POLITICS

Report: Indy struggles to spend $3M for kids' health

Brian Eason and Ryan Sabalow

At the halfway mark of a three-year federal housing grant for lead mitigation, the city of Indianapolis had completed work on five homes — out of a goal of 240.

On quarterly report cards, the city received scores as poor as 21 out of 100, and it was flagged as a "high risk" grant recipient by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, which administers the program.

And — despite signs of progress in the past six months — out of the $3 million earmarked to mitigate lead poisoning, the city has spent just $600,000 in two years to help the low-income children that the program was created to assist.

While local and federal government officials downplayed the severity of HUD's monitoring reports, the ongoing struggles to get the program off the ground still raise questions about the city's handling of public dollars.

Indianapolis is not alone. HUD officials said cities across the country have struggled to implement the lead mitigation program, which doles out around $95 million a year to local governments.

"There's difficulties all the way across the board with implementation of these grant programs," said Warren Friedman, a senior adviser with the HUD healthy homes program.

"Waste is not the main concern, happily," he said. "The biggest concern is the pace."

In Indy, officials cited a number of reasons for the delays — some beyond the city's control, but some not.

Jennifer Fults, an administrator at the city's Department of Metropolitan Development, said the city was ready for the program rollout in early 2013, only to have its grant manager leave. Then, the replacement manager got pulled off the job to assist the FBI's probe in the city Land Bank scandal, which resulted in a slew of criminal charges.

"They got behind and it was no fault of the people running the grant," said Jerry Freese, a HUD representative who oversees Indianapolis' program.

But the city still may have been partly to blame.

Freese said other city agencies were uncooperative with DMD employees, but he didn't offer specifics. And Fults would not explain what those problems were.

"I just want to be very positive and say we're working on having a very good relationship with all of our partners," Fults said.

Whatever the cause, the series of missteps have pushed back Indianapolis' efforts to mitigate lead poisoning in a state that has more cases on average than the nation at large because of its aging housing.

More than 63 percent of Indiana's nearly 2 million homes were built before 1978, when lead-based paint was banned for residential use. And of 48,500 children screened in 2013, more than 2,300 had elevated blood lead levels, or about 5 percent, according to an Indiana Department of Health report.

Lead inhalation or ingestion among developing children can cause learning problems, stunted growth and, in extreme cases, death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Pregnant women's unborn children are also at risk.

That's why HUD officials say they prefer to work with cities rather than punish them.

"I had heard a story going around that we were getting ready to pull the grant, and that was never the case," Freese said.

There's also little incentive for administrators to pull the money back before the grant expires, barring serious malfeasance. If the grant money doesn't get used, HUD can't reallocate it, Friedman said; instead it returns to the U.S. Treasury.

Lately, the city is facing a new problem: finding participants among qualified families with children 6 or under.

"As strange as it seems, it's difficult to get people to take government money to help themselves," Freese said.

To the extent that the city has met any of its benchmarks so far, it's been because HUD moved the goal posts to easier targets. And even then, the city has continued to struggle.

As of the third quarter of 2014, the city had completed just 33 homes, fewer than half of its benchmark target of 70, according to HUD reports.

Three months later, the city says it has completed 42, with 16 homes pending.

Call Star reporter Brian Eason at (317) 444-6129. Follow him on Twitter: @brianeason.