Los chavos de María

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.

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.