Greg Gerber posted on December 03, 2008 09:32
BILOXI, Miss. -- Why didn't FEMA just haul all its used and unused travel trailers and mobile homes to Camp Shelby and let the military use them for target practice?
Taxpayers would then not be spending $28 million a year to store more than 32,000 of them at five privately owned sites in South Mississippi until FEMA decides what to do with them.
FEMA is stuck with more temporary housing units than it knows what to do with. And until FEMA figures out what to do with them, taxpayers are stuck with exorbitant storage costs.
Why couldn't that massive piece of government property at Camp Shelby have been used for this purpose? If not, it certainly would have been cheaper in the long run for FEMA to buy land rather than lease it. How much cheaper?
FEMA is now paying $28 million a year - and will be doing so for several years to come - to lease and store trailers on 1,154 acres at five sites in South Mississippi. Those millions of dollars cover more than just the cost of leasing the land, but still, that averages out to $24,263 per acre per year.
That is a hefty fee just to park tens of thousands of trailers that will either be sold as scrap or auctioned off for a fraction of their original cost as surplus government property.
SOURCE: Sun Herald