Harvey czar John Sharp offers blunt words for insurers and developers

Sept. 29--Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp demonstrated why Gov. Greg Abbott chose him as the Harvey recovery czar Friday, praising the governor's handling of the recovery from his up-close perch while talking bluntly about insurance companies, Houston developers, the reliance on undocumented workers to help in the cleanup, and temporarily skirting environmental regulations, all in ways the governor can't or won't.

So, for example, in a public conversation with Texas Tribune co-founder and CEO Evan Smith at the Austin Club, Sharp said that Abbott was suspending any and every rule and regulation that would impede the recovery -- like burn bans. And then asked about the negative environmental consequences, he acknowledged that burning debris, especially vegetation, is not good for the air, but "when you're ass-deep in alligators, it's hard to think about draining the swamp."

"There are things that are going to be done that are probably not environmentally sensitive, but we are going to get people back in their houses," Sharp said.

Asked by Smith about whether much of the recovery work might be "on the backs of undocumented labor," even as their status is increasingly tenuous, Sharp replied, "We're not checking papers when we're asking people to haul stuff out."

Smith asked, "is that just your position," or is that also the position of the state and federal government?

"We ain't checking anything, papers, driver's licenses," Sharp said. "Just get the stuff off the curb."

Sharp said that one lesson of Harvey is that, "some developers had too much power in Houston," and will have to be told where they can no longer build.

Sharp was also especially critical of the insurance industry, saying that they are going to have to treat Texans post-Harvey better than they have treated disaster victims elsewhere, to prove that they are, as their ads say, a "good neighbor," and that Texans are in "good hands" with them.

"They need to quit telling their clients, 'Wait until you get the FEMA money,'" he said. "They need to write a damn check."

Sharp, a former Democratic state comptroller, said he wasn't sure why Abbott chose him to lead the Governor's Commission to Rebuild Texas, except that he knows a lot of people form his long years in state government and politics, and that the governor didn't really ask him to chair the commission so much as tell him he was going to do it. His only question, he said, was could he keep his day job running the A&M System, and the governor said he could.

Sharp praised U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, the Republican whip, for doubling to more than $15 billion the amount of disaster aid in the first of what are expected to be several federal relief bills.

"That was all him," Sharp said of Cornyn, without mentioning Sen. Ted Cruz, Cornyn's junior colleague.

"He's like an angel that's flying above us," he said of Cornyn.

As he has done in the past, Sharp extolled Abbott's virtues in handling the crisis, saying he is always the smartest, most knowledgeable person in the room, and that, in addition to stripping away any regulatory impediments, he had also successfully negotiated a better deal for Texas with federal officials than is the norm, including getting FEMA to agree to pay 90 percent of the cost of debris removal instead of the usual 75 percent.

From Austin, Sharp was heading to Houston Friday for a meeting and press conference at Houston City Hall at which Mayor Sylvester Turner and the governor were going to talk through some recent disagreements about recovery funding.

Turner wants the governor to call a special session of the Legislature to tap the $10 billion state rainy day fund to help Houston meet other extraordinary expenses and not have to raise taxes. The governor and other state officials say that, while rainy day monies will undoubtedly eventually be used, appropriated funds can be moved around without a special session and then replenished, including from the reserve fund, when the Legislature again convenes in January 2019.

The Houston Chronicle editorialized this week that the governor's response to the mayor was equivalent to President Gerald Ford's negative response to a federal bailout of New York City in 1975, which the New York Daily News memorialized in a headline, "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

But Sharp said that didn't reflect the governor's sentiment in the least, and that, aside from some frayed nerves,Texas and Texans had performed superbly in response to Harvey.

"The good part about this is it sure showed the world that Texans are a different breed of cat," Sharp said.

"We probably have the best disaster recovery operation that exists in the United States," Sharp said.

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