By Marianne Lyons Delorey, Ph.D.
Last spring, Colony Retirement Homes was in the news with a press release and photo op to collect an $8 million check from HUD from the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program (GRRP), which was a grant program initiated to address energy efficiency, climate change resilience, and air quality needs in one of our buildings. The intent of the program was to help us analyze our building and determine what projects made the most sense. The grant required that we share the cost of the identified projects so we would have “skin in the game.”
First, a news flash. The check was a prop. We did not actually get to the point of identifying a scope of work before the funding was cut this year by the federal government’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE). While we did get some information out of the analyses done, we did not receive a penny that we could invest in our building.
DOGE has reported that its goal in cutting governmental spending is to reduce “waste, fraud, and abuse.” But I don’t think there is enough reporting about the real world impacts of reduced government funding, including those on our elders.
Breaking down our intentions for the grant into specific projects, let’s talk about what this really means. According to the GRRP webpage, the grant proposes to invest in, “innovative energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions reductions, green and healthy housing measures, renewable energy generation, use of building materials with lower embodied carbon, and climate resilience investments.”
For Colony, the projects we identified can largely be put into three categories:
- Improves efficiency and reduces emissions (such as a new solar array or better caulking for our windows)
- Improves safety (such as new electric panels)
- Improves quality of life for our older residents (such as energy star rated refrigerators and a modern heating system)
Everyone, I think, would agree that eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending is a worthy goal. But I would ask the following questions about our grant funding:
What is fraudulent about wanting our residents to be able to breathe better in their homes?
What is wasteful about investing in a solar array so our electricity bills are lower?
What is abusive about upgrading electrical panels to ensure safety?
To those of you who are unfamiliar with how HUD interacts with housing providers, here is a primer. First, many of us are nonprofit organizations. Those of us who work there do earn a paycheck, but we do not profit from extra work. In fact, quite the opposite – we were more than willing to take on extra work for no compensation because we do the right thing by our residents. We also do the right thing by the taxpayers by making sure we are always thinking about insurability, liability, and long-term asset management. Why should the government help a nonprofit provider with extra funds? Because ultimately, we are saving the taxpayer money.
If we don’t need more money from HUD to address rising insurance costs, we won’t ask for it. Further, if our residents did not live with us, many would be in nursing homes at a much higher cost. And if the government did not occasionally come out with incentive programs such as this GRRP, we would not be able to front the costs for something like a solar array which would ultimately save the taxpayers money.
The government is made up of humans, and no human is perfect, so no government program is perfect. However, this was a well thought out grant. It required agencies such as ours to share the costs of certain upgrades so we had “skin in the game.” It was also data driven and the intent was to investigate the building’s needs before determining the final scope of work.
All told, I think cancelling this contract was a mistake. I think labeling grants like this as “waste, fraud, and abuse” is blatantly misleading if not completely untrue. Our nonprofit gets the funds needed to keep the building open, but we do not get to line our pockets with this grant. We could have saved significant funds in energy and insurance costs – savings that HUD could have asked us to return. Now, it seems the taxpayers are the ones who will suffer at the hands of those who cancelled the contracts.
Marianne Lyons Delorey, Ph.D. is the executive director of Colony Retirement Homes. She can be reached at 508-755-0444 or mdelorey@colonyretirement.com and www.colonyretirementhomes.com
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