A day in the life

It was a busy and productive Tuesday at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The day starts bright and early with Sens. Kit Bond of Missouri and Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, ranking members of the VA/HUD Appropriations Subcommitee, strongly advising Secretary Andrew Cuomo not to disperse any more emergency funds for disaster relief until Congress, in a bipartisan spirit and an increasingly anti-HUD mood, acts on a bill to transfer that authority to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Secretary Cuomo responds around noontime by dispersing $60 million in emergency funds, including $2.1 million to Maine for ice-storm recovery.

Later, despite unmet needs, mostly utility damage, from the 1998 storm that still tops $50 million, a HUD staffer says it’s all over: “We did for Maine what we were able to do.” With HUD’s recent promise to help Maine gain significant recovery funds still ringing in its ears and the betrayal of HUD’s mishandling of the $130 million Congress initially appropriated last year for New England ice-storm relief still a fresh memory — not to mention the recollection of Secretary Cuomo heaping high praise on Maine’s homeless shelters right before he yanked their funding — a furious Maine congressional delegation takes the staffer at his word and lashes out at the paltry and disappointing award.

Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, other HUD staffers go before the Senate Banking Committee to trash Inspector General Susan Gaffney, describing her inquiries into the waste, fraud and abuse-laden (but getting better) agency they call home as destructive and mean-spirited. Meant in the nicest way, of course.

The day ends with Secretary Cuomo gathering his employees together for a screening of “American Hollow,” a documentary film by his sister-in-law, Rory Kennedy, that highlights the strife and struggle faced by the nation’s rural communities. A grateful filmmaker praises her relative for recognizing the plight of these forgotten country folk and says HUD has become so rurally aware it should change its name to HURD — Housing, Urban and Rural Development. The irony escapes her audience of the professionally compassionate.

Wednesday is better. Sen. Susan Collins gets an early morning call from the secretary and learns this: the $2.1 million is not all HUD can do for Maine; it’s not the grand-prize, the major grant award Maine was expecting. It’s just a small slice of some extra cash HUD found in the federal agency equivalent of sofa cushions. And what better time to spread it around among a dozen or so states than when Congress is about to take your sofa away?

So HUD still wants to work with Maine. Maine could still be a winner. Secretary Cuomo’s staffers are packing their bags and heading to Augusta, where they will work closely with Gov. King’s staffers on a grant application that will, if it successfully competes against applications from 49 other states (extra points for states with delegations that say nice things about HUD), provide this state with the kind of disaster relief it was promised while it shivered in the dark 15 months ago and that Congress clearly intended when it appropriated $130 million nine months ago. That’ll be the day.