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The decommissioned USS Ranger makes its final
journey as it arrives at South Padre Island July 12 on its way to the Port of
Brownsville, where the aircraft carrier is being scrapped.
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The former chief counsel to the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD)
says the agency is misspending money paid by ship breakers into a maritime
heritage grant fund intended to support museums and education.
MARAD says it’s not. In any case, federal legislation dubbed the
STORIS Act and introduced by a pair of Louisiana senators — and co-sponsored by
U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela, D-Brownsville — would require the Government Accountability
Office to look into how MARAD is spending the grant money, which comes from
MARAD’s sale of surplus government vessels.
Denise Krepp left her job as MARAD chief counsel in 2012 and now
lobbies for the ship-breaking industry in Washington D.C. Brownsville-based
International Shipbreaking LLC is among her clients.
Although ISL and other domestic scrappers have paid more than $75
million into the fund since 2005, the legally mandated recipients — maritime
heritage and preservation groups — still haven’t received all the money, she
said.
“We want to know where the money went to,” Krepp said.
The 1994 National Maritime Heritage Act stipulates that 25 percent of
the money from ship sales go to the Interior Department each year for the grant
program. Further, the money has to be used to “foster in the American public a
greater awareness and appreciation of the role of the maritime endeavors in our
nation’s history and culture,” according to the NMHA.
The USS Lexington in Corpus Christi and Battleship Texas in LaPorte
are two examples of floating maritime museums.
MARAD said in its 2013 annual report that it had used heritage grant
money to record oral histories of agency employees and to repair model ships on
display at Department of Transportation headquarters in Washington, said Krepp,
who doesn’t think this fits the definition of preserving maritime heritage.
MARAD spokeswoman Kim Strong said the law allows the funding to be
used to “maintain the more than 7,000 pieces in the agency’s heritage asset
collection.”
About half that collection is on display at the
AmericanMerchantMarineMuseum at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings
Point, N.Y., she said. Other MARAD artifacts are on loan to museums around the
country, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and
the MaritimeIndustryMuseum in Fort Schuyler, N.Y., Strong said.
Another 25 percent of the proceeds from MARAD vessel sales is supposed
to go to maintain the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and the country’s six state
maritime academies, including the TexasA&MMaritimeAcademy in Galveston.
Fifty percent of the money is designated for maintenance and repair of the
National Defense Reserve Fleet.
Of the roughly $19 million that Strong said MARAD has made available
for maritime preservation, $1.3 million funded “a myriad” of federal maritime
heritage asset-preservation projects, $2.8 million was transferred to the
National Park Service last year to administer a round of National Maritime
Heritage grant awards, and $2 million was transferred to the NPS this year for
a subsequent round of heritage grants, she said.
Strong said the rest of the $19 million would be divided between the
future preservation of maritime heritage assets and annual transfers of at
least $2 million to NPS for more grants over the next four years.
Krepp said MARAD has not been making annual disbursements as required
by law. A 1998 congressional hearing into MARAD’s ship-recycling program
triggered an initial disbursement of grant fund in the amount of $652,616, then
nothing until last April, when another $2.6 million was released — still less
than the annual 25 percent stipulated by Congress, she said.
Two releases of grant money in 21 years falls far short of the law’s
“annual grant” requirement, Krepp said.
“We know how much money we’ve given the federal government, we just
want to know how they spend it,” she said.
Source: Brownsville Herald. 25 July 2015
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