ADVERTISEMENT

Puerto Rico Gets $13 Billion in Aid With Election Just Ahead

Puerto Rico Gets $13 Billion From FEMA for Power, Education

Puerto Rico is getting $13 billion in additional disaster funding to rebuild its energy grid and repair schools, which were ravaged by Hurricane Maria.

The money comes a full three years after the deadly storm and just six weeks before the presidential election, with Democrats and Republicans battling for Puerto Rican voters in crucial Florida. Speaking Friday at the White House, Trump brushed off questions about the timing.

“I’m the best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico, not even close,” said Trump, who oversaw a Maria response that significantly lagged mainland disasters in the pace of both spending and staffing.

Puerto Rico Governor Wanda Vazquez, who recently lost a primary and will soon leave office, called the payment “an unprecedented accomplishment,” and said it was thanks to a “good relationship” with the White House.

The move comes at a key moment in presidential politics. Both parties are courting the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans who have settled in Florida, America’s largest swing state. Some came after Maria, when an estimated 3,000 died and some parts of the island were left powerless for the better part of year.

U.S. House Natural Resources Chairman Raul Grijalva, a Democrat with a key role in Puerto Rican affairs, said the funding had been withheld.

“Four years of Trump administration abuse and neglect have caused preventable deaths in Puerto Rico, and today’s announcement will not erase Puerto Rican memories of how the president has treated the island and its people,” Grijalva’s office said in a statement.

In a visit to the Central Florida bastion of the Puerto Rican community this week, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden proposed a debt-relief program for the island, which is also trying to emerge from a historic bankruptcy and a deep economic downturn.

The latest funds are in addition to the $49.9 billion in aid that Congress has approved since Hurricane Maria raked the U.S. commonwealth on Sept. 20, 2017. Of those original funds, $25.5 billion has been obligated and $16.7 billion has been spent.

The White House, in a statement, said the grants exceed the total public assistance funding of “any single federally-declared disaster other than Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.”

The federal share of the new Puerto Rico funding is $11.6 billion, $9.6 billion of which will go toward the electrical grid and $2 billion toward schools, the White House said.

Failing System

The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority -- one of the U.S.’s largest public utilities -- runs the notoriously fragile and expensive power grid. This year, the company signed an estimated $100 million contract with a private consortium called Luma Energy to manage power transmission and distribution for the next 15 years.

Prepa, as the utility is known, will use the funding to bury power lines leading to hospitals and other critical infrastructure, and to repair dams and hydroelectric plants, according to Jenniffer Gonzalez, the island’s non-voting member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

FEMA’s regional administrator, Thomas Von Essen, said Prepa was “not the easiest group to work with,” calling his initial relationship with the utility “a disaster.”

“We hope this new infusion of money is done properly and spent properly,” he said at an appearance in San Juan with the governor. “The Department of Energy will stay on top of it.”

New Voters

Though residents on the island of 3.2 million people are U.S. citizens, they can’t vote in presidential elections. The diaspora is seen as critical to winning Central Florida. (Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent company Bloomberg LP, said Sunday that he would spend $100 million to help Biden in Florida.

Some 209,000 Florida voters were born in Puerto Rico, according to 2018 voter roll data compiled and analyzed by University of Florida political science professor Daniel Smith. That’s up by about 17,200 since 2016, just slightly more than the 16,700 Cuba-born Florida residents that joined voter rolls in the same period.

While sizable, the numbers of new Puerto Rican voters pale in comparison to some early projections of the Hurricane Maria exodus. What’s more, Puerto Ricans’ turnout in the last presidential election year was just 66%. By comparison, participation was 77% for Cuba-born voters.

Tatiana Matta, a Latino advisor for Biden, called Friday’s announcement a “political stunt” to win Puerto Rican support.

“For the thousands of families who had to leave the island, for all those we’ve lost, for those who still struggle everyday to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, it is three years too little and too late,” she said in a statement.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.