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Program for Guardsmen is little help, study says
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Published: September 29, 2009
CHAPEL HILL
Most of a $10 million program aimed at helping returning National Guard soldiers has been spent on salaries and consultants, with little help for the people it was supposed to serve.
The Citizen Soldier Support Program has spent $7.3 million of the funds U.S. Rep. David Price, D-N.C., inserted into the 2004 federal budget to help deployed National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers. The effort based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has spent most of the money on six-figure salaries, university overhead, highly paid consultants and travel.
The head of the N.C. National Guard, Major Gen. William Ingram, said the program recently produced its first tangible results, a database of mental-health providers experienced with the military.
"We're not seeing a whole lot of action," Ingram said. "There's a lot of discussion, but ... no results."
UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp told the UNC board of trustees on Thursday that he has ordered the program to shape up.
"The program has serious flaws," Thorp said. "We need the program to show drastic improvement in a short period of time."
Half of the eight full-time employees are paid more than $100,000 a year, including a deputy director who has been reimbursed $76,000 for food, travel and lodging when she commutes from her home in northern Virginia to North Carolina.
Price, of Chapel Hill, said he inserted budget language creating the program after seeing a need to help members of the National Guard and Army Reserves returning from battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. About 16,000 North Carolina National Guard members have been deployed, some of them two or three times.
The citizen soldiers returned to homes and jobs in communities around the state that lacked the institutional support available to active-duty troops stationed at Camp Lejeune, Fort Bragg or other bases.
Price said that the program is worthy of federal funding and that he still supports its goals.
"If these funds haven't been utilized in the most effective way, we need to correct it," Price said.
In February, Tony Waldrop, the university vice chancellor in charge of the program, ordered a committee to review the organization. The report identified overpaid employees, employees performing below expectations, excessive reliance on outside consultants, and an unclear chain of command that creates confusion.
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