OWASSO, Okla., Nov. 14, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Folds of Honor, the nonprofit organization that provides educational scholarships to families of fallen and disabled military members, recently accepted a generous donation of $100,000 from Grainger, North America’s leading broad line supplier of maintenance, repair and operating products, at a Veterans Week event held at Grainger’s Lake Forest, Ill. headquarters.

Folds of Honor visits Grainger’s headquarters, Wednesday, Nov. 13, in Lake Forest, Ill. to accept a $100,000 donation that will directly fund 20 scholarships in the amount of $5,000 each to qualified, incoming college freshman who are pursuing degrees in engineering and technology. Pictured (left to right): Ben Leslie, EVP, Folds of Honor; scholarship recipient family Sami Anderson, Skyler Anderson and Army Sergeant Garret Anderson; Joe Boveri, a military Veteran representative from Grainger.

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The donation doubles Grainger’s $50,000 donation from 2018 and will directly fund 20 scholarships in the amount of $5,000 each to qualified, incoming college freshman who are pursuing degrees in engineering and technology.

“We are incredibly grateful for Grainger’s partnership and continued generosity,” said Lt. Col. Dan Rooney, founder of Folds of Honor. “We are proud to partner with a company that is advancing STEM education and training nationwide and investing in the future of family members of military heroes this school year.”

Grainger has a strong connection to the U.S. Military, as many of its team members have a history of military service. Hundreds of Grainger team members based in the U.S. self-identify as Veterans, active duty, Guard and Reserve service members, and Grainger’s Chairman and CEO DG Macpherson is also a Veteran of the U.S. Air Force.

“We are incredibly proud to give back to the families of those who serve our country by doubling our contribution to Folds of Honor,” said Macpherson. “By focusing this year’s scholarships around components of STEM education, we are aiming to help students follow their passions and gain the skills required for many current—and increasingly future—careers.”

Gifts to Folds of Honor help fund educational scholarships and financial needs of military families whose loved ones have been killed or disabled while in active duty. They support private education tuition, tutoring and educational summer camps for children K-12 and higher education tuition assistance for spouses and children.

About Folds of Honor
Folds of Honor is a 501(C)(3) nonprofit organization, rated a four-star charity by Charity Navigator, that provides educational scholarships to families of fallen or disabled military men and women in the United States. Educational scholarships support tuition and tutoring for children in grades K-12, as well as higher education tuition assistance for spouses and dependents. Founded in 2007 by Lieutenant Colonel Dan Rooney, a PGA Professional and F-16 fighter pilot in the Air Force Reserves who served three combat tours in Iraq, Folds of Honor is proud to have awarded nearly 25,000 scholarships in all 50 states and some US territories, including approximately 4,500 in 2019 alone. For more information or to donate to Folds of Honor, visit www.foldsofhonor.org.

Source: Yahoo Finance

FORT MEADE, Md. — Ten active-duty military families living on base at Fort George G. Meade have sued the private companies managing base housing for what the families allege to be hazardous housing conditions exhibited through widespread mold, the law firm representing the residents announced Tuesday.

Filed a day after Veterans Day, the class-action lawsuit alleges that Corvias and Meade Communities, LLC — the companies managing all on-base housing at Fort Meade — have known about mold infestations at the U.S. Army base and launched a haphazard effort to remedy them by conducting tainted air tests, withholding results from families and failing to remediate conditions detrimental to the residents’ health.

The lawsuit, filed on a pro bono basis by law firm Covington, seeks an amount of damages to be determined at trial for the service member clients — Army, Navy, Coast Guard officers among them. It also asks the U.S. District Court for Maryland order Corvias to hire third-party inspectors to test every property on the base for mold and determine whether the property is habitable; remediate any property contaminated by mold, and prevent the company from leasing any contaminated property.

“It shouldn’t have to take a lawsuit to fix this. We need to do right by these folks,” said Benjamin Block, a partner at Covington, himself a five-year Army veteran. “These are good people, they shouldn’t have to go through what they’re going through in on-base housing.”

In a statement, a Corvias spokeswoman said the lawsuit ignores the efforts undertaken to provide suitable housing.

“We are aware of the complaint, filed today, against Meade Communities, the partnership of Corvias and the Army,” Kelly Douglas, the spokeswoman, wrote in an email. “It does not reflect the significant resources, attention and rigor that has been brought to assuring quality resident housing.”

