The state agency has spent only $29 million of that funding as of Jan. 1, nearly $21 million of which went to Innovation Emergency Management, a consulting firm the agency hired two years ago to help navigate the grants.

Now, Florida is anticipating an additional $735.5 million from HUD for Hurricane Michael and localities still reeling from the 2018 Category 5 storm have asked Gov. Ron DeSantis if they, not the department, can manage the cash.

“It will be better to have the money right here, where the hammers are swinging, versus 100 miles away in Tallahassee,” Bay County Manager Rob Majka Jr. said. “We know our needs better than anyone else.”

HUD disaster grants are meant to support “ full and swift recovery ” and many states susceptible to catastrophic weather, including North Carolina, Louisiana, and New Jersey, have beefed up their bureaucracies so they can distribute the federal funds quickly after misfortune strikes.

But Florida, the country’s lightening rod for hurricanes , hasn’t. Instead, the state has left much of the tricky application process to counties with no experience and few resources. With disaster aid sitting unused, thousands of people are living in temporary housing. Schools and police departments are closing, fire halls are clinging to life. Acres of towering pines are still pinned to the ground after 155-mile-an-hour winds stripped them of their bark.

After federal auditors told the state to hire more staff and HUD labeled the state a “slow spender,” Florida is starting to retreat from its tough-love approach.

Ken Lawson, appointed executive director of the Department of Economic Opportunity when DeSantis took office a year ago, has made HUD disaster aid a top priority, department spokeswoman Tiffany Vause said.

He’s ramping up the department’s Office of Disaster Recovery, which now reports directly to him rather than residing as a subdivision of the office responsible for other, nondisaster HUD block grants.

In May, Lawson won legislative approval to transfer 18 positions at the agency to the Office of Disaster Recovery. But as of this week, only seven of those had been filled. And the state has assigned disaster recovery work to a handful of federal grant experts who already manage other programs.

Lawson has asked state lawmakers for budget authority to transfer three more positions and about $675,000 to fund temporary employees. In its budget request, the agency said money in the current budget for the 18 positions was enough to hire only a handful of people.

Despite Lawson’s efforts, local leaders say help from Tallahassee is slow in coming and they’re largely going it alone.

Florida’s Bay County and seven Panhandle cities in December issued their own action plan and have hired Illinois-based Hagerty Consulting, led by Brock Long, a former Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator who resigned in February 2019.

Municipalities took note after they watched the state struggle to make use of federal disaster aid. In 2016, after Hermine and Matthew, HUD issued rules requiring disaster block grant applicants to address long-term recovery and restoration. It offered to consider waivers for critical needs of poor communities — like many in the Panhandle — to provide additional flexibility.

In response, Florida submitted a 194-page plan that included using HUD grant money for debris removal. The plan also listed projects such as replacing ruined affordable homes and apartments.

But the Department of Economic Opportunity gave little guidance to the counties that were actually to receive the money. One St. Johns County official told POLITICO county officials would need months just to learn how the program works. Suggestions that the department allow the housing industry and its experts to take a more active role were ignored.

“They could have gotten that money on the street in just a few months,” said a housing industry executive who asked not to be identified because he has an ongoing relationship with the state. “But anything — you suggest anything — they just wall up.”

After Hurricane Matthew in 2016, HUD designated a $96 million disaster grant for coastal St. Johns County. But state officials, not local leaders, were in charge of how to spend the money. In April 2019, after two years of back-and-forth, HUD approved $21.6 million for affordable housing repair and construction.

St. Johns didn’t break ground on the first $1.5 million phase of the project until this month because the Department of Economic Opportunity had left the county to set up its own HUD disaster-funding division. The county had to build a bureaucracy from scratch before it could begin spending the money.

“We needed to build the program from the ground up,” said Joseph Giammanco, St. Johns County disaster recovery manager. “Anyone you see who can move money faster, they already had experience with this program.”

