[FoCHAT] CHATNews: Road Home Program Trying to Stifle Complaints, Part 1

Sun May 30 00:18:20 CDT 2010

Road Home Program: Trying to Stifle Complaints, Part 1 

CHATNews                         May 29, 2010 
Dear CHAT Members, 
1. Sunday Edition by Dennis Woltering on WWL TV on Sunday at 10:30 on channel 4 and at noon on channel 15 will include an interview with me on some Road Home Program issues. The interview should also be posted to their website for viewing later on. 

2. Chapter 4, Public Records Request for the LRA-LSU Customer Satisfaction Survey 
To read the never previously released survey results from LRA and LSU go to this link 
                http://chatushome.com/chatusfiles/RHCustomerSatisfaction%20Survey_LRAReport_OneTableOfApplicComments_Contract.pdf   
 Or go to Chapter 4 in the Public Records Request Summary at 
http://chatushome.com 

Overview of the LRA-LSU Survey 
As an attorney who requested some the data that got about the LRA-LSU Customer Satisfaction Survey wrote to me recently, 
“It looks like the whole survey is flawed. They are only surveying people who HAD CONTACT! The problem with the RH program was that so many people never got contacted!” 

Despite this bias toward satisfied applicants, the survey revealed the following, as noted in an email by an LRA staffer: 

“most people are either really happy or really mad (lots of 5s [the top score] and 1s [the bottom score].” 

>From the responses that were included in the survey: 
·         55% of the applicants identified the barrier to rebuilding as an “insufficient Road Home grant,” 
·         32% as the grant being too late, 
·          ~10% as Road Home money having to go to mortgage or rent, 
·          and ~ 10% as unsure of location. 
There are many individual anonymous comments from applicants as part of the survey data, a few of which I will include in upcoming newsletters. While many of these comments reveal that the applicants were happy with program, many others sound just like most of the responses from applicants to CHAT’s survey. 
On Sept. 26, 2008, “Rainwater [Former Louisiana Recovery Authority Executive Director Paul Rainwater] said he is awaiting the results of a Louisiana State University study on the Road Home's customer service so he can address problem areas.” (http://www.nola.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news-6/122240701940590.xml&coll=1).

But although, the LRA-LSU survey was completed at that time, LRA did not publicize or post the results ever. 
 CHAT posted unedited CHAT survey results (except for making them anonymous) that were not filtered in any way, unlike the unpublicized report of results of the LRA-LSU survey. 
http://chatushome.com/chatusfiles/CHAT_Road_Home_Survey_MadeAnonCompiledByWeiss_5_17_09.pdf 

LRA and LSU misleading claimed in the final unpublicized report from their survey that their sample of applicants was “representative.”  CHAT never did that. We just said that our survey results indicated that very large numbers of applicants had been treated inconsistently, unfairly, and not according to Road Home rules. 

As indicated below, the LRA-LSU protocol for their survey was biased in its design, was made more biased by the removal of most of the applicants’ responses, and then was never released to the public, presumably because the level of satisfaction with the Road Home Program was still not considered high enough in the filtered survey responses. 

Who Has Seen the Survey Results? 
Not the public, until these CHAT postings, because it was never released by LRA. 
In addition, the LSU Public Policy Research Lab, which got paid tax dollars for designing and conducting this survey lists plenty of surveys that they have done at their website but there is no mention of this one. 
http://www.survey.lsu.edu/projects.html 

How Did CHAT Get the Survey Results and Emails About It? 

In Oct., 2008, I made a formal public records request for all state documents, including emails, about their telephone survey of applicants conducted by the LSU 
Finally, several months after filing suit in court for these and other withheld documents, in May and June, 2009, I received these documents. I will post many of these documents at our website. 

Some of the Major Points That We Learnt About the Survey. 
·         The survey cost $42,592.88 of taxpayer money and was conducted by the LSU Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs, Public Policy Research Lab, Kathryn Rountree, Operations Manager. 
·         There were three major sources of bias toward satisfied applicants in the survey. 

o   This survey only included applicants who had been contacted for a grant closing or by their advisor or the appeals department within two weeks prior to the survey. Therefore, the design of the survey eliminated the voices of huge numbers of applicants who had been left in limbo. 

o   Out of more than about 7000 interviewed applicants, only 650 were used. Most of the discarded responses were eliminated because applicants responded “no” to a question in section #5 in this 10-part survey. 

Ø This question was whether they got the information they needed from the contractor, ICF. 
Ø  Incredibly, if they answered “No I did not get that information” to that question, they were asked no more questions and their answers were not used. 
Ø Overwhelming evidence from applicants, ICF staff, and even from public statements by the Chairman of the LRA Housing Task Force, Walter Leger, indicated that applicants’ inability to get basic information about their grant for months or more than a year was a major problem affecting a very large percentage of applicants. See also the attorney’s statement at the beginning of this newsletter. 
Ø The problems that applicants had in obtaining answers to questions about their grant processing was even acknowledged by the state in their applicant-friendly rule change, CP #189A  made at the urging of CHAT in fall of 2007 http://www.chatushome.com:2500/chatus/published/HomePage#newpolicies 
§ However, most of the provisions of CP#189A were not implemented and Mike Spletto, former head of Housing in the state Office of Community Development, refused to include any description of this rule in mailings they were sending to applicants so most applicants did not know their rights to get information they needed about their grant being in limbo or calculations for their grant amount. 
. 
Ø After an LRA staff member stated in an email to LSU staff that eliminating most of the applicants included in the survey was a serious flaw that had to be corrected, LSU called back 383 of the thousands of dissatisfied applicants whose surveys were previously ignored. However, this happened after a report was prepared about the survey, and there is no indication that these results were ever included in a revised report. This, of course, suggests that LRA did not like the results 
. 
o   A statistical procedure called using confidence limits (evaluating people with extreme scores on the survey) was employed to eliminate additional applicants, ~10% of those who completed the survey. 

Ø According to two people well versed in statistics (deceased core CHAT member, Homer Branch, and a math professor who is a colleague of mine), this procedure was “nonsense” for a survey of this type because there was no previously tested model for saying which responses were likely to be accurate. 

Given that 55% of applicants who had not rebuilt their home and were included in the survey said that their inability to build was because they did not get enough funds, state officials surely know that very many applicants did not get enough to rebuild. 

The state is unjustified in demanding money back from applicants who failed to make a rebuilding deadline in the cases of the more than 15,000 applicants who tried to dispute their grant amount but never had a fair and independent appeal with written rules for deciding the appeal and did not have a chance to enter their documentation to correct mistakes entered in their files by ICF, the contractor.    

Road Home oversight is changing. The state legislature is considering bills now about unspent RH funds. 

The legislators are trying to divert unspent RH funds from the applicants to the parishes. (Bill 1175) 

 In a meeting with top Road Home officials in Oct. 2006, CHAT warned that the program was not being designed to give enough money for rebuilding especially to low- and middle-income applicants this. 

Left-over Road Home money should be used to help low- and middle-income applicants who got too little money to rebuild.  The money can be given in installments with applicants proving that they are using it for rebuilding. 

We are concerned that the Louisiana Senate is about to vote on a bill overwhelming passed by the House about the use of this leftover money. This bill will divert remaining funds away from shortchanged applicants to various uses by the parishes. This will require HUD approval and a new law from Congress, which stipulated that all Road Home Homeowner Program money be used only for applicants. 

Mayor Landrieu has spoken recently about using this RH money for blight removal. 

Diverting RH money from needy and deserving applicants who had been shortchanged on their grant will increase blight and unfair treatment of hurricane and flood victims. 

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