NYT: Slow Home Grants Stall Progress in New Orleans

The $7.5 billion program to rebuild Louisiana by helping residents repair or replace their flooded homes has gotten off to a slow start, frustrating government officials and outraging many homeowners who say they are still in limbo 14 months after Hurricane Katrina hit.

Though nearly 79,000 families have applied to the program, called the Road Home, only 1,721 have been told how much grant money they will receive. And just 22 have received access to the cash, which was provided by federal taxpayers and is being distributed by the state.

“I don’t know of anyone who has actually received any money,” said Cassandra D. Wall, who is active in a group of homeowners from the eastern part of New Orleans. Ms. Wall said she planned to attend a protest Nov. 17 in Baton Rouge, the state capital, “to go public with the outrage and the outcry.”

.......

The city’s mayor, C. Ray Nagin, is so dissatisfied with the pace of the program that on Nov. 1 he announced that the city was developing a plan to lend money to people waiting for their Road Home grants.

“It’s time to kick into high gear,” said Walter Leger, a lawyer and a member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which devised the federally financed Road Home program. “It’s time to forget the reasons and excuses” for the slow pace so far.



http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/11/us/11louisiana.html?hp&ex=1163307600&en=1d213ba1503e43b3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

when do the Katrina investigations begin?

courtesy of Madame Speaker Pelosi. Still trying to get used to saying that :-)

Something must be done to protect our phoney baloney jobs gentlemen! Harumph, harumph, harumph!

Over 80,000 households registered for road home money, and 22 have goten it(that's .0000275 of applicants). We are so discouraged here many people are abandoning their mortgages and their homes now, forced to stay where they have evacuated to.

Sad times. The city MUST have this money to survive. SO many people were underinsured or took low offers from corrupt insurance companies, they must have some assistance to rebuild their homes. And it is only right, for it was a federally built and operated structure (levees) that failed causing the damage.

DU'ers, please contact your Congress critters and ask them to please speed disbursement of road home funds. Ask them to simplify and publicize the process for Road Home. And ask them to increase funding $400K or so to increase staff @ Road Home to speed up the process.

Thank you in advance to any of you who do that for us.

From reading the story, it appears that the state is administering the federal funds, although part of the problem seems to be verifying other federal funding - such as from FEMA - before the new money will be approved.

So, is the real problem with the state bureaucracy that is perhaps being overzealous about preventing fraud, or is it with the federal requirements? The story doesn't make this very clear. I'd be glad to contact my representatives but I want to be sure of the facts.

The process for qualifying requires that you show proof of ownership, status of any liens, status of your insurance payments received and what is pending, how much FEMA, Red Cross and other assistance you have received and so on. In principle what they are asking for is reasonable information. In practice, many folks have lost everything and don't have important documents and then have to navigate our HORRIBLE, LABYRINTHINE City Hall to get the docs, and the lines in City Hall these days are INSANE. I have waited five plus hours at city hall SEVERAL times this fall in pursuit of docs for clients and so forth. The city is understaffed at the time of its greatest historical need.

The second problem is that Road Home is understaffed, so when you apply, you don't hear anything for MONTHS. Then they call you in, let you know you are missing something, and off you go again to find the missing piece of paper, and you won't get another appointment for another 8 weeks.

What needs to happen is that the pertinent city hall offices need to have reps at Road Home, and Road Home needs better funding, so when someone goes in to Road Home, they can get all they need to qualify right there, so they can then sit down, do their worksheet, and get their offer from Road Home, so they can then go home, put a pen to paper and see what option is best for their family. Right now, there is inadequate staff, and everyone gets stiffed.

Right now, only 1,800+ families out of 80,000+ have received their offers and are able to start thinking about their choice, and less than 25 families have actually received benefits. That is less than one block length of one street. SHAMEFUL. 85% of our city is still vacant, ungutted and full of storm debris and destroyed homes.

it is so hard to even attempt to try to "walk in the shoes" of those tens of thousands who are still in crises - these stories should be before the public on a daily basis - we the people need to be ever aware, angry, vigilant to the ridiculous roadblocks being thrown up in the way of people just trying to put their lives back together. It is indeed shameful.

This might be a question of government oversight of the consulting firm hired to administer the grant, as well as the strictness of some of the staff. My husband and I were called in for an appointment about 6 weeks after we applied, our interviewer was nice and accepted whatever documents we had (we probably had access to more than most), and 2 weeks later, an examiner came to our home. We just got a letter that we qualify for help.

I heard on the news this week that LA Governor Blanco is furious and she told the consulting firm (I forget their name) that 10,000 people better be funded by the end of November or...? I assume there will be consequences.

I'm a Realtor here in LA and have signed up for a training that will allow me to be hired to produce pre-Katrina pricing of these homes at $25 a shot. Apparently the trainings are in the next week or so.

I think the government put the job of dispensing money in the hands of the consulting firm and left them to do their job. That should have happened. Apparently, they needed supervision. If there is another reason, I hope it comes out and all are held accountable.

when so many lives are directly affected, is a must.

Glad to hear that you got the approval from the grant. :D

disbursed to the state of Louisiana months ago.

They'd have gotten the money months earlier, but they dawdled in producing a plan for how to disburse the money. Only when it became publically known that the money was simply waiting for NOLA and LA to produce a plan did serious work start on it.

And once Blanco got the money, she farmed the management and disbursal out, it seems, to an outside contractor.

The plan was in place and the criterion the Feds wanted kept changing.

The farming of the contract to an outside source was done out of necessity because the city was broke and unstaffed, so it didn't have the staff to do it and couldn't afford to hire them.

The plan was in fact finalized for nearly two months AFTER the money was 'in the pipeline', approved but not disbursed. The feds were hanging out the local Dem officials. Simple as that.

The public here is EXTREMELY well informed, as everyone is an expert on Road Home (LRA), FEMA, Insurance etc. so they sniffed it out and determined Blanco did not in fact have the cash in her possession, and that the feds had only approved the funding at that point and had not yet sent it.

So, in short, the money has only been here 90 days or so. The problem now is that the LRA has a shitty, slow, cumbersome system for processing and approving applications. Oh, and that there isn't enough money in the fund to do what is intended for all. If you aren't in the first third to get your money I would be VERY nervous about whether there would be any left for you.

My God - what a nightmare, what a crappy thing to do to people who are probably already stressed out to an extent that few of us could imagine.

My Republican senators are useless, but my Congressman is a Democrat and fairly responsive. I'm going to write him this weekend.

Thank God the Dems are back in control. One week of Iraq money would have completely rebuilt our most important and interesting and cosmopolitan city.

:mad: