DHHL, Spend Your Money!
The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL) administers about 200,000 acres of public lands to be leased to native Hawaiians, upon which they may live, farm, ranch, and engage in commercial or other activities. The department, led by a nine-member commission, must provide financial and technical assistance to native Hawaiians (those with at least 50 percent Hawaiian blood), which enables them to enhance their economic self-sufficiency and promote community-based development. According to the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920, by doing this, the traditions, culture, and quality of life of native Hawaiians will be self-sustaining. In practice, however, moving native Hawaiians to homestead lands has been an agonizingly slow process. The Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement reported that the list of Native Hawaiians awaiting homestead land leases has been growing steadily from nearly 26,000 in 2010 to more than 28,700 today. It’s no exaggeration to say that scores of Hawaiians have died on the wait list. Back in 2015, we wrote about agencies that received federal grants but were unable or unwilling to spend the money. DHHL was listed at that time as having $55 million in federal housing funds awarded for Native Hawaiians but unspent, resulting in HUD suspending additional funding. House Bill 2511 and its companion Senate Bill 3359 in this year’s Legislature propose to provide a historic amount of funding, $600 million, to DHHL. If enacted, this would be the single largest state or federal investment in the program in any one year in the 100-year history of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act. The bill currently has great support in both chambers of the Legislature. We want to make sure that DHHL will be able to use the money for their mission. Some statistics on their website, however, make us concerned. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) provides a Native Hawaiian Housing Block Grant program. DHHL is the sole recipient of such grants. In 2014, DHHL was sitting on about $55 million in federal funds unspent, as a result of which HUD stopped providing additional funding in 2016. Recent news reports say that the federal money is still not flowing. DHHL’s website, http://dhhl.hawaii.gov/nahasda/, shows its current grant status: 2014 14HBGHI0001 $9,700,000 $7,736,927.94 (80%) expended 2015 15HBGHI0001 $8,700,000 $59,575.66 (0.007%) expended 2016 0 No federal appropriations 2017 17HBGHI0001 $2,000,000 No expenditures/encumbrances 2018 18HBGHI0001 $2,000,000 No expenditures/encumbrances 2019 19HBGHI0001 $2,000,000 No expenditures/encumbrances It’s 2022, and the agency is still working on 2014 and 2015 money. We need to understand the problems that are preventing this money from doing some good here in Hawaii. We can’t throw a great deal more money at it blindly. When these statistics were presented to the Legislature, DHHL was motivated to respond to us by saying that the block grant funds were all obligated, and that the available balance of block grant funds was slightly over $14 million. They also noted that the U.S. Treasury recognized DHHL as a high performing grantee in expending funds for rental assistance provided through the Consolidated Appropriations Act. Just to be clear, we are not at all opposing a historic level of funding for DHHL. We just want to make sure the money is put to good use and does not languish. So, we need to understand the operational challenges and we need to address them directly if we want to do the most good.
0 Comments
TANF Hoarding One of the ways our government provides a safety net for those less fortunate is through a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. TANF was enacted in 1996 as a program that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which used to provide cash assistance to families with children experiencing poverty. Under TANF, the federal government provides a block grant to the states, which then use these funds to run their own programs. To receive federal funds, states must also spend some of their own dollars on those programs and face severe fiscal penalties if they fail to do so. This state-spending requirement, known as the “maintenance of effort” (MOE) requirement, replaced the state match that AFDC required. States can use federal TANF and state MOE dollars to meet any of the four goals set out in the 1996 law: (1) assisting needy families so children can be cared for in their own homes or the homes of relatives; (2) reducing the dependency of needy parents by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage; (3) preventing pregnancies among unmarried persons; and (4) encouraging the formation and maintenance of two-parent families. These goals are broad, giving states lots of freedom to use these federal dollars in a way that they think brings about positive outcomes. So what have we done with the federal TANF money? We’ve let it pile up unused. ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power, recently published an unflattering article that calls out several states for doing nothing at all with large sums of money. It reports: “According to recently released federal data, states are sitting on $5.2 billion in unspent funds from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF. Nearly $700 million was added to the total during the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years, with Hawaii, Tennessee and Maine hoarding the most cash per person living at or below the federal poverty line.” Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services As this graph shows, the “unobligated balance” of the federal block grants, meaning federally authorized money that we haven’t spent, has been rising steadily over the last five fiscal years. In federal fiscal year 2020 (the year starting Oct. 1, 2019, and ending Sept. 30, 2020), our unobligated balance was $364 million, equivalent to almost $3,000 per person living in poverty. Certainly, we have been using part of the TANF money. But we have been spending quite a bit of our own funds: According to ProPublica, a Hawaii state spokesperson said that our state government plans to use its surplus to extend employment services like job coaching and placement for noncustodial parents who have children receiving TANF and to provide diaper assistance to families that are eligible for the program. The state is also considering increasing benefits and offering monthly housing assistance.
