LAS VEGAS — Disputes over how the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Claims Office is distributing the $3.95 billion funded to help the victims of New Mexico’s largest wildfire rebuild their homes and their lives continue, with one local advocate questioning why the office is paying itself out of those funds, among other grievances.
For their part, officials with the Claims Office rationalize how the funds are being used, how quickly these are being distributed and can share information on claimants satisfied with how their case has been settled.
In a letter to the editor, Manny Crespin Jr., founder and director of the Coalition for Fire Fund Fairness, notes that this past holiday season was the second to come and go while the majority of the victims of the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire “have not been compensated and their hearts are burdened by the weight of prolonged suffering and mismanagement of the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Claims Office.”
Crespin states in the letter that while the passage of the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire Assistance Act in September 2022 was encouraging to victims of the fire, the “FEMA bureaucrats charged with administering the fund have failed spectacularly.”
Crespin goes on to discuss and challenge figures provided by the Claims Office during a town hall meeting on Dec. 13. Originally slated to take place at the Mora High School lecture hall, the town hall meeting took place via Zoom due to a snowstorm.
During the meeting, Claims Office Director Angela Gladwell stated that, by that date, FEMA had distributed $146 million to help victims of the fire.
“In the more than 14 months since the Fund was created, Gladwell and FEMA have paid out less than 4 percent to the victims who lost their homes and livelihoods in the fire,” Crespin states in the letter. He contrasts that with the $276.5 million — or 7% of the allocated funds – that the Claims Office will pay itself.
“That’s even more than what’s been paid out,” Crespin said in an interview via Zoom. “It’s just an outrageous waste of taxpayer money.”
“I just have to repeat myself like a broken record,” Crespin continued, “but the process is just not working.”
Crespin also notes in the letter that Gladwell is failing to comply with the Act, which requires FEMA to provide victims with a written offer within 180 days of when their claim was submitted.
“The Coalition for Fire Fund Fairness has learned from victims and their attorneys that there are dozens of victims who have submitted a claim but have not received an offer within the required 180-day period,” Crespin states in the letter.
Crespin noted that information on how much the Claims Office has paid out to the victims of the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire is public information and can be found online. He said the numbers he has found and the figures Gladwell gave during the Dec. 13 town hall do not match up.
John Mills, external affairs officer for the FEMA Incident Management Assistance Team Region 7, said in a Jan. 9 email that the statement that the Claims Office has only paid out 4% of what has been allocated by the Act to help victims is false.
“We have paid more than $302 million in claims,” Mills states in the email. “We have paid about 70 percent of the $436 million in claims with documentation that have been submitted.”
Mills goes on to state that an estimated $1 billion to $1.5 billion is expected to be spent on reforestation claims on non-federal lands.
As for the funds that the Claims Office will be paying itself, Mills cautioned that the Claims Office pays “100 percent of approved claims directly to the people with property, financial, or business losses. … We never take away any of your money for our administrative expenses.”
The administrative costs incurred by FEMA will “have no effect on how much money people with property, business, and financial losses are eligible to receive,” Mills reiterates. “No effect at all.”
Mills does note in the email statement that the law passed by Congress requires FEMA “to administer the program and pay for New Mexico office space and personnel from the same funding source.”
When asked for an update on the work the Claims Office is doing to help the victims of the fire, Deborah Martinez, media relations specialist for the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Claims Office, forwarded several video interviews of claimants who are satisfied with how their claims were settled.
In one video, brothers Jerry and Silviano Gomez of Rociada speak of their experience.
“The house where I was born and raised, I saw it go down,” an emotional Silviano Gomez says. Jerry Gomez says that living through the experience of the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire made him realize “that what we built can become nothing in seconds.”
The Gomez brothers found it difficult to assess the damage to their 900-acre cattle ranch and turned to the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service for help.
The Claims Office partnered with the NRCS back in May to offer landowners affected by the wildfire an opportunity to request an NRCS Conservation Restoration Plan for their property at no charge.
In the video, John Cyle Sharp, FEMA Claims Office associate advocate, describes how the NRCS was able to help the Gomez brothers with their claims.
“(The NRCS) brought in certified planners,” Sharp says. “They reviewed the damage with a site inspection … and they were able to write an estimate for the debris removal as well as … reforestation.”
Sharp says that the Gomez brothers were able to benefit from the expertise provided by the NRCS in order to get an estimate of their damages and file a claim and start the process of restoring their land.
Jerry Gomez acknowledges in the video that much of what was damaged will take years to bring things back as they were, such as the land’s topsoil and trees. However, he and his brother express gratitude to the Claims Office.
“At least we have somebody behind us saying, ‘we can help you,’” Jerry Gomez says.
