Senate Report N. 115-138 (2018)

Calendar No. 185
115TH CONGRESS 1
1st Session

SENATE

1

REPORT

115—138

TRANSPORTATION, AND HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOP
MENT, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS BILL,
2018
JULY 27, 2017.—Ordered to be printed

Ms. COLLINS, from the Committee on Appropriations, submitted

the following

REPORT
[To accompany S. 16551

The Committee on Appropriations reports the bill (S. 1655) mak
ing appropriations for the Departments of Transportation, and
Housing and Urban Development, and related agencies for the fis
cal year ending September 30, 2018, and for other purposes, re
ports favorably thereon and recommends that the bill do pass.
Amounts of new budget (obligational) authority for fiscat year 2018
$60,058,000,000
Total of bill as reported to the Senate
61,437,017,000
Amount of 2017 appropriations
47,928,180,000
Amount of 2018 budget estimate
Bill as recommended to Senate compared to—

2017 appropriations
2018 budget estimate

26—351 PDF

—1,379,017,000
+ 12,129,820,000

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those most in need. If owners fail to uphold these standards, HUD
should hold them accountable. After learning of several properties
around the country that suffered from severe physical deficiencies,
but were none-the-less able to pass HUD inspection, the Committee
strengthened a general provision requiring the Department to take
specific steps to ensure that serious defects are quickly addressed.
This provision requires the Secretary to take explicit actions if an
owner fails to maintain its property, including imposing civil mone
tary penalties, working to secure a different owner for the property,
or transferring the Section 8 contract to another property. In addi
tion to the requirements under this general provision, the Depart
ment took several steps to improve its inspections process, includ
ing: closing a loophole that allowed condemned units to be excluded
from inspection samples; permitting REAC to require owners to
make repairs for individual deficiencies even when an overall prop
erty receives a passing score; requiring owners to adopt industry
standards when making repairs; and training REAC inspectors to
recognize industry standards when evaluating whether deficiencies
have been corrected. In addition, HUD is considering regulatory
and policy changes that would reduce the time it takes to conduct
an inspection after a property owner is notified about a failing
score and removing the point deductions cap, which limits how
much a property’s score can be lowered for multiple instances of
the same deficiency type. The Committee commends HUD for the
steps it has taken to improve responsiveness and accountability
and encourages the Department to implement the measures still
under consideration described above. It also urges HUD to consider
using PBCAs to identify troubled properties early on. Unfortu
nately, despite enacted changes, the Department’s oversight still
permits a property cited for multiple code violations by State and
local building departments to receive a passing REAC score. While
local code violations are factored into the risk assessments that de
termine which properties are inspected, State and local citations
for building code violations do not consistently trigger an imme
diate response from the Department, which may explain why HUD
has been inexcusably caught off guard by media reports of atro
cious conditions that have been allowed to persist within its multi
family portfolio. The Committee directs the Department to estab
lish a plan for responding to State and local building inspector
findings so that properties with serious outstanding code violations
are targeted by REAC and, if conditions leading to those violations
are not addressed, those properties do not receive a passing score
from HUD.
Unfortunately, the Department has been less than transparent
with the Committee about the extent of the problems within its as
sisted housing portfolio, failing year after year to comply with the
Committee’s requirement to provide regular reports on its most
troubled properties. HUD’s refusal to provide this information
makes it extremely difficult to assess the Department’s perform
ance and to evaluate whether changes and reforms such as those
described above are effective. Once again, the Committee requires
the Department to provide quarterly reports to the House and Sen
ate Committees on Appropriations on projects that receive multiple
exigent health and safety violations, physical inspection scores