Hitting Bottom

The morning started well enough. I continued working on the project write-ups. The main office gave us an extension. Our original deadline was yesterday, but they let us work on them today (for better or worse). I almost want them to cut us off and take it out of our hands. Enough is enough.

The day took a turn for the worse when we met with the Citizens Recovery Committee. The thing I was most afraid of happened, they freaked out because we changed the projects without talking to them.

I wrote about this a few days ago. The mother ship sent down someone to help us winnow the list of projects and rewrite the others so they were stronger. Stronger in this case means they were more clearly tied to damage and recovery from the hurricane.

When Benjamin first arrived we had a big fight because we did not want to do anything without talking to the Citizens Recovery Committee. We felt it would betray their trust and our cooperative relationship. Eventually, following the bosses lead (the boss said there was no time to get the CRC together), we accepted it on the theory that the other projects were good projects, they would just not go to FEMA and the Mississippi Recovery Authority for funding.

To explain some background, all our projects are being scored against a recovery value tool. It is a series of questions like:
Is the project related to damage from the hurricane
Can the project be done in the next five years
Does it leverage multiple sources of funding
And each project gets rated one to three based on the answers. Part of why HQ wanted us to change our projects was because many of them scored low.

Well, the CRC members were furious that we would take such liberties without them. We had never discussed the recovery value tool with them and they felt betrayed. The reality is that the projects did not change that much. We eliminated a few and tweaked a few, combined a few, but nothing major.

You have to understand, they have spent thousands of hours following the process that we laid out, a process of citizens being in charge, and to have the rules change at the end without them – they were having none of it. So we spent an hour in the meeting from hell where they yelled at the boss and the guy from head quarters. In the end, one of our greatest champions, someone that has spent hundreds of hours volunteering to get the county headed in the right direction, the guy that gets up at the start of every public meeting and does a speech how he hates FEMA but we are a special part of FEMA and the county’s ally, he storms out and says, I need to work on my own damn life. The unspoken message is that he has he regrets the time he spent following our process.

It was the worse day since I have been here.