"You can incentivize all the businesses you want to relocate in a depressed area, but you have to have a workforce to make those businesses work," he said. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.), since much of the workforce has simply left. The Gulf Coast's situation is unique, said Sen. The day's events indicated the administration has yet to regain its footing since its slow response to the hurricane's initial onslaught more than a month ago. Each of the firms said yesterday that they will continue to work in the meantime. And there is no timeline for how quickly the competition will proceed.
Also, FEMA has already committed a large amount of money to the four firms doing the housing site work - $49.2 million in the case of Bechtel. The agency said yesterday that it has no plans to compete numerous other deals signed in the wake of Katrina with little or no competition. Paulison's pledge to rebid some Katrina contracts showed a willingness to reexamine some of those decisions, though the actual impact of the move could prove limited.
Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, decried "a trail of missteps that calls into question what has been done during the last four years and that continues to plague the recovery even today." He also announced a higher estimate of Katrina homeless, from 300,000 to "between 400,000 and 600,000 households." 3, while registering more than 1.7 million victims for disaster assistance. Paulison told the panels that his agency had delivered nearly 85 million liters of water, more than 4 million meals and nearly 176 million pounds of ice by Oct. to find and engineer sites for temporary housing for displaced residents. Those are $100 million contracts awarded to the Shaw Group, Bechtel Corp., CH2M Hill Inc. We're in the process of re-bidding them already."Ī FEMA spokeswoman later said the new bidding process affects only the four largest no-bid deals.
Lieberman (D-Conn.) why the agency did not hold competitions before Katrina struck, Paulison replied that "all of those no-bid contracts, we are going to go back and rebid. David Paulison, the acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said, "I've been in public service a long time, and I've never been a fan of no-bid contracts."Īsked by Sen. Under questioning about the agency's reliance on contracts that lacked full and open bidding, R.
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