First Amendment Coalition » FEMA

News rater, anti-Palin group win government contracts

SusanaMontes — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:42:25 +0000

The federal government hired a New Orleans man for $18,000 to appraise whether news stories about its actions during the Gulf oil spill were positive or negative for the Obama administration.

September 15, 2010

By The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The administration was keenly sensitive to comparisons between its response and former President George W. Bush’s much-maligned reaction to Hurricane Katrina.

The government also spent $10,000 for just over three minutes of video showing a routine offshore rig inspection. The government sent the footage to news organizations but couldn’t say whether any outlets ran the footage.

And the government awarded a $216,625 no-bid contract for a survey of seabirds to an environmental group that has criticized what it calls the “extreme anti-conservation record” of Sarah Palin, a possible 2012 rival to President Barack Obama.

The contracts were among hundreds reviewed by the Associated Press as the government begins to provide an early glimpse at federal spending since the Gulf disaster in April. Although most of the contracts don’t raise alarms, some could provide ammunition for critics of government waste.

As of yesterday, the administration had released details of about $142 million in contracts, a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars it has spent so far. BP has reimbursed the U.S. $390 million, company spokesman Tom Mueller said. The government sent BP a new invoice for $128.5 million last week.

The White House is still deciding whether it will bill BP for spill-related trips by Obama and his wife, Michelle, to the Gulf, including the president’s flights aboard Air Force One, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars each.

The contracts the government has disclosed so far include at least $5.8 million for helicopter services, $3.1 million for lodging, $1.4 million for boat charters, $225,000 for water-testing devices, including some used aboard ships, $457,570 for cellular and satellite phone services, $25,087 for toilets, $23,217 for laundry services and $109,735 for refrigerators and freezers.

Yet the government’s new contracting data includes errors and vague entries that make it difficult to identify wasteful spending. It spent $52,000 on a boat charter described as “marine charter for things,” with no further explanation. A separate $90,000 contract for a single 70-pound anchor is listed incorrectly; the contractor told the AP it actually supplied hundreds of anchors.

A White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt, declined to comment on the contracts.

Among all the contracts, perhaps none is more striking than the Coast Guard’s decision to pay $9,000 per month for two months to John Brooks Rice of New Orleans, an on-call worker for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, under a no-bid contract to monitor media coverage from late May through July.

Rice told the AP that he compiled print and video news stories and offered his subjective appraisal of the tone of the coverage. “From reading and watching the media I would create reports,” he said. “I reported either positive coverage, negative coverage, misinformation coverage.”

The Coast Guard provided the AP with a copy of two of Rice’s printouts of news stories but didn’t respond to a request for copies of his reports rating the tone of news stories. Rice said he had already deleted them. The AP has requested copies of all Rice’s reports under the Freedom of Information Act but hasn’t received them.

The Coast Guard expects BP to reimburse the $18,000, said Coast Guard spokesman Capt. Ron LaBrec.

The Coast Guard said it didn’t ask for competitive bids because it urgently needed the work done. In the newly released federal data, the government didn’t disclose Rice’s name, instead misidentifying him as “miscellaneous foreign contractors.”

Such contracts have caused problems for the government in the past. The Obama administration abandoned a $1.5 million contract in August 2009 with a public-relations firm, Washington-based Rendon Group, that assessed work by journalists for the Defense Department before embedding them with troops in Afghanistan. And the Clinton administration in 1995 ordered Energy Department officials to cancel a $46,500 contract with a consulting company, Carma International, that ranked reporters who covered the agency, a practice that the White House concluded was “unacceptable and will not be tolerated.”

Rice said he wasn’t on duty for FEMA or drawing a government salary when he worked for the Coast Guard. He monitored news coverage for FEMA during the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and a former FEMA co-worker recommended him for the Coast Guard contract, he said.

The head of a public-relations firm in Baton Rouge, La., John T. Rice of Common Sense Communications, questioned the wisdom of the government spending $18,000 to track coverage of the spill, particularly in the Internet age when stories can be monitored easily online.

“In our neck of the woods, if you can land a $2,000 to $4,000 retainer with somebody, that would be considered really good,” said Rice, who isn’t related to the Rice hired by the Coast Guard. Rice said an $18,000 contract could also include focus groups and a marketing plan, not just tracking and evaluating coverage.