According to the lawsuit, when all residents signed their leases they were required to sign a “mold addendum,” which downplayed the health risks of mold contamination.

Being exposed to mold can cause allergic responses like sneezing, skin rash and red eyes, with people with asthma at risk of episodes, according to the complaint. More volatile varieties of the microbe could lead to headaches, dizziness and nausea, among other symptoms, it stated.

Such fungus was present on the walls, in the bathrooms, in heating and air conditioning ducts and kitchens of tenants, according to the lawsuit. Corvias often met proliferating pests, deteriorating infrastructure, discolored water, leaks, burst pipes and other problems with stopgap solutions — like painting over mold.

Featured in the 92-page lawsuit are photos of a child with bloodshot eyes, ceilings collapsed and what captions describe as white air vents blackened with mold and back yards with standing sewage water. Ignored by maintenance staff, the lawsuit alleges, some of the families spent thousands of dollars trying to remedy the problems on their own.

The lawsuit also refers to news media reports beginning in the fall of 2018, which detailed widespread mold at Fort Meade and the ensuing response, which saw Corvias President and CEO John Picerne testify at U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee hearings and pledge his company would return to the “gold standard” of resident care.

“This is not the gold standard,” lawyers for the families wrote in the complaint. “This is no standard at all.”

The complaint alleges the management companies were grossly negligent, breached repair warranties and contracts — violating a host of federal and state laws. The lawsuit also asks a federal judge to mandate Corvias pay for the plaintiffs attorneys fees and stop collecting housing allowances from service members living on base until they fix the housing conditions.

Companies like Corvias receive rental income from direct payment of service members’ housing allowance, a tax-free allowance based on average rental prices in the area, which was created by the Military Housing Privatization Initiative of 1996, according to the lawsuit. Corvias receives funds directly from the federal government for its operation at military bases, and they receive the entire housing allowance of service members living on base by direct deposit.

“On-base housing should be beneficial to service members and their families by giving them access to a safe community near work, thereby reducing one area of stress for people who have volunteered to serve our Nation,” attorneys representing the military families’ wrote in the complaint. “Unfortunately, at Fort Meade, the on-base housing has been a tremendous source of stress and harm to these service members and their families.”

Block said his clients are most concerned with preventing other military families at Fort Meade from being subjected to the living conditions they’ve endured. “We agree with that and that’s what we’re hoping the suit will help ensure,” he said.

He and the other attorneys representing the 10 service members listed in the complaint, who boast more than a century’s worth of active duty between them and many deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, implored the court to act swiftly on behalf of their clients and all other military members living on-base at Fort Meade.

What they’ve been subjected to, the attorneys concluded in the complaint, “cannot be allowed to continue over another Veterans Day.”

Source: msn.com

Lawmakers and stakeholder groups are pushing for legislation to be enacted this year that would help families of deceased military members have more money in survivor benefits.

Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are pushing to end a requirement that reduces the amount of money military families receive in survivor benefits. They’re also pushing to get legislation enacted that would fix a provision of President Trump’s 2017 tax law that inadvertently raised taxes on military survivor benefits received by children.

Both changes have overwhelming bipartisan support and have been included in separate bills that have passed the House. But it remains to be seen if they get enacted this year.

“We’re very hopeful,” said Candace Wheeler, senior adviser for policy and legislation at the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. “We believe it is the intent of Congress to do both, and it’s just a matter of time.”

There are two programs that provide survivor benefits to the families of deceased military members.

One is a Department of Defense (DOD) program. Military retirees pay into this program so their spouses can receive benefits when they die. The program also provides benefits to the surviving spouses or children of service members who die in the line of duty. The second program, a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) program, goes to the spouses or children of service members who die in the line of duty or of veterans whose death is related to their military service.

The amount that a spouse receives under the VA program reduces the amount that he or she receives under the DOD program on a dollar-for-dollar basis. For example, if someone is entitled to $2,000 under the DOD program and $500 under the VA program in a month, they would only receive $2,000, rather than $2,500. This offset is commonly referred to as the “widow’s tax.”

DOD has estimated that about 65,000 surviving spouses are subject to the benefit offset.

