Road Home drama continues, six years later

By Zoe Sullivan
The Louisiana Weekly

By the time the Road Home portion was reached during a joint meeting by the Louisiana Senate Select Committee on Hurricane Recovery and the City Council’s Disaster and Recovery Committee, the audience had dwindled from a modestly full chamber to about half that.

Since there was also no quorum, no decisions could be taken at the meeting. Nonetheless, the session, chaired by Senator Karen Carter Peterson, was extended from its scheduled 9 p.m. ending to 9:30 p.m. to accommodate some of the comments from audience members since at nine the committee was still grilling the representatives of the Office of Community Development (OCD). The three people in the hot seat at the hearing were Pat Forbes, Interim Executive Director of the Office of Community Development — Disaster Recovery Unit, Lara Robertson, Deputy Director of the DRU, and Bill Haygood, program manager for the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program.

Deborah Poling-Berthelot, a Lake­view homeowner, was called to address the committee and OCD by Senator Murray, her representative. Soft spoken, with long, flaxen hair, Poling-Berthelot told the assembly her story. She had contacted the Senator’s office because OCD had sent a check for nearly $42,000, her Road Home award, to her empty, Lakeview home. Fur­thermore, Poling-Berthelot went on, she had requested to receive her award via wire transfer and had provided a different mailing address from the home in question. Making matters worse, after receiving the check, Poling-Berthelot was told by a Road Home staff member that she no longer qualified for the program and demanding that she return the funds. “

“If they look at my survey, and I’ve been approved, how can they ask me to send the money back?” she asked, adding that she received three threatening phone calls about the funds. “It’s been very emotional. I had just gone through so much with this whole process…Three times my application’s been lost in the whole process.”

After hearing Ms. Poling-Berthelot, Senator Peterson asked why representatives of Shaw, the state’s contractor for the Road Home program, were not present for the hearing so that they could address their role in situations such as this. Shaw did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. Near the end of the meeting, Peterson also asked that FEMA representatives be invited to participate in the next hearing in order to end the “he say, she say” surrounding technical questions about the program.

The OCD presented a new web site that is supposed to help Road Home applicants view their applications. The site is www.miti­gatela.org. Members of the joint committee criticized the site because although it was already “live,” OCD staff had not yet been instructed to direct applicants there for information. Additionally, committee members chided the OCD representatives when they learned that people who had applied for home elevation grants had no way of tracking the status of their applications through the web site. “How can someone find out if they are in the active pipeline?” questioned Senator Morrell, raising the concern that the site didn’t give applicants a way to learn about their status and, consequently, the ability to make decisions about how to proceed with their lives.

“Have you all signed a card saying you’re telling the truth?” Senator Ed Murray pounded the OCD officials mercilessly for their failure to fulfill promises. “You always say that, but you never do it,” he berated OCD when the question came up of posting the documentation presented to the committee members to the OCD website.

Another point of criticism were the figures that OCD presented. Senator Carter Peterson insisted several times, to groans and shouts from the audience, asking how many applicants had ever applied for Road Home assistance and how many had thus far been cleared. The numbers in the documents supplied to the committee members were not the same as those the OCD representatives offered up in the meeting, which were the most up-to-date figures available. 55,000 grants were said to have been cleared by FEMA for 46,092 homeowners. Of these, 12,738 applicants had been cleared this year. “I was raised in a very Christian household, and I was raised by my mother to not use the ‘L’ word and not call anyone a liar,” Senator Murray admonished the OCD representatives. Murray stated that they had said they would send a letter out to certain Road Home applicants explaining that they were ineligible.

Deborah Harris, the owner of a home in the Lower 9th Ward, was the first attendee called for comments. She installed storm shutters, but hasn’t received reimbursement. “The hazardous mitigation sent a um, paralegal to my home for me to sign the documents for the shutters…now they’re saying I’m not eligible.”

A further issue that came up concerned advertising that misleads homeowners. Senator J.P. Morrell voiced his view that television advertisements that encourage homeowners to contact shoring companies were deceptive. The only people eligible for these elevation grants are those who applied for Road Home assistance prior to the program’s deadline, but the ads suggest that anyone can receive funds to elevate their home. “Why are there people on television, soliciting people to apply for money that doesn’t exist… And if new applicants are probably not going to get money, what are these companies advertising this and increasing the number of people with false hope?” Morrell demanded to know why OCD wasn’t regulating this and suggested that perhaps a legislative solution would be an appropriate fix to the problem.

This story originally published in the June 06, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.