I move to strike the last word. The amendment that has been offered removes a 3 percent increase in the administrative account for the Office of Public and Indian Housing. I rise to oppose the amendment. In this instance, the cuts in the…
I move to strike the last word.
The amendment that has been offered removes a 3 percent increase in the administrative account for the Office of Public and Indian Housing. I rise to oppose the amendment.
In this instance, the cuts in the Office of Public and Indian Housing cover a number of things, including the VASH program. We're adding $75 million for additional VASH vouchers--veterans' homelessness vouchers-- and that has to be administered. The arbitrary $6.5 million simply does not help with that effort. It hurts that effort.
The Office also implements the operating and capital funds for public housing and the Native American housing grants. All of these require either layoffs, removal of people, because the salaries and expenses of the Office are subject to normal increases, small increases year by year for salaries for people in those places, and they are clearly going to end up having to reduce the number of personnel while they're administering more, and particularly the housing and the homeless program for veterans.
So on that basis, I think this is an unwise reduction and one that is unjustified as well as unwise, and I would urge a ``no'' vote on the amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
I rise in opposition to the amendment.
This amendment again, as the gentleman has said, is an amendment that would freeze at the level of the 2012 funding here for salaries and expenses of the Office of Community Planning and Development.
Now, this office, it turns out, administers and implements the CDBG program, which in the bill, as presented by my chairman, is increased substantially--several hundred million dollars in the CDBG program--and increases the funding for the HOME program, which had been held at a much lower level in last year's program. In both of those cases, they were considerably lower.
And just last night, we added an amendment to increase the funding for HPWA, Helping Persons With AIDS, one of those vulnerable populations that we have, and our housing programs--as with veterans who are homeless, others who are homeless, those who are vulnerable such as those living with AIDS--have proven to be rather strong programs that have strong support.
Furthermore, already, across the board in HUD, there has been a reduction in personnel services and in the salaries and expenses of $20 million already compared with last year's overall within HUD. So this is a duplicate and hitting at vulnerable populations that we do not want to or should not want to be reducing. The reduction again requires that there be some reduction in personnel because people's salaries go up. They go up because people get a COLA, or a cost-of-living increase, of some sort with their salaries, or they move up in their category because of
longevity. So it ends up putting people who have jobs out of work and reducing the personnel to provide service to the American people and slows down the work of the offices in all these places where I think we all have a stake in making certain that they are efficiently implemented.
So I would urge a ``no'' vote on the amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
Madam Chair, I move to strike the last word.
In this instance, it is again a case of freezing a salaries and expenses account at the previous year's level. But this one has an interesting sidelight in that, in the legislation that we have before us, we have adopted a Presidential recommendation for a partial-year funding for project-based section 8 vouchers, which is going to cause considerable additional administration than the usual program of doing full-year continuation of those voucher programs. There is going to be much uncertainty if this goes on all the way to adoption. There would be much uncertainty for the people who are the owners and providers of that housing, and probably some loss in actual affordable housing available under the project-based section 8 program. So this is a case where they need that assistance. This is where we administer the housing programs for the elderly and disabled, the so- called 202 programs and 811, chapters 202 and chapter 811 for elderly and disabled people, as well as housing counseling assistance.
In addition, we have the Federal Housing Administration, which is having a much larger level of activity as we are trying to dig out of the foreclosure crisis from the past, and that agency needs to have personnel that are qualified and able to do the right job.
So again here--and by the way, I made an error in my previous comments when I said there was a reduction across the board for HUD. What I should have indicated was that it was a reduction in the salaries and expenses account over a period of time going back to 2010 of $20 million across the programs of salaries and expenses within HUD over that time.
So I made a mistake saying it was a $20 million reduction in 1 year. But for all those reasons, I urge a ``no'' vote on the amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
Madam Chairperson, I move to strike the last word.
The gentleman from Georgia just wants to freeze everything. But our personnel, in an agency like this, they are subject to the civil service laws, to the personnel laws under OPM, and they are assigned in grades and then steps. They add several steps as they gain seniority and go from step 1 to step 7, and then they may sit for a while. But you end up with people--unless you're really trying to put people out of work. Unless you're trying to put people out of work--and there's no reason to do that for this kind of an agency at all--then there has to be a slow, small increase for those people who move from step to step along the salary scale.
So this is an amendment that would essentially cause disruption in the processing and in the personnel system for the agency, which has lots of work to do. We should be worrying about how to get productivity in the processing rather than about trying to jigger and freeze a step system's pay scale for the people who do the work at these agencies.
I again urge that this amendment not be adopted, and I yield back the balance of my time.
I rise in opposition.
Madam Chair, now at this point we have--I think this is the last of this group of amendments that have been proposed in this area, in essence. And when you put them together, because one was for $6.5 million, one was for about $5 million, then there were a couple that were a little--there was one that was a little over $1 million and then a couple that were smaller--the sum total of people who will be taken out of the--who this would require, the freeze, in that way, would require that some number around 200-or-so employees would be put out of positions.
Now, the gentleman from Georgia thinks that, well, they're Federal bureaucrats; but they're providing a service. In this instance, it is the service in the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which has a budget, total budget, of $70-million-or-so. And this 300,000 is only a couple of percent out of it.
