In case you’re filled with too much holiday cheer this Christmas season, the latest edition of Sen. Tom Coburn’s “Wastebook”, chronicling wasteful federal spending, is now available. You might just want to put an extra shot in the egg nog and take a look. The dollar amounts aren’t always shocking, but the blatant waste of taxpayers’ money is. Number 2 on the list:
The city of Shreveport, Louisiana misspent $1.5 million in stimulus funds on mold remediation for a housing complex it was considering for demolition, according to a federal audit.
To obtain the stimulus money, the city‘s housing authority promised the federal government it would spend the money on improving a number of low-income homes it managed. Those projects included a mere $100,000 for combating mold and mildew at an apartment complex named Wilkinson Terrace.
More than ten months after awarding the grant to Shreveport, officials from the Department of Housing and Urban Development noticed the city had failed to spend most of the money. Under the rules of the stimulus, the money was to have been spent within one year. The agency reminded Shreveport that the funds needed to be put to work, or they would be rescinded.
In the span of a few weeks, Shreveport officials cut contracts worth over $1.5 million for mold remediation at Wilkinson Terrace – fifteen times what they told the feds they would spend, and much more than a site facing possible demolition likely deserved.
As the HUD Inspector General noted in an audit of the troubled grant, ―if the Authority‘s ultimate plan was to demolish the Wilkinson Terrace site in the next few years, the prudency of its decision. . . should be further questioned.
What‘s more, when the IG‘s investigators examined Wilkinson Terrace, it found the contractors had failed to do the work properly. ―[T]he inspected units had what appeared to be pest excrement caked on surfaces that were to have been cleaned and disinfected,‖ the IG wrote.
The audit concluded that Shreveport should return over $1.1 million in misspent federal funds. The city disputes the IG‘s findings.
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