The question, however, is why has it taken so long for our bureaucrats to come up with ways to put that money to good use? It certainly won’t help alleviate poverty if it’s sitting in some bank somewhere. Legislators and other interested people: Here’s your chance. The Legislature is now grilling each of the Executive Branch departments for answers on how they plan to spend your hard-earned dollars. It’s a great time to ask the Department of Human Services what the heck is going on with their steadily growing wad of unused TANF cash. The New County TAT Earmarks Aren’t the Real Problem
Honolulu, just like most of the other neighbor Island counties, has passed a 3% addition to the Transient Accommodations Tax (TAT). It had to. The State was giving it millions of dollars a year in revenue sharing, but in 2020 the Governor shut off the spigot using his emergency powers and in 2021 the legislature made that permanent. “We’ll keep the money permanently,” they said, “but you counties can enact a TAT of your own.” Here in Honolulu, enactment of the county TAT was pretty much a foregone conclusion. But there was lots and lots of debate over earmarking the money. This much goes to the General Fund. This much goes to the Transit Fund (i.e., rail). The final version of the bill also sets up a special account in the general fund, which must be used to “mitigate the impacts of visitors on public facilities and natural resources, including the restoration, operations, and maintenance of beaches and parks,” and to “supplement, and not supplant, any funds regularly appropriated for those purposes. May I suggest, though, that these debates are meaningless. Suppose I had three bank accounts, one called “General,” one for “Vacation,” and one for “House Maintenance.” I dutifully put some money into each account every month, pay my house maintenance expenses out of the House Maintenance account, and pay other expenses out of the General account. Then tragedy strikes! My spouse gets sick and has to go to the hospital. Because I don’t have a diamond-studded platinum health plan, the health insurance only pays a certain percentage of the hospital bill, leaving a good chunk for me to absorb. My mortgage is due in a few days, and my General account doesn’t have enough to pay it. Do I preserve the other two accounts, let the mortgage fall into default, and cringe while waiting for the foreclosure notice? Not a chance. The Honolulu rail project is hitting some serious bumps in the track. The wheels don’t fit the rails (or the rails don’t fit the wheels). Someone forgot that there’s electric power needed to get a train moving – a lot of power –every time a train leaves a station, so that other customers on the power grid might be impacted if the trains simply pull power out of the grid without doing anything to protect the other users. And now, HART needs to start building the rail track in urban Honolulu, which is going to be quite a bit more complicated, and may contain more surprises, than building in the suburbs or in rural areas. These surprises may require more than the Transit Fund is going to have. Are we going to preserve the General Fund and the visitor mitigation (or whatever it’s going to be called) fund while letting the City & County of Honolulu go into default, wrecking its bond ratings in the process? Although that decision may be made by future City Councils and not this one, we can bet that we won’t be worrying about the integrity of the special funds as much as we would be worrying about how to pay the City’s bills. Which is why, when we are examining county council actions like this one, we need to pay more attention to the reality of the action (a new tax is being imposed) rather than the “earmarks” on that tax (which may become entirely meaningless once financial reality sets in). As voters and taxpayers, I suggest we be more watchful of what issues are threatening to give us even more cost overruns, and that we insist that our politicians who are (or want to be) in that office give us some action on those issues now. |
If you wish to further discuss blog posts, please contat our office directly or contact us via Contact page.
Categories
All
|