BRATTLEBORO — At a time when affordable housing is in short supply, it is outrageous that the Brattleboro Housing Authority (BHA) has been ordered by town officials to stop repairs to 26 apartments at Melrose Terrace which were badly damaged by Tropical Storm Irene.
Those 26 elderly and disabled residents, whose lives have been uprooted for more than two months by a massive disaster, are now being told they can't come home.
Those 26 elderly and disabled residents, who lost virtually everything they own, now are left to fend for themselves because of the capriciousness of government bureaucracy.
How capricious?
The town is enrolled in the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) national flood insurance program (NFIP), which allowed residents in flood-prone areas to buy discounted insurance.
But, according to FEMA, if any property covered by this flood insurance has suffered flood damage equal to or above 50 percent of the property's value, the town cannot issue permits to rebuild, or issue a certificate of occupancy for the apartments at Melrose Terrace that have been repaired.
As we reported last week, there is ample confusion about what estimates the town used to determine that the work falls below the limit allowed by the FEMA and NFIP rules.
There shouldn't have been.
Did FEMA employees or contractors assess the damage to Melrose Terrace? Did they supply the town with those figures? If they did, would federal law require Brattleboro to use them in determining the 50-percent threshold?
The professional attempts of our reporter, Olga Peters, to get straightforward, reasonable answers to these baseline questions were utterly thwarted by two parties in this conflict - the town and FEMA - behaving less than transparently.
Peters was turned away from attending a training session designed to explain the mechanics of how this data translates into policy and decisions.
Town Manager Barbara Sondag was absolutely correct that the town of Brattleboro had no obligation to let the public or the press attend this particular meeting. But by preventing the public - through its representative, the media - from learning as much as possible about an issue that affects 26 residents, it reflects poorly on the town and its hard-working employees. It erodes confidence and trust.
With residents of Melrose Terrace pleading with us to provide some information, it is frustrating beyond measure to feel like our town and federal governments are working at cross purposes, when all parties should have an overarching goal to return the displaced Melrose Terrace residents to their homes.
Ironically, three days later, Secretary of State Jim Condos came to Brattleboro as part of his Vermont-wide tour to promote and educate municipal officials about the state's public records laws.
In a March op-ed advocating openness and transparency during the legislature's efforts to streamline, update, and reinforce the public records laws, Condos staked out his position on the issue.
“Open government is good government!” he wrote. “Shutting the public out of government deliberations because of matters of inconvenience or fear of embarrassment are not valid reasons.”
His philosophy should prevail.
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The only good news about this whole mess is that the BHA has temporarily shelved its plans to demolish one of the buildings at Hayes Court and build a new assisted living apartment building on the site. This, too, was an example of bureaucracy gone wild.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Human Development refused to pay for the assisted living project at Hayes Court because the building site sits on a flood plain.
But in this storm, Hayes Court escaped unscathed, while Melrose Terrace suffered all the damage.
When one government agency refuses to help because of fears of flood damage that didn't materialize during the worst flooding in more than seven decades, while another public housing development may be left to rot because of another government agency's policy, you know something is not right.
The town ought to adopt the policy that's on a t-shirt that Jamaica is now selling: “Fix it now, apologize later.”
The reality is that in the wake of a major disaster, flexibility is a must. If the BHA can get the Melrose apartments habitable, why should anyone - the town or FEMA - stand in the way?
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The answer to that question raises another seemingly unrelated current event. The Occupy Wall Street movement gained traction not only because of economic inequities and fear. The grassroots uprising also reflects growing resentment toward a government that is out of touch with its constituents.
The BHA owns and manages Melrose Terrace, but it administers its properties as part of the federal Housing and Urban Development's Public Housing Program. Local, state, and federal government has come into play in every single aspect of this fiasco.
It is entirely possible - but hardly certain - that local municipal employees were less than forthcoming to the press because they stumbled in good faith in trying to dot the i's and cross the t's.
It is entirely possible to imagine a scenario where the rules and procedures are far too baffling for an understaffed town government to do well, and the consequences are so severe - like everyone in Brattleboro losing flood insurance coverage - that ample incentive is created to evade straightforward questions or to keep the press at bay.
Blunders made in good faith should not be used to penalize the town or the Brattleboro Housing Authority in their attempts to get 26 of our neighbors home where they belong.
We need to understand whatever happened to create such baffling confusion and inconsistent, opaque accounts of the events that led to work coming to a standstill at Melrose Terrace. Understanding which of our governments broke down here and how it happened is the first step to preventing the next catastrophe from displacing dozens of our country's most vulnerable people.