Sen. Ted Stevens will press forward with efforts to streamline the delivery of federal funds to Alaska Natives despite a recent congressional investigation that turned up no evidence of waste and inefficiency, his office says.
For several years, Stevens has urged Native groups to consolidate programs, saying the distribution of federal funds to multiple village tribes rather than regional groups may be unsustainable. He has said congressional grants for services such as housing and law enforcement appear to be creating duplicative administrative jobs in villages.
"With 231 tribes (in Alaska), we are hard-pressed to ensure that housing funds go to build houses and not simply pay salaries," Stevens' spokeswoman Courtney Boone said recently. "We cannot pay for a housing coordinator in every village."
Last year Stevens asked the Government Accountability Office to look at the cost of those programs. The GAO report was released in August, with a focus on housing programs.
The report's conclusions did not particularly reinforce Stevens' concerns. In fact, one of its key findings was that village housing authorities were able to build new houses more cheaply than regional housing authorities.
That finding was hardly conclusive, however. The report noted that the difference might be explained by regional authorities working in more high-cost areas of Alaska. Moreover, village housing authorities generally do not receive state funds and therefore may choose to ignore state construction and energy efficiency standards, the report said.
The cost of rehabilitating old homes was higher for village authorities than for regional authorities, according to the GAO.
Overall, the GAO report found that from 1998 to 2003 the federal government had turned over nearly $3.5 billion to Alaska Native villages and regional Native nonprofits.
Of that amount, $483 million went to 216 villages and about $3 billion to 33 regional Native groups. More than half the funds went for health programs, which by law are administered regionally rather than by villages.
In addition, the report said, the state of Alaska passed through $105 million in federal funds to those Native groups during that period, and another $224 million went to organizations that primarily provide assistance to Alaska Natives.
All this money has been having some effect, the report suggested. The GAO cited statistics assembled recently by the Institute of Social and Economic Research showing that in areas such as health and poverty, the situation of Alaska Natives has improved in the last 15 years. But disparities compared to the rest of the nation remain, the GAO said.
In its assessment of housing programs, the accounting office said regional housing authorities built three times as many houses as villages during the six-year period. It did not break out administrative expenses when examining the costs of building and fixing up houses in rural villages.
"It didn't go as far as we would have liked," said Stevens' spokeswoman Boone.
Stevens' efforts have been controversial among some Native groups. They have defended the status quo, saying the system represents a common-sense combination of efficiency and local control. Some critics saw the effort as a step toward federal creation of regional tribes, which Boone called a misunderstanding.
Since first raising the issue several years ago, Boone said, Stevens has traveled in rural Alaska and learned of activities in which Native groups are already collaborating to improve efficiency.
"We're going to continue urging people to collaborate to reduce overhead to make better use of the dollars out there," she said.
Another reason for pushing the change, she said, is that regional groups are better able to leverage other sources of funds to build houses.
Alaska Federation of Natives president Julie Kitka said her organization plans to make recommendations based on the GAO report and is eager to work with Alaska's congressional delegation on improving accountability and efficiency.
"We're interested in increasing the effectiveness of federal funding coming in," Kitka said. "We're not sure how high on the national priority list this is at the moment, especially with the hurricane and flooding."
Daily News reporter Tom Kizzia can be reached at tkizzia@adn.com or in Homer at 1-907-235-4244.