In 2019, Florida’s track record earned it the title of “slow spender” from HUD.

It wasn’t the first time the state had been called out. In September 2018, the HUD Office of Inspector General cited the Department of Economic Opportunity for not hiring enough people to manage the grant.

The agency, then under former Gov. Rick Scott, made no changes in response to the findings.

North Carolina, like Florida, once was labeled a slow spender. It shed that status in October after adding people and resources to manage federal disaster recovery funds.

When HUD approved $236.5 million in aid for North Carolina after Hurricane Matthew, most of the money sat unused for more than a year. Outrage from lawmakers and residents prompted Gov. Roy Cooper to establish the North Carolina Office of Resiliency and Recovery in October 2018.

“There was no infrastructure — there wasn’t any staff or expertise to spend the money quickly,” said Laura Hogshead, chief operating officer of the office. Hogshead now has a $4 million budget that includes money for 45 staffers skilled in areas like federal grant writing.

As of December, North Carolina had distributed more than 16 percent of the Matthew grant money, earning the state HUD’s elevated “on pace” status.

Hogshead, a former chief operations officer at HUD, said she looked to Louisiana while she built her North Carolina office. No stranger to disaster, Louisiana as of December had spent 52 percent of $1.7 billion provided by HUD after catastrophic flooding in August 2016.

By contrast, Florida as of December had spent only 2 percent of the $117 million it received for Matthew .

Patrick Forbes, executive director of the Louisiana Office of Community Development, said he learned lessons after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“We had so many disasters, and so many appropriations, and then allocations, that we had picked up the knowledge of doing it,” Forbes said. “That helped with building a good working relationship with HUD, too.”

Much of Louisiana’s work associated with HUD’s disaster recovery grant now is done by in-house staff.

Florida’s bureaucratic sluggishness isn’t the only reason funds have been slow to get to where they’re needed. Under President Donald Trump, HUD has been taking longer to publish rules for disaster recovery grants, according to a POLITICO analysis of Federal Register notices.

HUD took 44 days to publish rules after Congress approved the first round of funding for Hermine and Matthew in December 2016, according to a notice in the federal register. After Congress approved funding for Irma in February 2018, the agency took 193 days to write rules.

Each new set of rules is different, making the program difficult to manage, said Sam Viavattine, director of the Sandy Recovery Division of the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs.

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“You’re cautious, because if you’re not, inevitably you’ll have the inspector general’s office breathing down your neck for the duration of the grant,” Viavattine said

The confusing, ever-changing rules were brought up in a 2018 HUD inspector general report that found grant recipients in 2017 had to follow 61 different federal register notices. The inspector general recommended the agency adopt a single set of rules.

DeSantis has blamed the delay in distributing disaster funds on HUD and the White House Office of Management and Budget and said he plans to meet with HUD Secretary Ben Carson.

“I know about the games being played at OMB,” DeSantis said during a December visit to Gadsden County, which was hit by Michael in October 2018. “This will be something I’ll bring up with Secretary Carson.”

In response to questions about the disaster recovery block grant program, known as CDBG-DR, HUD released a written statement from an unidentified senior agency official.

“Since every appropriations act is unique, we have to complete a different notice each time,” the official said. “Secretary Carson is just as frustrated with the process and has urged Congress to reform it so HUD does not have to start from scratch each time a disaster strikes. However, since CDBG-DR is not codified, HUD has to wait for Congress to appropriate funds on a case by case basis.”

Set rules would allow eligible states, counties and municipalities to better prepare for the already lengthy federal grant application process. The Reforming Disaster Recovery Act from, sponsored by Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), also would give HUD more oversight power to tackle corruption and misuse of funds.

“Without any laws on the books, HUD has been hesitant to enforce accountability standards,” said Sarah Saadian, senior director of public policy at the Washington-based National Low Income Housing Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group. “There have been some cases where the money that was supposed to go to people with low-to-moderate incomes, but it went somewhere else.”

