Congress scrutinizes debris removal contracts for wasteThe collection, hauling and smashing of debris in Louisiana and Mississippi resulting from Hurricane Katrina is still a daily ritual that has already cost taxpayers almost $2.5 billion. But government investigators and those closest to the cleanup now say hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars may have been wasted. Workers, contractors and government investigators say the large size of the contracts and the multiple tiers of subcontractors have pushed up the cost of the cleanup while slowing down the pace of the operation.
“I have not seen a better example of waste and ineptness in my lifetime,” says Troy Hebert, a part-time Louisiana state legislator and full-time owner of a debris removal company. Hebert has worked past hurricanes and complains that this time, the Army Corps of Engineers gave debris removal contracts to four major corporations — which did little actual cleanup themselves, instead farming out much of the job to layers of local subcontractors.
The result?
“They were able to make huge, huge sums of profits off of actually other people doing work to clean up our communities, and that's not the way it should be,” says Hebert.
The four primary contractors — Ashbritt Inc., CERES Environmental Services Inc., Environmental Chemical Corp. and Phillips and Jordan Inc. — were each provided with a $500 million contract and a $500 million option by the Army Corps. The companies claim that they did not permit multiple tiers of subcontractors but admit that in some cases their subcontractors may have subcontracted to others. By contract, Environmental Services Inc. permits only two layers of subcontractors, but the company acknowledges that in a few rare instances it found as many as five layers of subcontractors. Ashbritt says it took pains to ensure that it had only one tier of subcontractors on the debris removal work it performed in Mississippi. But in one case NBC News discovered four tiers of subcontractors.
more
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13153520/
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
