{"id":132340,"date":"2022-10-19T06:00:35","date_gmt":"2022-10-19T10:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=132340"},"modified":"2022-10-18T13:50:08","modified_gmt":"2022-10-18T17:50:08","slug":"fema-scandals-post-maria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=132340","title":{"rendered":"FEMA scandals post-Maria"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Tiffany Brown, 43, told FEMA in 2017 she could deliver 30,000,000 self-heating meals to devastation-wracked Puerto Ricans and was awarded a $156,000,000 contract. She actually delivered 50,000 meals, non-self-heating, and had her contract terminated. Seems her company, Tribute Contracting LLC, consisted of herself, yet promised to deliver 30 million meals using 210 trucks, none of which were contracted.<\/p>\n

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FEMA said that Brown submitted a proposal that her company, Tribute Contracting LLC, could assist and provide 10 million meals per day with 210 trucks. Brown\u2019s proposal also said the trucks were equipped with the staff and tools needed to make the deliveries, according to investigators.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office claims that Brown did not have any suppliers or logistics set up when FEMA awarded her the contract.<\/p>\n

Brown did receive 50,000 meals from a Georgia vendor, however, prosecutors said those meals were not self-heating.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn October 11, 2017, Brown submitted to FEMA a voucher and supporting documentation (i.e., bills of lading) requesting a payment of $255,000 based on false representations that she had delivered 50,000 self-heating meals,\u201d the office said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The full articles can be read for more details at ABC News<\/a> or MSN<\/a>. She, or course, says she is a scapegoat.<\/p>\n

You may remember another company FEMA contracted post-Maria, Whitefish Energy, who were excoriated for being emergency contractors who were claimed to pay ‘exhorbitant rates’ to their linemen and lost their contract.<\/p>\n

After Hurricane Maria in September 2017, recovery efforts were marked by a different scandal involving the contractor Whitefish Energy. The company, which was based in former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke\u2019s small hometown in Montana and which was only two years old at the time, reportedly charged exorbitant salaries for its linemen. The company, financed by a major Trump donor, had only two full-time employees<\/a> at the time it landed its $300 million contract. Puerto Rico\u2019s governor at the time, Ricardo Rossell\u00f3, canceled<\/a> the contract in the face of the controversy.*<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0 Slate\u00a0 <\/a><\/p>\n

At least Whitefish had experience with major contracts before. And, as was pointed out at the time here on TAH, emergency repair contractors tend to have minimal full-time staff since their business is intermittent.<\/p>\n

Side note – if you talk to anyone who has worked with contracted employees, you will find they get seemingly sky-high wages – until you remember the employees pay full FICA, any income taxes, health insurance out of pocket and often have zero job security. And whoever contracts those employees to a third party gets a nice add-on, too.<\/p>\n

There was another company who mostly got little notice who DID break the procurement rules – they got busted paying bribes to FEMA contracting officials Ahsha Tribble and Jovanda Peterson, to get $1.8 billion in Maria business.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Tribble (above) was having an affair with Donald Keith Ellison of COBRA Acquisitions and received free trips, an apartment, credit card use, and shall we say “other considerations.” Peterson was given a (presumably lucrative) job with COBRA.<\/p>\n

Ahsha Tribble, a deputy regional administrator, another former FEMA official, Jovanda Patterson, and Donald Keith Ellison, the former president of COBRA Acquisitions, were charged in a 15-count indictment.<\/p>\n

Patterson, Tribble\u2019s deputy chief of staff, steered contracts to COBRA and left FEMA in July 2018 for a job at the energy company, the court documents say.<\/p>\n

The charges implied that Tribble, who oversaw the restoration of the island\u2019s electrical system for FEMA, and Ellison were romantically involved and documented how they traveled together and often stayed in the same room between October 2017 and April 2019.<\/p>\n

Ellison, who had a two contracts for recovery work from the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), enticed Tribble with gifts, including a helicopter tour of the Caribbean island, helping her get an apartment in New York, hotel rooms in Fort Lauderdale and Charlotte, N.C., first-class air tickets from San Juan to New York, and use of his credit card, the indictment released Sept. 3 says.<\/p>\n

In return, she used her influence to \u201csecure favorable treatment\u201d of COBRA by pressuring PREPA executives to speed-up payments to the company and assign work to Oklahoma-based COBRA that could have been done by PREPA workers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

NY Post<\/a><\/p>\n

I think I have found the answer to how the government is still in operation: you would think with politicians spending money like a redneck lottery winner in a high end whorehouse, eventually they’d run out. Not if they don’t actually SPEND it –<\/p>\n

As of this August, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has allocated<\/a> roughly $28 billion in funding. Just $5.3 billion\u2014less than one fifth\u2014has been spent. Of that, the large majority was on emergency repair work such as debris removal. The amount spent on permanent projects like rebuilding roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and utilities was just $407 million. When it comes to the energy grid, the situation is even worse. FEMA has a $13.2 billion budget for utility projects post-Maria. Five years into the recovery, the amount spent on upgrading Puerto Rico\u2019s utilities<\/a> is just $40.3 million.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Vanity Fair<\/a><\/p>\n

Sure seems like the contracting process has issues, doesn’t it? If you are only going to read one article, read the last one. Pretty damning indictment of a broken system on many levels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tiffany Brown, 43, told FEMA in 2017 she could deliver 30,000,000 self-heating meals to devastation-wracked Puerto … FEMA scandals post-Maria<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":668,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[213,238],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-your-tax-dollars-at-work","category-government-incompetence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/668"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}