Going through the motions here, since we all know that Justice Department investigation will never happen.
Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham has penned a letter to federal law enforcement officials encouraging them to reject “unsubstantiated findings” submitted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that accuse the Texas General Land Office of mishandling Houston’s Harvey flood mitigation dollars.
HUD escalated a complaint to the U.S. Department of Justice last week, claiming state officials had violated the Fair Housing Act by discriminating against the city’s Black and Hispanic residents by creating an unfair competition for disaster relief funds.
The federal agency found that the land office had “intentionally discriminated based on race” by creating a competition to allocate funds “that steered money away from Black and Hispanic communities that had the highest storm and flood risk into whiter, more rural areas with less risk.”
That competition resulted in no funds set aside for Houston or Harris County.
HUD had originally upheld its discrimination ruling in 2022, but the Justice Department said it would hold off on considering the matter until HUD completed its investigation. Since making that initial finding, HUD said it obtained more information that showed state officials had intentionally allocated mitigation funds in a way the agency knew would disadvantage minority communities.
Buckingham, in a Thursday news release, said that the Biden administration had lost its “bully pulpit it used for political stunts like this” as President Donald Trump took office Monday, and she called on the Justice Department to refer to the claim as “fake news.”
Trump’s new Justice Department leadership has said the agency would not take on any new civil rights cases until further notice, the Associated Press revealed yesterday.
[…]
When Houston and Harris County initially received no funding from the land office through its process, the Northeast Action Collective, a grassroots group made up of residents impacted by the storm, and the nonprofit Texas Housers, which advocated for safe housing for low-income families, filed a complaint with HUD.
Ben Hirsch, facilitator for Northeast Action Collective, said the land office was playing a political game over protecting people in Texas who face flood risks.
Hirsch noted that federal officials at the Justice Department never said that HUD’s findings were “fake news,” as Buckingham claimed Thursday. HUD’s investigation showed that 600,000 Black and Hispanic residents in Houston and Harris County ended up going without the funding they needed, Texas Housers research director Ben Martin said.
A total of around 1 million high-risk Texans of all races also did not receive adequate funds, Martin added, which is a “scandal.”
See here for the previous update. I’m sure Commissioner Buckingham is aware that the fix is in for her and the GLO, so her whining is just for show. At least we got Beryl funds without any meddling from the state. That’s going to be as good as it gets for the time being. I wish I had something better to say.