Hurricane home repairs fall short

Hurricane home repairs fall short

	Published : Wed, 24 Jan 2007 21:33 By : Agencies Print this Story

BATON ROUGE, La. (AFX) - The contractor running Louisiana's post hurricane home repair and buyout program will miss a benchmark that Gov. Kathleen Blanco's administration listed when searching for a company to dole out aid to homeowners: the calculation of all grants within seven months.

The goal, though not included in ICF International Inc.'s contract with the state, was listed when Blanco's Division of Administration solicited offers last spring from contracting firms seeking to handle the $7.5 billion federally funded program for homeowners.

Dubbed 'The Road Home' program, it gives repair or buyout grants of up to $150,000 to Louisiana homeowners who have suffered damage from Hurricane Katrina, which struck in August 2005, or Hurricane Rita, which followed a month later. More than 101,000 people have applied for aid, but only 258 homeowners have received grants so far, according to the latest data provided by the Road Home.

The administration wanted all applications for housing aid grants to be verified and all payments calculated within seven months from the start of the Road Home. ICF's contract with the state, worth up to $756 million, was signed in June.

However, seven months later, Virginia-based ICF has calculated grants for an estimated 30,400 homeowners. That's less than a third of those who have applied and about one grant for every four homeowners expected to be eligible for the federally funded, state-run aid program for victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Suzie Elkins, director of the governor's Office of Community Development, the agency that monitors the Road Home program, said the expectation that all the grants would be calculated within seven months wasn't included in ICF's contract with the state because it wasn't realistic.

Elkins drafted the language in the bid solicitation and said she agreed the seven month mark shouldn't be included in ICF's contract.

She said that, although the contract was signed with ICF in June, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development didn't approve the plans to spend the money until August. The state made wide-ranging adjustments -- at least 30 policy changes -- to the homeowner aid program after running a pilot version of the program in August and September. The first grants in the reworked program didn't go out until November, she said.

'We really rolled out this program in November for all the homeowners. That's when it really started,' she said, suggesting the program's timeline should be judged from the November start of the full aid program.

State officials have heaped criticism on ICF for moving too slowly to dole out aid, saying the company is impeding Louisiana's recovery. And the slow pace has become a political issue. When President Bush's critics noted that he failed to mention Katrina or Rita in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter said he was disappointed at but, 'I'm not terribly surprised when the federal taxpayer has sent us billions but it isn't getting to the people who need it because of state debacles like the Road Home Program.'

State lawmakers called on Blanco to fire ICF after reports of inaccurate appraisals, incorrect grant letters and mountains of paperwork. Blanco said she was dissatisfied with the pace of awards but didn't want to slow the process further by restarting the homeowner grant program with a new contractor.

'Frankly, many are giving up. This promise of help is being strangled. They feel betrayed by this Road Home Program that was supposed to help them,' Melanie Ehrlich, with the Citizens' Road Home Action Team, a New Orleans-based citizens group pushing to speed up the aid program, told officials with the governor's hurricane recovery authority.

Mike Byrne, director of the homeowner aid program for ICF, repeatedly has told lawmakers, state officials and residents at public hearings that the Road Home is making adjustments to speed aid calculations while following a string of federal requirements for the hurricane recovery aid. Recently, the company changed home appraisal methods in a bid to quicken grants.

Elkins also defended the company and its work.

'This is going as fast as we can make it,' Elkins said. 'We meet on almost every day about ways we can streamline it.'