[FoCHAT] CHATNews: Amnesty Int.: U.S. Guilty of Katrina-Related Abuses

Mon Apr 12 13:19:34 CDT 2010

CHATNews, April 11, 2010 
Dear CHAT Members, 
A report came out from Amnesty International, which has much merit but is missing the main problems for eligible Road Home (RH) applicants, ~ 130,000 – 140,000 hurricane victims. It isn’t the Stafford Act upon which the report focuses that is responsible for so much heartache and so many RH applicants being unable to rebuild or repair their homes despite $10 billion of grant money for the program. 
 It is largely the government's and contractors' administration of the program irrespective of the Stafford Act. It is that there was far too little targeting of applicants' needs. Sure tens of thousands got the grants they needed and deserved but tens of thousands didn't, due to no fault of their own.
For other programs, the Stafford Act may be the major hindrance, but not for the Road Home Program. 
http://neworleanscitybusiness.com/blog/2010/04/09/amnesty-us-guilty-of-katrina-related-abuses/ 
Amnesty: U.S. guilty of Katrina-related abuses
…Amnesty urged Congress to amend the nation’s main disaster response legislation, the Stafford Act, to guarantee the humane and fair treatment of all disaster victims, as stipulated by the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. The U.S. has ratified the treaty. 
The treaty calls for the humanitarian treatment of people uprooted because of war or a natural disaster. The principles say governments need to allow victims to “return voluntarily, in safety and with dignity, to their homes” or “resettle voluntarily in another part of the country.” 
It says governments have the duty to help victims recover their property and possessions they left behind or which were taken from them. Also, governments should make sure victims are compensated for property or possessions they have lost, the principles say. 
The treaty also says uprooted people should be allowed full participation in the planning and management of their return or resettlement. 
Stephens, the spokeswoman for the LRA, said Louisiana officials have lobbied Congress to make the Stafford Act “less bureaucratic and problematic” and make it easier for disaster victims to return home… 
______________________________________________________________________________ 
>From CHAT 
Please look at the LRA Statement of Principles for the RH Program, that were unanimously adopted by the LRA Board of Directors after Frank Silvestri, CHAT CoChair, suggested them, CHAT adopted them for advocacy, and four city/parish councils (NOLA, Jefferson, St. Bernard, and Terrebonne) endorsed them. 
http://road2la.org/about-us/principles.htm 
Most are principles that look good but have little or no reality in the RH program, despite CHAT’s consistent advocacy for them being put into practice after they were proudly (and misleadingly) displayed at the RH website. 
Note that over 22,000 applicants tried to dispute their pre-storm value determination by RH (Louisiana Legislative Audit, 2008). 
Officials at OCD told me at a meeting of seven of their officials in 2008 that more applicants disputed their damage estimate than their pre-storm value. So that's a lot more than 22,000 applicants disputing their grant amounts or eligibility.
According to the unpublished (except by CHAT) LRA-LSU Customer Satisfaction Survey, which had several sources of bias toward satisfied applicants (as I discussed in a recent CHAT newsletter), the following conclusions were nonetheless drawn. The following words are  theirs.
Option 1 applicants not yet in their home identified a number of 
barriers to rebuilding. 

• The most common reason was an insufficient Road Home grant 
amount, which was reported to be a major impediment by 55% of 
respondents. 

• 32% of respondents reported the lateness of Road Home grants as a 
major impediment. 

• 23% reported that contractor availability was a major impediment. 

CHAT has large amounts of documentation which show finger-pointing by state officials to HUD officials making applicant-unfriendly and grant-squeezing rules and the state officials saying “HUD required us to do this.” 
HUD officials, in turn, pointed to state officials saying that this is a Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) HUD program which gives the state “maximum possible deference,” (that is HUD's CDBG rule) so it is up to the state, don’t blame us. 

As to FEMA, I spoke to a FEMA official in DC about HMGP elevation grant money in February of 2008. He told me that FEMA could not understand why the state was not telling applicants in a timely way when they got FEMA approval for their HMGP grant and why they were delaying processing those grants. 
As to the state dragging this HMGP program out to great extents (and thereby compounding applicant rebuilding woes and discouraging safe building), you need only consider the recent CHAT newsletter about only four (that is not a typo) applicants having their HMGP house-elevation grant fully processed as of a few weeks ago. Four versus  40,000 who have applied and now it is almost 5 years after the hurricanes-floods. 

