[FoCHAT] CHAT News: Double Standards- Road Home vs. Charity Hosp.

Tue Apr 21 00:14:20 CDT 2009

Stranded and Squandered: Lost on the Road Home

Dear FoCHAT Members,

In this newsletter are the following:

1. Double Standard: 3 ft of water and over 12 stories = more
than 51% damaged according to the state but rules for Road Home applicants are
extremely different and against their recovery

2.  Reminders about
HMGP elevation grants (reimbursement) and appeals

3. First installment from recently published article “Stranded
and Squandered: Lost on the Road Home,” by Davida Finger, Staff Attorney for
the Loyola Law Clinic. 

4. CHAT meeting on Wed.

1. The Percentage Damage from Hurricane Katrina

Very many RH applicants
with 1-story houses and 5-8 feet of sewerage/salt water/flood water for 3 weeks
in their home have been told that they had less than 51% damage.

One applicant won a
RH appeal of this type only after hiring a structural engineer!

I have been told by a
top OCD official  that a camel-back house
or regular 2-story house with 8 feet of flood water would never qualify for more
than 51% damage assessment by RH.

And yet, when this
Administration wants more money from FEMA to rebuild a new Charity Hospital for
NOLA rather than repair the existing one for less money and faster without
destroying a NO neighborhood, Angele Davis, Commissioner of Administration
refers to the state’s claim that Charity Hospital with more than ten stories
and about 3 feet of flood water (I was there at the time and saw it) was more than 51% damaged. Tulane University Hospital
and Medical Center on the next block had the same amount of water (and also had
infrastructure in the basement) and has long been fixed post-hurricane and
made fully operational.

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/capital/index.ssf?/base/news-7/1240032705264560.xml&coll=1

Citizens hoping to sway FEMA's hospital payout

Coalition also pushes to reopen CharitySaturday, April 18,
2009 By Bill BarrowStaff writer

Advocates for tearing
down Charity cite danger from mold and mildew but LRA last summer made a rule
not to cover repair of mold and mildew from the hurricanes.

What a double-standard!  
How can Charity Hospital be more than 51% damaged? 
How can applicant
houses with the above-described flooding, not be more than 51% damaged? 

2. Reminders: 

Expansion of HMGP grants to $100,000cap

http://nola.live.advance.net/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-12/1239859984130360.xml&coll=1

·        
see http://chatushome.com for more details;  

·        
contact
LRA-HMGP at 1-877-744-7235 or 1-225-339-3746 or hazardmitigation at la.gov

For unresolved
mistakes made by RH on your grant

“The LRA and OCD will review these
cases to ensure that homeowners received due process under the Road Home and
that cases did not fall through the cracks.”
http://lra.louisiana.gov/index.cfm?md=pagebuilder&tmp=home&pid=106  

·              Email
info at louisianarecoveryauthority.org with "Road Home Appeal" in the
subject line 

·              Or mail a letter to the Louisiana
Recovery Authority, ATTN: Ty Larkins, 150 Third Street, Suite 200, Baton Rouge,
LA, 70801  (CHAT recommends certified
mail  and save the receipt)

3. Second installment from the recently published article
“Stranded and Squandered: Lost on the Road Home,” by Davida Finger, Staff
Attorney for the Loyola Law Clinic. 

(The first installment was mistakenly repeated in two FoChat
messages.)

From the Seattle Journal for Social Justice Vol. 7, (2009)

On May 24,
2007, Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) convened an oversight hearing to probe
widely broadcasted projected budget shortfalls in Road Home, in addition to its
other barriers.20 Senator Landrieu concluded, “The
lesson from this oversight hearing was clear, the mistakes for the Road Home
program lie at many levels of government.”21 

In
her late seventies, Ms. R. from Gentilly22 had applied for Road
Home funds in the first month of the program. Her home had been badly damaged
by several feet of water. Ms. R. meticulously documented the phone calls she
made each month to the Road Home call center. In virtually every call for the
first eight months, operators told Ms. R. to send additional documents, several
times requesting documents she had already provided. These included insurance
paperwork, energy bills, FEMA documentation, and property ownership
information. She provided the requested documents, mailing some three times.
After scheduling several in-person meetings in downtown New Orleans, to which
Ms. R. traveled by taxi, she was informed that she was “preclosing.” Ms. R. had
been “preclosing” for four months when I met her. By this time, the wait for
the federal rebuilding dollars had taken its toll. 

