Recovery

Privileged government information can give officials who move into the private sector an unfair competitive advantage, a business ethics expert says.

As Puerto Rico prepares to host the World Baseball Classic in March 2026, many communities across the archipelago are still waiting for the parks where children and teenagers play the sport to be brought back into shape.

Eight years after the hurricane, Gov. Jenniffer González’s administration insists on maintaining the same emergency protocol for electricity-dependent patients that failed under the past three administrations.

The island’s Department of Education is losing students, in part, due to a cycle of constant school relocations, deteriorating facilities, and shortened schedules from noon to 5 p.m., which are stopgap measures that fail to address the core problem: an unrepaired infrastructure, despite the availability of funds.

The outlook is grim. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has announced that its secretary will now personally review any grant or contract award exceeding $100,000 before the funds can be committed, the agency told the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo.

The fund expired in June. Originally approved by the Legislature in 2020 to provide municipalities with liquidity, the reserve ultimately failed to deliver. Jenniffer González now plans to redirect it toward energy projects that could benefit “other entities,” not just government agencies.

Amid a web of conflicts, Eduardo Soria Rivera — who has led Puerto Rico’s main recovery office since January — also chairs the Governing Board of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority.

After a $1 billion cut to one of the main federally funded mitigation programs — designed to help communities tackle climate change — Puerto Rico is losing significant grants. For the past four days, Governor Jenniffer González's administration has remained silent on the matter.

COR3, the agency in charge of recovery in Puerto Rico, holds FEMA responsible for excluding that multi-million-dollar expense because of the methodology it used to estimate the damage to the electrical system after Hurricanes Irma and María.

The absence of clear guidelines from the Puerto Rico Department of Housing to execute the program and poor advice from US firms hired for millions of dollars results in the delay in City Revitalization Program projects.

Of the 242 community aqueduct systems legally registered in Puerto Rico as franchises, 31% have not requested recovery funds for the damages caused to infrastructure by Hurricanes Irma and María in September 2017, according to data from the Government’s Central Office of Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency (COR3). Although the reasons are different for each community […]

Fourteen of the 42 monitors that the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources (DRNA, in Spanish) used to measure air pollutants harmful to health throughout Puerto Rico are out of service, some for as long as five years, a Center for Investigative Journalism investigation found.

The area in the switchyard where the Central Costa Sur fire occurred, which caused the general blackout last Wednesday, should have been renovated four months ago, in December 2021, according to the original infrastructure plan through which the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) will access $10.7 billion in federal recovery funds. But, after LUMA’s […]

The Department of Health, responsible for inspecting and approving the emergency evacuation plans of all the island’s hospitals, only keeps them for the three hospitals that it runs. The agency’s Deputy Secretary’s Office for the Regulation and Accreditation of Health Facilities (SARAFS, in Spanish) does not keep a copy of the evacuation plans that it […]

María Pérez-Ramos never imagined that the land ceded by the former mayor of Canovanas, José “Chemo” Soto, in the San Isidro community 19 years ago, was flood-prone. Had she known, she would not have accepted it, she said. Now, all she wants is to move to a safe place where she doesn’t have to be […]

Although the University of Puerto Rico’s (UPR) administration has been given notice to avoid further structural damages in its campuses in case of earthquakes, the President of the institution, Jorge Haddock, acknowledges that there is no plan or a cost estimate to fix the flaws, which due to lack of maintenance and old construction defects, […]