Being told the programs paid for by the federal stimulus are transparent and accountable is like being told it's sunny and gorgeous when you are pinned under a support beam deep in a mine that has caved in. Both may be true, but you have your work cut out for you if you want to find out.

Take the weatherization story we posted today about the work being paid for with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act dollars in Houston. At the core of a story about a good many of those dollars being wasted is a report we got by using the law, the Texas Public Information Act. We didn't know the report existed because that wasn't what we were originally looking for.

What we wanted seemed pretty simple. After we ran a January story about how the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs was having trouble launching its Weatherization Assistance Program, department officials were anxious to keep us posted once things picked up. In particular, they seemed proud that after having weatherized just 47 homes in all of Texas through December, contractors had done 450 homes in January alone.

Nearly a third of them were done by contractors working for Sheltering Arms Senior Services of Houston. Because Houston is Texas Watchdog's home base, we thought we could localize the story by taking a look at the work that had been done and interviewing a low-income homeowner or two.

The folks running Sheltering Arms wouldn't tell us where the work had been done.

They said the privacy of the people served by federal tax money was protected by something called the HIPAA Privacy Rule, an odd claim since HIPAA refers to medical information.

After going back and forth between Sheltering Arms and Housing and Community Affairs for more than two months, we made formal requests under the Public Information Act for what boiled down to three things: a copy of the contract between the state and Sheltering Arms, copies of all the reports of all the inspections the department had done of weatherization work anywhere in Texas and the addresses where Sheltering Arms had done its work.

The department's public information officer, Gordon Anderson, provided the contract by e-mail on April 20, the day we asked for it. Nine days later Anderson sent the inspection reports Federal Express.

Anderson also sent us a copy of a request by the department for a list of the work done by Sheltering Arms. We sent Sheltering Arms a similar request. And although it appears clear from the contract that the state has a right to the information and, by extension, so does the public, Sheltering Arms denied the request and on May 4 informed us they were asking for an opinion from the Texas Attorney General as to whether they could continue to keep the addresses secret.

After reading the report on the work done by the Sheltering Arms contractors, all the stonewalling and secrecy made sense. All the more reason, we think, to know where Sheltering Arms and all of the others spending $326 million to weatherize homes are doing their work.

Federal Stimulus Monitoring Report Of Sheltering Arms Senior Services

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