[FoCHAT] CHATNews: Whose Road Home money?

Wed Jul 28 00:05:40 CDT 2010

CHATNews: Whose Road Home money?
July 27, 2010
1. To hear two private citizens, who unselfishly volunteered to help Road Home (RH) applicants on their own and who confirm the CHAT message about the uncorrected mistakes and RH-inflicted emotional stress, you can replay our interview by Dennis Woltering on Sunday Edition from  last Sunday, July 25, on WWL TV.
http://www.wwltv.com/video/featured-videos/Sunday-Edition-Road-Home-checking-on-recipients-99197444.html

Thank you, Judy and Paul for bearing witness so eloquently for the tens of thousands of unlucky RH applicants (who did not have the good fortune of getting a fair grant as did tens of thousands of other applicants).
Thank you for revealing the unnecessary turmoil that the heavy-handed and unfair compliance procedure will cause for so many RH applicants, whether or not they complied with the RH covenants and whether or not they got enough money to rebuild. 
Paul, a contractor, provided this written statement with his offer to be interviewed for this program in answer to my CHATRequest and allowed me to share it.
I have developed a personal as well as professional relationship and have been requested to attend their road home meetings to facilitate answering questions during the process.   This experience was profound in that I saw FIRST HAND! how the frustration and ultimate depression of my clients as they tried with minimal results to rebuild their homes.  I tried helping with applications, estimates, CADD and other forms requiring a response.   The most of the clients were elderly..had already paid off their homes and were living on an somewhat adequate pension before the storm....subsequently  suffering the effects of the storm in their lives was this RH program..that initially gave them HOPE and a promise to make them WHOLE...what they got (especially at their age) was confusion, fear, intimidation, depression and a cycle of wasted time and a waste of what little money (savings)they had accumulated ..all they wanted was to go HOME!  
 Presently...SOME  are home but home is an altogether different place...now they are in serious DEBT..now they have to deal with DEPRESSION!  and other health issues resulting from the RH process...Others are not even home YET!..because they were to old to understand what to do and could not come to NO to through the cycle of denials..I could go on but I think this space is limited to a few words...but explaining five + years of heartache and sorrow for these folks is'nt enough.

Let’s recap about the funding
2006. Congress gave Louisiana about $7 billion for the RH homeowner program. 
Spring, 2007. CHAT broke the news of the shortfall of RH money in an interview on WWL TV. During the Blanco administration we warned state officials from LRA and OCD that the program did not have enough money for all the applicants at the rate that grants were being given out and showed them the numbers but they said, don’t worry, there is enough money.
After the story of the shortfall became big news in the media, the state officials acknowledged the shortfall. They lobbied for more money and CHAT plus other nonprofits helped.
ICF Emergency Services, then the contractor, spent months trying to predict the shortfall.
We advocated for an additional $3 billion, more than the state was originally going to ask for, and then, finally, the state officials agreed to that number.
Our reasoning was that even in 2007, it was clear that huge numbers of applicants did not get as much money as they should have, so $3 billion would provide enough to pay those still waiting and fix shortchanging mistakes.
Autumn, 2007. The $3 billion was given by Congress but only with the stipulation that they money be used exclusively for RH applicants. I guess they were correctly concerned about attempts to divert the applicants’ money from them.
January, 2008. I met for the first time with the new Executive Director of the LRA, Paul Rainwater, in a 3-person meeting with CHAT Co-chair Frank Silvestri in NOLA.
We made a strong plea for setting aside money to start a new appeals program to fix RH grant calculation mistakes that were not fixed by the old procedures for Appeals and Dispute Resolution (that usually was no “resolution” at all, simply a holding tank to keep grants with mistakes from further processing). 
Rainwater said about setting aside money for applicants to appeal anew, and I quote, “Melanie, I wish we could do that but there just isn’t enough money.”
2008 – 2009. The Jindal administration took more than $700 million of RH funds for “elevation incentive grants” even though the Blanco administration had previously promised to use almost only FEMA Hazard Mitigation money for elevation grants. This FEMA money was approximately $1.2 billion that came to LA automatically as 7% of the FEMA cleanup money after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.  By using RH money, the officials spared FEMA money which could be used for other, unpublicized purposes around the state.  In other words, they ate into the money that was supposed to go to applicants for basic compensation grants and that was part of the $3 billion to cover the shortfall for such grants.
Despite this huge chunk of the $3 billion being eaten away, contrary to 2006 -2007 RH policy, by RH elevation incentive grants, there is still a surplus. How? 
Rules for grants constricted grants making them smaller and smaller, like Paul Rainwater’s change to make mold and mildew damage no longer covered by the RH. In addition, more and more grant shortchanging mistakes were made and then buried very deeply by the RH contractor staff during the 1st level appeals conducted by the contractor (or by making very hard to appeal at all) and by OCD state at the 2nd and final appeal level of the State Appeals Board (a secret board with secret rules; more about my public records requests for this secret information in later newsletters).
Winter, 2010, the new Executive Director of LRA and OCD, Robin Keegan, met with Frank and me. I gave her suggestions for easy and quick ways to fix many, but far from all, of the mistakes with the “surplus’ RH money to which she referred. She said my ideas would be seriously considered. I guess that someone upstairs in the Jindal administration said, “no.”  She never answered me in the future about my recommendations.
Spring, 2010. In defiance of the explicit language in the federal law that gave the RH Program the extra $3 billion, LA Speaker of the House Jim Tucker sponsored a bill that unanimously passed the House authorizing the Parishes to get “surplus” RH money. The amount of this money is, like so many RH things, ever changing, $400 million, $800 million, or more. Then there is the question of the unspent money for the RH rental program but that is a topic unto itself for another newsletter.

Summer, 2010. I am glad to report that Rep. Tucker’s bill has now vanished.
Check it out: http://www.legis.state.la.us/     HR 705752
When you try to find the bill, you get the message: 

Specified Bill could not be found.  

RIP!  (that’s from me, not from the LA legislature’s website)

I had heard something about this bill being withdrawn. Perhaps Rep. Tucker finally understood what he had been told about this bill being in violation of US law. Or maybe he only understood that when he heard about the next phase of people other than applicants reaching for RH money, namely, Congress itself.

Summer, 2010 Congress wants “surplus” RH money back. 
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/capital/index.ssf?/base/news-8/1278966613228410.xml&coll=1

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-15/127960750410580.xml&coll=1

If you read all the news articles about how badly LA needs these RH funds, according to state spokespersons, you might get to think that they finally really understand that many thousands of applicants (more than 20,000, they estimate) did not got enough money to rebuild. 

But read the articles above and others on the pleas for Congress not to rescind the RH money carefully. You will see the clear agenda of Mayor Landrieu to use much of the “surplus” RH money to pay contractors to fix RH funds sold to the state. Not to give all of it to applicants who want to fix their homes and got no RH money (because of technicalities about titles or mistakes) or too little RH money (because of mistakes, constricting rules, and unfair rules in the first place), but to contractors.

So it wasn’t bad enough that almost $1 billion went to contractors who performed obviously substandard work, too slowly, with abysmal customer relations.
Now, the state is pleading to be able to use this remaining RH money for applicants (and some, but probably a minor portion, would undoubtedly go to them) but also to contractors for owner-less homes.  More contractors and government officials, not citizens and their needs. 

Whose Road Home money is it?

Best wishes,
Melanie Ehrlich
Co-Chairman, Citizens’ Road Home Action Team (CHAT)
http://chatushome.com

PS We were having some technical problems with the website but now you should be able to access the documents about the compliance checks near the top of our website.

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