Barely
able to pay her mortgage, property taxes, and lot upkeep, Ms. R. was aware that
Road Home was her last chance to repair the home that she and her late husband
had worked so hard to build. She had heard stories about foreclosures in her
neighborhood and was already behind on mortgage payments as she used her
savings to pay contractors’ bills for roof, electrical, and incomplete
sheetrock work on her home. Ms. R. arrived in our office to figure out what
would happen if she died before her Road Home award came in. As she explained,
“My husband worked three jobs his entire life for that house—he is looking down
and shaking his head at what we’re going through to get back home.” 

I. BACKGROUND: THE ROAD HOME PROGRAM 

A. Funding for
Road Home: Community Development Block Grant 

The
U.S. Congress provided hurricane relief funding for the Gulf Coast following
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita through a series of appropriations in the form of
Community Development Block Grants (CDBG).23
CDBG funds are administered by the
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).24 “The primary
objective . . . of the community development program . . . is the development
of viable urban communities, by providing decent housing and a suitable living
environment and expanding economic opportunities, principally for persons of
low and moderate-income.”25 With this objective as a mandate, the U.S. Congress
allocated approximately $13.4 billion to the state of Louisiana through CDBG.26 

While
CDBG generally requires that at least 70 percent of its funding be used for the
benefit of low- and moderate-income persons, post-Katrina the U.S. Congress authorized a general
waiver of the CDBG’s low- to moderate-income requirement.27 As
a result, the mandatory minimum amount of funding to be spent on low- to
moderate-income people for all combined disaster recovery programs was lowered
to 50 percent.28 

Louisiana
was required to determine how the allocated CDBG funds would be spent. In
Louisiana, the Office of Community Development (OCD), within the Division of
Administration and under the supervision of the governor’s office, is usually
responsible for CDBG programs.29 The Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA), created in the
wake of the hurricanes as the planning and coordinating body for Louisiana’s
recovery effort, made recommendations to OCD for implemenation of Road Home.30 After
extensive negotiations, these implementation plans were submitted to the
Louisiana governor and legislature for approval.31 Following State approval, the
implementation plans were submitted to HUD.32
The Disaster Recovery Unit within OCD now
administers the CDBG Disaster Recovery funds.33 Throughout this article the
terms “State” or “Louisiana” are used to refer to the agencies involved with
Road Home. 

In order to
document for HUD how the CDBG funds would meet the lowered 50 percent
moderate-income housing requirement, the LRA relied on a particular aspect of
Road Home called the Additional Compensation Grant (ACG), a grant feature
designed to provide additional assistance to applicants with household incomes
80 percent and below the parish’s median income.34 The ACG is supposed to add up to fifty thousand dollars to an applicant’s
grant when there is a “gap” between the estimated cost of damage (minus any
other assistance received) and Road Home’s actual compensation.35

To be continued.

Next CHAT Meeting-Time:
     Meetings on Wed. at 6:30 PM at UNOPlace: Room 179, UNO Milneburg Hall, on Milneburg Rd. (the road
     where the brand new dorms are, past the stop sign and the University
     Center and opposite the Fitness Center.

     Building #24: Directions to the
     Business Bldg are given on the Campus Map for UNO 

NEXT MEETING Wed., Apr. 22.
     Newcomers are welcome.* 

Best wishes,

Melanie Ehrlich

Founder, Citizens’ Road Home Action Team (CHAT)

Member, LRA Housing Task Force

http://chatushome.com

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