Bad Government

Gov. Rick Perry said last month he was “underwhelmed” and irritated by the federal response to Hurricane Ike, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s in particular.

FEMA deserves some criticism; maybe a lot. It’s also true, however, that FEMA has become a general-purpose whipping boy for post-disaster disasters.

There’s nothing especially wrong with that, except it may obscure the fact there’s plenty to be underwhelmed and irritated about at every level of government.

The state’s own response has not been dazzling. The Texas Workforce Commission mailed unemployment checks to people without addresses, for example.

At the same time Perry was bashing FEMA, he announced formation of a disaster recovery commission. Its first job would be finding short-term housing for people left homeless by the hurricane. That was two weeks ago, and more than two months into Ike’s aftermath. If the commission has done anything at all, it has done so very quietly. It certainly has not solved or even mitigated the housing problem.

One of the few places in Galveston where FEMA might have put a lot of trailers was on land owned by the county north of Broadway, near the criminal justice center. That’s not a bad spot. It’s behind the seawall, near the headquarters of both the sheriff’s office and the police department, and within walking distance of the Island Community Center, where many post-disaster social services are stationed.

A majority of the commissioners court is against that idea. Commissioners offered various justifications for their opposition, none very compelling, much less overwhelming, in their merit.

The most ridiculous was that trailers in the city’s gateway would be an aesthetic faux pas. Apparently forcing people to live in the gutted shells of houses, or in tents, and perhaps ultimately in alleys and under bridges, is better, as long as they don’t do it where tourists could see them.

City councils all over Galveston County took similar stances against temporary housing. Galveston’s public school district did, too.

Even among the general public, it’s hard to find people willing to put concern for displaced people above concern about problems the residents of temporary housing could cause.

Some of those concerns are real and some probably imaginary. Either way, the fact they prevail makes all the rhetoric about taking care of our own ring a little hollow.

There’s plenty to be irritated about, as well.

Consider Mod Coffee House on Postoffice Street in Galveston. The owners, who didn’t ask the paper to make an issue of this, wanted to sell coffee in paper cups from the sidewalk while their shop was gutted.

The county health district would not allow Mod to sell coffee in paper cups from the sidewalk because Mod didn’t have a three-chambered sink.

If you went downtown this weekend, you found vendors selling all sorts of food and beverage from the sidewalks. You probably didn’t find any three-chambered sinks.

The health district said Mod and vendors fall under different sets of rules. One set allows vendors to use buckets. Another demands that an established local business have an expensive sink.

That may be a small irritation, but it illustrates a larger one.

Governments at every level have given themselves breaks on what they normally should do, and reasonably so in many cases.

At the same time, they have done little to reasonably accommodate people trying to survive this calamity through their own initiative.