The offset for spouses has led many military families whose relatives were killed in Iraq or Afghanistan to choose to put the DOD benefit in the names of the surviving children, rather than the names of the surviving spouses. This allows the families to receive the full amount of benefits under the DOD and VA programs in the short term. However, the DOD benefits then disappear when the children reach adulthood.

“It’s already a tough life to be a widow and to have your spouse make the ultimate sacrifice,” said Traci Voelke, whose husband was killed in a vehicle accident in Afghanistan in 2012. “There’s no reason we should have to make these complex financial decisions in the wake of our grief.”

Military families argue that the survivor benefit offset is wrong.

Edith Smith, whose husband died in 1998 from a service-connected disability, said the families of career service members who die in active duty “lose what they earned through work.”

The House passed a version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in July that included a provision, based on legislation offered by Reps. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) and John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), that would eliminate the widow’s tax and allow surviving spouses who put the DOD benefit in their children’s names to reclaim the benefit as a spousal benefit.

The Senate-passed version of the NDAA doesn’t include the elimination of the widow’s tax. However, legislation on the topic from Sens. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) has more than 70 co-sponsors, and the Senate in September voted 94-0 to instruct the NDAA conference committee to include the elimination in the final version of the bill.

Democrats and Republicans, though, have hit a roadblock in conference committee negotiations on the NDAA over the use of military funds for a U.S.-Mexico border wall. That led Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) to introduce a “skinny” NDAA as a backup. That bill would extend necessary authorities to keep DOD operations going but doesn’t include the widow’s tax provision.

Inhofe told reporters Tuesday that he doesn’t know if there will be a House-Senate conference report on the NDAA, but that he would expect one to eliminate the widow’s tax. He told reporters that despite the price tag for the change, “it’s something that most people are in agreement with, certainly a majority.”

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the standalone House bill on the issue would increase direct spending by $5.7 billion over 10 years.

The widow’s tax isn’t the only issue involving survivors’ benefits.

On a separate track, lawmakers are pursuing legislation to fix an issue with the 2017 tax law that had the unintended consequence of raising the amount of taxes children of deceased military members pay on their survivor benefits.

The 2017 law made a change to a tax on children’s unearned income, known as the “kiddie tax,” that was created in 1986 in an effort to prevent wealthy people from avoiding taxes by shifting income to their children. Before the tax law, the children’s income was taxed at the rate of the children’s parents, but under the 2017 law, the income is taxed at the same rate as trusts and estates. The change ended up inadvertently increasing taxes on certain income received by children who are not wealthy, including military survivor benefits.

In May, the Senate passed by unanimous consent a bill that would fix the tax issue for the families of deceased military members. Soon after, the House also passed in a near unanimous vote a bipartisan retirement savings bill that would reverse the tax law’s changes to the kiddie tax.

The House-passed bill has faced obstacles in the Senate because a handful of GOP senators want votes on amendments unrelated to the issue impacting military families. Last week, Republicans sought to get senators to agree to put the bill on the floor with votes on amendments, but Democrats rejected the effort because they want to pass the House bill without any changes to it.

Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), a leader in the House’s efforts to fix the tax increase affecting military survivor benefits, said it is an issue that lawmakers want to get resolved.

“I want to close the loop and make sure that we get it reconciled so that we can get that signed into law, because I’m still hearing from Gold Star families in my district that are affected by this, and I certainly want to be able to provide them the relief from the undue tax burden that they had,” she said in late September.

House Ways and Means Committee ranking member Kevin Brady (R-Texas), a key author of the 2017 tax law, said that the kiddie tax provision in the law was first proposed in 2014 in an effort to make it easier for families to file their children’s taxes. He said lawmakers have been working to fix the issue for Gold Star families since it was discovered.

“It’s time for the Senate to move quickly – these families are waiting and deserve this tax certainty,” Brady said in a statement to The Hill.

Source: msn.com

Ten military amilies say they were stuck in mold-infested, substandard housing at a Maryland Army base because property managers dragged their feet when asked to fix problems and made it financially difficult for them to leave.

Some of the families say they have experienced serious, long-term health problems because of the mold.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, the families accused Corvias Property Management, a real estate company that has been at the center of a national scandal over privatized military housing, of 14 charges including gross negligence and fraud.

A spokeswoman for the Office of the Secretary of Defense did not respond to a request for comment. A Corvias spokeswoman said the company is aware of the suit, adding that it “does not reflect the significant resources, attention and rigor that has been brought to assuring quality resident housing.”

Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), whose District includes the area around Fort Meade, said in a statement that his office has been in “constant contact” with high-level Army officials about the conditions at Fort Meade, adding that members of his staff have visited the base to see for themselves.

“Corvias has taken some steps to improve housing conditions, but it’s clear that, after nine months, they are still unacceptable,” Ruppersberger said, later adding: “Based on my conversations with my constituents at Fort Meade, I suspect the problem is worse than we realize at this point.”

The suit, filed by the law firm Covington & Burling, alleges neglect and mismanagement at Fort Meade, an Army installation near Baltimore that is also the home of the National Security Agency.

The lawsuit claims one family returned home from a funeral to find their townhouse flooded because the property manager left the washing machine disconnected. Another describes being moved into a temporary townhouse to escape their previous mold-infested one, only to find urine on the toilet seat, peanut butter smeared on the stairs and more mold.

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Derek Buitrago, a Navy hospital corpsman, lived at Fort Meade for two-and-a-half years with his wife, Sandy, and their two young children. Buitrago took a second job and sold his blood so he could cover the extra expenses of dealing with the mold himself, his attorney and his wife said. When he tried to move out because of the mold but before the lease ended, the family faced a $600 fee they couldn’t afford, the complaint alleges.

Buitrago is among several plaintiffs who found it financially difficult to relocate, something exacerbated by a system some say favors profit-minded landlords over tenants. Under the terms of their leases with the government, property managers like Corvias collect the full amount of service members’ housing allowances, making it financially impossible for some lower-income families to move off base.

The problems at Fort Meade are inherited from a 1997 military privatization drive in which developers such as Corvias received long-term lease agreements, federal loans and other subsidies. The Defense Department privatized some military housing in the hope of shrinking the bureaucracy and also improving customer service, assuming that private companies will be more efficient in their operations.

But the lawsuit filed Tuesday is the latest disclosure to raise serious questions about whether this approach is working, as service members and their spouses draw attention to abhorrent living conditions on bases across the country.

Lawmakers blast companies overseeing military homes racked by toxic dangers

A 2018 Reuters investigation detailed how Corvias founder John Picerne collected hundreds of millions in fees and equity returns while military families languished in defunct housing. In a Feb. 13 congressional hearing that examined Corvias-managed properties in North Carolina, Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), a retired Air Force officer, said of the mold: “This is disgusting.”

“We went to the private sector because the private sector, unlike the bureaucracy of the government, is supposed to better, more innovative, more responsive, more able to do customer service for our troops and their families,” McSally said.

 “Instead of being partners with our troops,” McSally told military family members who testified that day, “they left you hanging. They put you in harm’s way.”

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Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said this week that he has “underscored to corporate leaders at Corvias” that they need to handle maintenance requests better.

“The troubling experiences of those families is not only wrong, it must be noted that they detract from both the morale and the missions of our service members,” Cardin said in a statement. “These families, which have sacrificed so much in order to answer the call of duty anywhere in the world that they are needed, should never have to worry about the health and safety of their families on the home front.”

For the Buitrago family, who now live at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, the house at Fort Meade was their first after they were married.

Sandy Buitrago says Corvias rarely followed through on maintenance requests even though the home had a recurring problem with water seeping in around the windows. They rented their own dehumidifiers, air purifiers and carpet cleaners to deal with the excess water, something that strained their finances, she said.

“At Fort Meade a lot of the issues that we had at home became our responsibility,” Sandy Buitrago told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “Even when [Corvias representatives] would come out, it was difficult to get a straight answer out of them,” she said.

When a February 2019 inspection found mold in the family’s bedrooms and on the furniture, a Corvias representative said no remediation was needed and recommended that they shampoo their couch, the complaint alleges.

The Nunez family lived at a Corvias property on Fort Meade for close to four years before they discovered rotting and moldy insulation in their attic, the lawsuit alleges. They moved out that day.

Liza Nunez, whose husband, Alex, was stationed there as an Air Force officer, said in an interview she and her two children had experienced health problems throughout their time at Fort Meade, including allergies to mold that matched the types found in the house. Her two children experienced severe respiratory problems, she said, with both of them requiring surgery at one point.

“My two little ones and myself were constantly sick,” she said. “We would be in the house for weekends trying to recover, not knowing that the house is what was making us sick.”

Source: msi.com