Under another federal contract, the Interior Department hired videographer Bob Boccaccio of Boccaccio Productions in Baton Rouge to shoot video of inspectors aboard an offshore drilling rig to distribute to news organizations. Boccaccio confirmed he was hired but declined to provide details.

The Interior Department said it hired Boccaccio amid concerns about safety, scheduling and permitting after network camera crews asked to accompany inspectors offshore to film them. The contract authorized payment of up to $15,000; Boccaccio, who traveled to the rig with the government inspector, billed the government $10,000. The AP typically pays a one-person crew about $1,000 per day. The government said it hasn’t decided yet whether to ask BP to pay for it.

The government’s contracts include at least $6 million for studies to gauge the spill’s effects on wildlife.

Contractors include a group whose political arm endorsed Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign and ran ads in several swing states against then-Republican vice presidential candidate Palin. The group, Defenders of Wildlife, received a $216,625 noncompetitive contract from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for a seabird survey in the BP spill area.

Both Defenders of Wildlife and its political arm, the Defenders Action Fund, have criticized Palin, the former Alaska governor, for supporting use of low-flying airplanes to hunt wolves and other wildlife in winter.

Defenders of Wildlife also has been urging Discovery Communications to drop plans for “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” a reality TV series, and wants sponsors and viewers to boycott it. The Interior Department said the Fish and Wildlife Service hired the group to survey the effects of oil on ocean birds because its chief scientist, Chris Haney, is respected and experienced in bird research. It said BP approved the scientist’s selection.

An executive for Defenders of Wildlife said politics played no role in the $216,625 contract.

“I just truly believe there are no dots to connect,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, the group’s executive vice president and a former director of the Fish and Wildlife Service under former President Bill Clinton.

Mueller, the BP America spokesman, could not say whether BP has already reimbursed the government for the media monitoring, videotaping and seabird survey, because bills the government submits do not include enough details for the company to tell which contracts are included.

BP paid the government’s first five bills but sought more information about some items before eventually paying for them, Mueller said. Those have included a $12.6 million bill from the Navy for “skimming and tow vessels,” a $30,000 Air Force expense for a “severe weather safe haven” and $339,915 for aircraft flight hours, he said.

Fifty of the 513 contracts disclosed so far went to minority-owned businesses. Female-owned businesses received 41. More than half the government contracts went to small businesses.

Not all of the contracts the government authorized were carried out.

A $58,800 contract the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration struck with a women-owned public relations firm, Public Communications Inc., for media strategy and public education on threats to marine mammals and sea turtles wasn’t finished and may never be, NOAA and the company said.

“We never did anything” and haven’t received any money from NOAA, said Jill Allread, a partner at the Chicago firm. “We work with a lot of marine-mammal issues. They said, ‘If we start having issues with die-offs with dolphins and things we may need additional support on helping people understand why that’s happening.’”

NOAA spokeswoman Connie Barclay said the contract was arranged by NOAA’s Gulf regional office, which has one public-affairs officer and was overwhelmed with calls in the spill’s early days.

Barclay said she, not a PR firm, organized a recent Gulf event in which retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is overseeing the government’s response to the spill, released the first oiled turtles to be rehabilitated.

“People are really hungry for good news,” Barclay said.

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Hurricane expert claims he was fired for criticizing Corps of Engineer’s work on New Orleans levees

donal brown — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 03:32:00 +0000

A hurricane expert says he was fired by Lousiana State University because the university feared losing federal funding for the expert’s criticism of the Army Corps of Engineers mistakes that caused breaks during Hurricane Katrina in the levees protecting New Orleans. -db

Courthouse News Service
February 12, 2010
By Sabrina Canfield

BATON ROUGE (CN) – A hurricane expert claims Louisiana State University gave him the boot for criticizing the Army Corps of Engineers’ poor work on New Orleans levees, whose failures flooded the city after Hurricane Katrina. Ivor van Heerden claims LSU fired him for fear that his public criticism would hurt the university’s federal funding.

Van Heerden says LSU placed the bureaucratic interests of university officials “above the health and safety of the millions of people who live in the path of the hurricanes that threaten the Gulf Coast every year.”

Van Heerden’s book, “The Storm,” published in 2006, recounts the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s failed response to Hurricane Katrina. In that book and in public statements during and after Katrina, van Heerden said the Army Corps of Engineers made serious engineering mistakes that caused multiple breaches in the levee systems meant to protect New Orleans against hurricane-related flooding.

