CSUN President Concedes Lack of Disaster Staffing

Only three days after blaming federal delays for threatening the university’s earthquake recovery, Cal State Northridge President Blenda Wilson conceded Friday that the school’s lack of adequate disaster staffing had contributed to the problem.

Emerging from an hourlong meeting with state and federal officials, Wilson said CSUN has hired three specialists to help prepare the detailed paperwork required to seek federal recovery funds for the campus’s estimated $350 million in damage.

“Cal State Northridge will augment its staff as necessary to keep up with demands for information,” Wilson said. “We had not anticipated the degree of additional information that is necessary. . . . But now we know.”

All three new staff members are expected to be on the job by next week, she said.

The announcement came after top officials in both the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services challenged Wilson’s comments Tuesday to the California State University system’s board of trustees blaming only FEMA for the delays. They said CSUN’s own tardiness in providing requested documentation also has been a factor.

Wilson said she could not estimate the cost of bringing on the three extra staff members from the Los Angeles engineering firm of Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall, which already is handling CSUN’s earthquake recovery construction management duties. But Wilson said they will stay “until we have all of the information up-to-date and completed.”

CSUN officials could not immediately say Friday how many university staff members already are working in their earthquake recovery office on damage survey reports, the vehicle for seeking federal funds.

Meanwhile, in another development Friday, FEMA officials asserted that a dispute over the university’s demands for funding to manage the earthquake work on campus also brought the processing of damage claims and their funding to a virtual standstill for at least four months, from late last year until March.

FEMA officials said CSUN was demanding 20% overhead on repair projects, meaning they would get $200,000 extra to manage $1 million of repairs. They said FEMA now is providing only 2% to 5%, depending on the cost of a project. “That was the main issue” behind why CSUN now has 20 claims totaling $12.1 million still pending with FEMA, a spokesman said.

In another earthquake funding matter, a memo written this week by a state Office of Emergency Services official sided with FEMA officials in blaming CSUN for the repairs slowdown. “There is no truth to the accusation that OES/FEMA has been anything less than cooperative” with the campus, the unidentified official wrote in the memo, which was provided to The Times.

The memo alleged CSUN failed to provide an “extensive list of documentation” requested by FEMA and OES officials for a range of costly repair projects, and that the university’s earthquake office was understaffed. The memo also stated that CSUN earthquake recovery chief Jane Chatham “will not return phone calls” from FEMA and Office of Emergency Services officials.

Chatham told CSUN officials Friday that the last allegation was untrue and that she has regularly met with FEMA and emergency services officials. She and her husband, Bill, a CSUN associate vice president, were criticized by Wilson recently for creating “an appearance of impropriety” by having several contractor employees rebuild their earthquake-damaged home patio amid contract negotiations.