Most of the salaries and expenses, most of these agencies that he has been affecting are mostly done in salaries and expenses of the operation of the office. But they all provide a public service to people. In this instance, it's the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.
Well, it ensures that Americans have the same right, that all Americans have the same right to housing and investigates instances where those rights have been violated. So we are, in every instance of them, and we dealt with a couple of similar ones last night before in the other department under this bill--they only serve to slow down the effective operation of those offices to provide services across the whole gamut of things which have been given to them to do, whether it be public housing, whether it be the Veterans Administration program, here the Fair Housing Administration program, the FHA, the housing for elders, housing for disabled people. All of them are the same ilk. There's no reason to do anything other than the same thing that we have done in the past. And so I'm urging, again, a ``no'' vote on this.
I yield back the balance of my time;
Madam Chairwoman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.
The amendment that the gentleman from Georgia has now offered has to do with the Public Housing Capital Fund.
The public housing infrastructure currently has an estimated $26 billion of maintenance backlog. In fact, capital repairs accumulate at the rate of something over $3 billion a year, which is considerably higher than $1.9 billion that is contained in this--$1.985 billion that's contained in this bill. So what we are doing is, year by year, continuing to provide maintenance funding: the replacement of utilities, the replacement of appliances, as well as such simple maintenance as painting if it's needed, and so on.
In our more than a million housing units, in the 3,500 or so of our total housing authorities around the country, we are steadily putting these in a situation where we're building a further capital maintenance backlog gap year by year by year.
This is never a wise thing to do when it's at the extent that we are presently doing it. But the $110 million at least is a little bit better than not having the $110 million, which would be an even greater increase in the backlog gap that we have for maintenance, repair, and upgrading of our housing units.
All of those housing units are intended to last for many years and be used long into the future. If we don't maintain them properly in a reasonable way, then eventually we will lose those units. It is much more expensive to replace the units with new units than it is to maintain them in a proper way.
I urge a ``no'' vote on this amendment so that we do not continue to dig our hole deeper on the maintenance needs for the stock of housing that we have in our 3,500 public housing authorities around the country.
With that, I yield back the balance of my time.
I move to strike the last word.
I'm not sure I have anything much to add to what my chairman has said, other than to just point out, if you look back at the number of dollars that were assigned for the fiscal year '11 bill, that was over $4.6 billion. So in 2012, the amount of money brought that down to under $4 billion. The $500-plus million that the gentleman from Iowa had pointed out was part of the reserves that were taken from those housing authorities around the country that had substantial reserves. So that has been done. That was a one-shot kind of a deal. And now the funding has to go back to something that is in line with the yearly fundings, going back to a period of time of well into a decade ago, that were on a different guide path. So this is just returning to that.
It is at the President's request. It's below the amount that has been granted in the other body's allocation. They had a larger allocation in their numbers for it. This particular account is well below ours. It's $70 million or so below what has been provided by the chairman in the mark for this year.
So I think this is entirely appropriate, given the size of the maintenance gaps and the need to keep maintaining your facilities, your housing quality so that you don't end up losing that or ending up with much higher expense for replacement. I urge a ``no'' vote on the amendment.
I yield back the balance of my time.
Madam Chairwoman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.
Madam Chair, this is an amendment that would take a huge chunk out of the CDBG program. This is one of the areas in which I have been particularly, I thought, most commendable about what the chairman's mark is in the bill for the CDBG.
The CDBG is a hugely popular program in communities around the country. We have, as I have mentioned in my opening remarks at the beginning of this bill, 65 percent of our population living in communities in metropolitan areas with over half a million people, and close to 90 percent of our people live in communities with over 50,000 people. It's roughly around 50,000 people that are entitlement communities and get an amount of money that they may use in a flexible kind of a way in their cities and towns of large size, and can directly get that money to use for things that they need in their cities. Their cities and towns have suffered greatly in the Great Recession that we have had before us, and they have housing needs which are very substantial.
Now I would point out to the gentleman from Utah that the amount for the CDBG program as proposed by Chairman Latham I am commending him for and strongly support his allocation for this. The amount that he has provided in this bill within the allocation and with the $4 billion reduction that the bill entails is below the number that CDBG was given all the way back in 2008. It has varied up and down, depending upon the allocations and depending upon what has gone on. But this one still is below. And I strongly support it and would urge that it be maintained.
And by the way, about 20 percent of the whole amount goes directly to States, which then can use it in a discretionary way in groups of smaller communities. So it actually gets into rural areas and small communities--in communities like those of the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, whose district has no community larger than about 15,000 people. But his district manages to get a considerable amount of money through the State of Kentucky for the congressional district.
So it is something that goes to everybody in their districts in a flexible way for things that are eligible under the law.
But when it is being used for the development of housing, then it ends up clearly directly providing for jobs. If it's used in the way of social services through nonprofit organizations, again it is providing jobs for people who are doing great service for our population. So I'm a strong supporter of this.
I certainly urge that the amendment be defeated, and I will stop there because other people wish to speak, and I yield back the balance of my time.
