “Under the circumstances, I’d say we’re getting a pretty good value.” Coburn and Obama disagreed. “Finding out after the fact that we’re spending taxpayer money on no-bid contracts and sweetheart deals for cruise lines is no way to run a recovery effort,” they said in the statement.
But the Carnival deal has come under particular scrutiny. Not only are questions being raised over the contract’s cost, but congressional investigators are examining the company’s tax status. Carnival, which is headquartered in Miami but incorporated for tax purposes in Panama, paid just $3 million in income tax benefits on $1.9 billion in pretax income last year, according to company documents. “That’s not even a tip,” said Robert S. McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice. U.S. companies in general pay an effective income tax rate of about 25 percent, analysts say. That would have left Carnival with a $475 million tax bill.
Carnival’s public records boast “that substantially all of our income in fiscal 2004, 2003 and 2002 . . . is exempt from U.S. federal income taxes,” largely because it maintains that its operations are not in the United States but on the high seas.
The Ecstasy and Sensation had to set sail for safer seas as Hurricane Rita rolled in. They re-docked Monday. By Tuesday morning, 625 were aboard the Ecstasy, a fraction of the 2,544 passengers once registered. An additional 820 were aboard the Sensation, down from 2,579. And those ships have fared better than the Holiday, docked in Mobile, Ala., with 342 on board. FEMA had hoped for 1,800.
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY