MANCHESTER, N.H.(AP) – The federal government rejected a $17 million state grant application without reading it because some pages had margins narrower than 1 inch, state officials said.
The grant – $3.4 million each year for five years 0151 would have paid for drug and alcohol screening at hospitals and clinics throughout the state. The project’s main goal is early intervention and brief treatment, before individuals’ drug and alcohol problems become chronic.
The grant proposal involved every hospital and many doctors’ offices in the state. Dartmouth Medical School would have provided professional training.
Riley Regan, director of the state Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention and Recovery, said he felt “violated” when he learned why the grant was rejected.
“My whole career has been based on building federal-state” relationships, he told the New Hampshire Sunday News.
Riley said federal officials did not notify his agency about the formatting problems and give the state a chance to resubmit the application.
In fact, state officials had to wait until the grant winners were announced to learn that the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration hadn’t even read New Hampshire’s application.
Of 27 applicants, seven had their applications rejected for similar reasons. Twenty proposals were reviewed and seven were funded for a total of $113 million over the next five years.
The state’s senior U.S. Senator, Republican Judd Gregg, fired off a letter Friday to Charles Curie, the administrator of the federal agency, saying he found it “appalling” that state officials weren’t given a chance to fix the formatting problems.
Gregg, also a former state governor, said that after all his years of public service, “this gives new meaning to bureaucratic insensitivity and ineptness.”
Gregg urged Curie to modify the application process immediately to clarify application requirements, provide additional guidance and “quickly notify applicants that fail to follow the guidelines.”
“Clearly substance abuse and mental health problems are serious matters that deserve federal attention. I trust that by bringing this bureaucratic problem to your attention you will ensure that future federal dollars will flow to applicants based on merit,” Gregg wrote.
Mark Weber, a spokesman for the federal agency, defended the agency’s decision.
“If we don’t enforce the rules as they are written clearly for everyone to read, that could give someone an unfair advantage. Say instead of using 1-inch margins, you use half-inch margins – maybe you could get in quite a few extra words that might tip the balance in the grant’s favor,” he said.
Dr. Alan West, a psychologist under contract to the state who wrote the grant proposal, said he was stunned that states whose applications were screened out for formatting reasons didn’t get notified.
“It would have taken one keypunch to make the margins different,” he said.
“On the other hand, I feel so bad about it that I hardly want to talk about it. I feel I’m the one that let this thing go.”
Weber said calling some states and not others would have been unfair. But he said the agency would look at giving states whose applications were rejected an opportunity to resubmit their applications next year.
He said his agency is getting ready to announce the availability of several million dollars more in unding for early intervention.
“And New Hampshire will be right in line to apply,” he said.
AP-ES-12-21-03 1520EST
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