So although Amnesty International is correct about advocating for reform of the Stafford Act, reforming that act would have helped only a small percentage at most of shortchanged Road Home applicants. 
Stafford Act  reform would not have decreased ICF International’s almost $1 billion contract for incredibly error-prone, applicant/customer-ignoring, and often applicant-hostile grant processing that negatively impacted tens of thousands of hurricane victims. 

Please do write to Sen. Landrieu as Amnesty International requests, but tell her briefly about your or your neighbors’ Road Home experience and how 
RH treated disaster victims with applicant-unfriendly and often uncommunicated and inconsistently applied state rules that were unnecessarily restrictive and discouraged optimal rebuilding of S. Louisiana. 

Lastly, I note that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were equal opportunity disasters affecting people at all income levels  and ethnicities. 
It is certainly true that as a whole, lower-income applicants to Road Home suffered more because they had less financial resources and the formula for grants was weighted against them, as CHAT first told Walter Leger, Chairman of the Housing Task Force, and Mike Byrne, then head of ICF Road Home operations in October of 2006. 
That bias has never been corrected.
Recently raising the cap on the additional compensation grants helped some, but not nearly enough, low-income applicants. Many were unfairly denied eligibility after being told they were eligible, and arcane calculations deprived other low-income applicants of needed and deserved compensation. 
However, there has also been a bias against those in camel-back or 2-story home no matter what the percent damage after the first year of the program. 
Moreover, the heartache from being ignored in the face of broken promises of compensation and often outrageous, uncorrected mistakes, and unnecessarily complicated poorly explained rules caused unlucky applicants of all backgrounds and income levels emotional turmoil for several years and sometime physical illness from all the long-drawn-out stress. 
 The problems continue in the ongoing HMGP elevation, elevation-reconstruction grants, and individual mitigation measures grants that have rules unfairly excluding many (probably most) applicants.
In an email that I received only months after getting a lawyer and many months after my public records request, there is a statement as follows from an LRA official, which is relevant to the question of certain groups of applicants having a yet harder time than others. Here are words from an LRA official in a document that I have.
“I was never able to get the data {on the survey} in a format I can use. Having the road home id matched to the survey result is critical to us so we can answer some further questions and note responses by geography and/or demography.” 

Well, there is nothing in LRA press releases or the emails from LRA or LSU about the survey or in the unpublished LRA-LSU report about demographics. It is likely that the demographic and geographic data prove that there was a very unequal result of the percent rebuilding by RH applicants and so was suppressed. 
Just drive around Gentilly (in my middle-class neighborhood, only 35-40% of the houses are occupied), more affluent parts of NOLA (which have a far higher percentage of rebuilding, but still not high enough), and low-income parts of previously submerged NOLA that are still largely wastelands. Then, contrast other S. LA parishes which got much RH money.

________________________________________________________________________________ 

>From Amnesty International 

For Katrina survivors, deprived of their basic human rights, the time for healing has never come. 

Help them rebuild their lives with dignity. 

Dear Melanie,

Five years after Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,800 people and destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes, the suffering continues. In New Orleans and throughout the Gulf Coast, there is a continued lack of access to housing and health care, and issues related to the criminal justice system persist. Communities displaced by the storms remain unable to rebuild and return to their homes.

To focus attention to this ongoing human rights catastrophe, Amnesty International USA is kicking off its Annual General Meeting today in New Orleans with a brass-band-led march on City Hall. Our supporters will be calling on Mayor-Elect Mitch Landrieu to protect the rights of New Orleans residents still suffering from the storm.

We also released a new report today, Un-Natural Disaster, that's been picked up by more than 160 news outlets in the United States and internationally. It documents the failure of local, state, and federal governments to protect the rights of poor and minority Gulf Coast residents in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

The report makes specific proposals to improve federal response when a significant percent of a population is displaced, and to protect the rights of displaced people to access education, health care, housing, food, vocational training, and other public services. 

Together we can help the forgotten victims in New Orleans. Amnesty International is calling on Congress to amend the Stafford Act, the legislation that governs federal disaster response, to bring it in line with recognized human rights standards. 

Urge Sen. Mary Landrieu to introduce legislation to reform the Stafford Act to protect the human rights of all people displaced by disasters. 
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&aid=14093&ICID=P1003A04&tr=y&auid=6191243 

Take action today to restore dignity to the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and respect for human rights here at home. 

In Solidarity,

Sameer Dossani
Director, Demand Dignity Campaign
Amnesty International USA 

Best wishes, 
Melanie Ehrlich 
Co-Chairman, Citizens’ Road Home Action Team (CHAT)  http://chatushome.com 
Member of the LRA Housing Task Force 
Comments:   http://www.chatushome.com/blog/?p=64   
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