As far as overtime goes, there are, believe it or not, positions at nay given church that are hourly wage jobs. The janitor is, most likely, not cleaning the toilets for free. The maintenance staff is not fixing things out of the goodness of their heart. They get paid to do these things. Now, the ministerial staff is an entirely different beast. I have never in my life met a minister that was paid by the hour. It is always more of a salary situation. Volunteers, on the other hand, are completely unpaid. As such there is no such thing as "overtime". 1.5 times nothing is still nothing.

Based on that, I have no issue with your everyday working stiffs getting paid OT and FEMA reimbursing them for it. Ministerial staff will not make overtime, so there is nothing to repay. Volunteers could get triple time, I don't care, they still make nothing.

As far as reimbursing for materials, I feel that that should only be for goods and services procured AFTER the church finishes with it's donations. At the distribution point I've been working at at the City, we have passed out untold millions of dollars worth of goods. A lot of it is, in fact, from churches across the nation. However, for the churches that are here, there is no way they can continue to operate as a distro point if there is nothing to distribute. VERY few churches could afford to spend more than a couple of hundred thousand and continue to remain solvent. The sheer volume of relief aid boggles my mind until I remember that we are one of a few distro points around and that we are replacing ALL the shopping centers and grocery stores (save Wal-mart) as well as most of the restraunts. Now, when these DONATIONS come in, there is still the problem of unloading, moving, sorting, and redistributing it. This required money, to be turned into fuel and maintenance costs. To expect a church group to provide that as well as the manpower is asking a LOT. Especially when you consider that these same churches have lost most of their members to displacement and that of the remaining, very few are still able to give anything back to the church. In other words, I have no issue with any organization being reimbursed for this sort of activity. Granted, the time may not actually cost anything, but everything else does. It rather makes me think of the "good samaritan" law. Basically, you can't get in trouble for breaking a law if it is for the purpose of saving someone's life. It frees you from the problem of having to think about whether you should break that door down to try and save someone in a burning building. Of course you should, but you might not if someone was going to sue you for vandalism after. Same goes for churches. They are enabled to provide far more help than they would have normally been able to provide, and in a manner that is far more efficient than anything the federal government can do, without the risk of outgiving themselves and having to close their doors permenantly. In closing, there should be no way that any church would be able to actually come out ahead in the deal. The way I see it, it just helps stretch the volunteers a little farther before they have to call it quits.

Now, if we're talking about paying people back for donations they have made, that's no different than what we do now. Treat it as a tax write-off. Nothing more, nothing less.

As for paying rent, I do have an issue with that. I mean, I wouldn't ask for rent if fema wanted to use my back yard as a storage facility. If they wanted to use my house..... different story.