He said, she said: FCHA, Falbo grab at straws
Who are we to believe? Ralph Falbo, whose firm crafted a $20 million grant application for the Fayette County Housing Authority, or Paula O. Blunt, the high-ranking U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development official who rejected the application because of a shortcoming? Falbo showed up at last week’s FCHA meeting basically proclaiming that HUD had erred and he was prepared to “argue this.” Falbo apparently doesn’t intend to argue it too long, because the authority took him up on his offer to resubmit the application for a new round of federal funding, at no cost.
Considering that the FCHA spent $65,000 on the first application, that’s a relief. And Falbo found an eager ally in FCHA Executive Director Thomas L. Harkless, who wanted to “dispel that it wasn’t done correctly. It was done correctly.”
Blunt, whose agency wrote the rules and made the eligibility determinations, said the FCHA application failed to meet a basic requirement concerning cost control standards – and thus wasn’t even eligible for consideration. In her rejection letter, Blunt wrote that the FCHA’s application for HOPE VI funding to remake Bierer Wood Acres “was not selected due to the failure of one or more threshold requirements.”
That seems pretty clear and unambiguous.
Falbo and Harkless blaming HUD is expedient, similar to blaming the dead guy for a crime. That’s easy to do, especially when HUD’s not at the meeting to defend itself.
It’s real nice that Falbo now wants to submit a new application, gratis, for another round of funding.
But in this world, who really offers to do a job for free if they adamantly believe it was done right in the first place?