[FoCHAT] CHATNews: Amnesty Internatl: U.S. guilty of Katrina-related abuses

Mon Apr 12 18:31:39 CDT 2010

CHATNews, April 11, 2010 
Dear CHAT Members, 
A report that was just released by Amnesty International 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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