Houston Chronicle columnist Lisa Falkenberg has followed up on some digging she did last month into how stimulus money was being used by prominent Houston nonprofit Sheltering Arms to weatherize the homes of low-income families.

Her initial column followed a Texas Watchdog report that highlighted shoddy work Sheltering Arms had done in weatherizing homes. Texas Watchdog also reported that Sheltering Arms was fighting to keep private the addresses of the homes they fixed up -- meaning there was no way for the public to oversee the work that was being done with its tax money.

Falkenberg's follow-up focues on the home of 87-year-old E.M. Gatterson -- worked on by Sheltering Arms and apparently not worked on very well.

Falkenberg reports:

The Houston nonprofit is spending $22 million in stimulus funds through the program and has completed more units to date than any other Texas contractor. But a recent monitoring report by the state agency administering the funds found workmanship problems with about 60 percent of the Sheltering Arms units inspected. The report by the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs also cited Sheltering Arms for sloppy recordkeeping.

In a column last month, a Sheltering Arms official told me all the problems were on track to be fixed by the end of the week and that the organization stood by its work.

Gatterson's home is one example of problems left behind. Sheltering Arms won't release addresses of the units completed in the program, so Gatterson's case came to my attention through a longtime Acres Homes community activist.

This matches what Texas Watchdog has found when we went digging for homeowners that were supposed to be helped by Sheltering Arms -- homeowners that the nonprofit did not want us to find.

We found, for example, a Tomball couple getting a runaround after they said they were told they qualified for central air conditioning.

Read the Texas Watchdog story about the Tomball family. Or see clips from our video report below.

Read here the initial Texas Watchdog story about Sheltering Arms.

And read here the Texas Watchdog story on the federal stimulus weatherization program that started it all.

Trent Seibert can be reached at trent@texaswatchdog.org or at 832-316-4994.

Photo by Flickr user Photos8.com, used via a Creative Commons license