In his complaint in East Baton Rouge Parish Court, Van Heerden says LSU and its administrators have publicly branded him as “incompetent and irresponsible” because of his statements, barred him from working on storm preparedness with government agencies, and terminated him “by manipulating the policies and procedures governing faculty appointments at LSU.”

When Katrina hit, Van Heerden had been a member of the College of Engineering faculty since 2000 and since then had been deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center. He also had been director of the LSU Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes.

Much of Van Heerden’s expertise is on protection and restoration of wetlands and barrier islands that historically provided a buffer to Louisiana’s natural hurricane vulnerability.

He warned of an “apocalypse awaiting New Orleans” from a direct hit by a major storm “due to the combination of the city’s natural vulnerability and progressive diminution of barrier-island and wetland buffers.”

Though he warned of devastation that would befall New Orleans should a major hurricane make landfall, van Heerden says that Hurricane Katrina should not have caused such destruction. Katrina veered eastward just before making landfall and in the end was far less powerful than expected. Nevertheless some 85 percent of New Orleans was flooded “from breaches of several levee walls which had been designed and engineered by the Corps,” according to the complaint.

Van Heerden says that in the midst of the “Katrina emergency,” LSU’s then-Vice Chancellor Harold Silverman told him and others at the Hurricane Center “that their operational support to federal and state agencies during the storm emergency was ‘okay,’ but that what really excited him was ‘federal dollars.’

“In the weeks after Katrina, Corps officials insisted the storm surge from Katrina ‘had overtopped and overwhelmed their Grade A levees,’” the complaint states. But van Heerden says he “minced no words” in rejecting that explanation.

Van Heerden told the Washington Post that he was “absolutely convinced that those flood walls were never overtopped,” and that “the real scandal of Katrina [was] the ‘catastrophic structural failure’ of barriers that should have handled the hurricanes with relative ease.” (Brackets in complaint.)

In October 2005, van Heerden was appointed to head Louisiana’s nine-member Forensic Data Gathering Team, known as “Team Louisiana” was established under the Louisiana Department of Transport and Development (DOTD) to investigate the causes of the flooding and the ensuing deaths and devastation.

In November 2005, van Heerden testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs regarding Team Louisiana’s preliminary findings – that widespread levee failures and flood breaching were due to a levee design that didn’t account for the very weak nature, high porosity and permeability of the soils around the levees. He described the Corps’ design as a “geotechnical engineering failure.”

Not long after that, according to the complaint, then-Vice Chancellor Silverman and others called van Heerden to a meeting and “admonished him for his public criticisms of the Corps, saying the criticisms jeopardized LSU’s prospects for federal funding.”

Van Heerden says he maintained his position that the Corps’ engineering failures were to blame for 90 percent of the flooding and 50 percent of the associated deaths. The remaining 50 percent of the deaths he attributed to FEMA’s failed response.

After “The Storm” was published in 2006, The New York Times reported that van Heerden’s views about the Corps had “gotten him called on the carpet [at the university] for threatening the institution’s relationship with the federal government and the research money that comes with that.” (Brackets in complaint.)

In response, he says, then-Vice Chancellor Michael Ruffner sent a letter to The New York Times saying that van Heerden had “no professional credentials or training” to discuss the engineering of levees.

In 2007, van Heerden says, he was asked to serve as an expert witness in a lawsuit charging the Corps of Engineers with negligence with regard to the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO). Breaches in the MRGO caused widespread flooding of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward and much of St. Bernard Parish. Van Heerden says LSU administrators told attorneys for the plaintiffs “that the chancellor stated that Dr. van Heerden would be fired if he testified against the Corps.”

“The attorney stated: ‘They just don’t want their people front and center in such politically charged conflicts, especially in a capacity that opposes the current Republican regime.’ In the end, the defendants prohibited Dr. van Heerden from testifying as an expert witness. This unwarranted action directly interfered with Dr. van Heerden’s ability to earn income and direction affected his reputation and standing in the community,” according to the complaint.

Instead of testifying as an expert, van Heerden served as a non-testifying expert at depositions that began in early 2009. (Since then, a federal judge has ruled that the Corps is to blame for the failure of the MRGO and widespread flooding.)

Van Heerden’s contract with LSU has not been renewed and is scheduled to end at the end of May.

Van Heerden seeks damages from LSU and its Board of Supervisors for constitutional violations, breach of contract, libel, slander and defamation.

He is represented by Jill Craft of Baton Rouge.