‘Road Home’ is a slow one despite $7.5 billion aid program

Sixteen months after Hurricane Katrina, the road home through Louisiana’s housing grant program isn’t a speedway, but a snail’s path.

Lawmakers rarely agree on much, but they’re unanimous in their ire against the contractor selected by Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s administration to run the $7.5 billion hurricane aid program, called the “Road Home.”

In the nicest terms, they say the program is too bureaucratic, too slow and too confusing to average homeowners who are seeking assistance. In the harshest criticism, some lawmakers call ICF International Inc. incompetent and criminal in its pace of awarding grants.

Many homeowners agree, flooding newspaper pages with complaints of inaccurate appraisal estimates, incorrect grant letters and long waits to find out their aid eligibility n after they fill out a mountain of paperwork.

“In Lakeview and Gentilly and the Lower Ninth Ward, it is a road to nowhere. It is disgraceful, wrong, shoddy. That’s the nicest thing you can say about this thing,” said Rep. Peppi Bruneau, R-New Orleans, listing several New Orleans neighborhoods devastated by Katrina. A resident of Lakeview, Bruneau gutted his flooded home and is rebuilding.

As the anger builds, one legislator from the Lower Ninth Ward pitched a tent in front of the state Capitol to protest the speed of the Road Home, packing up after two nights and pledges from Blanco that the program will be tweaked in hopes of quickening aid.

The program gives repair or buyout grants of up to $150,000 to homeowners who have suffered damage from hurricanes Katrina or Rita, but few homeowners have actually received aid so far. Fewer than 100 homeowners out of nearly 90,000 people who have applied have received their housing recovery grants through the federally funded program.

Many state officials considered it inevitable that whichever firm received the Road Home contract wouldn’t move as speedily as homeowners, thousands of them displaced since August 2005, want the dollars to flow. Indeed, the Road Home is the largest rebuilding program of its kind in the nation’s history, a point often mentioned by Mike Byrne, Road Home director for ICF.

Byrne said the company n which has a contract worth as much as $756 million and has been paid an estimated $80 million so far n is improving the aid process and trying to speed grants, while following complicated federal requirements for using the hurricane recovery cash and ramping up housing assistance centers after signing a contract in July.

“We want to do it smarter and faster,” Byrne said.

ICF was hired by Blanco’s Division of Administration, and lawmakers complained they had no hand in awarding the contract. Legislators said ICF has made more mistakes, has less experience and has shown less urgency than other companies might have.

The complaints have been mounting, with Donald Powell, President Bush’s Gulf Coast rebuilding czar, urging the contractor last week to speed up the financial assistance. Before wrapping up a recent special session, state lawmakers in both the House and Senate unanimously directed the governor’s staff to fire ICF, though they acknowledged they didn’t actually have that authority.

“I think we can get better with the money we’re paying somewhere else,” said Rep. Jean-Paul Morrell, D-New Orleans.

The governor and her staff haven’t offered much in the way of a hearty defense of ICF, instead saying they were dissatisfied with the pace of grant awards and telling the company to hasten the aid delivery. However, Blanco also has said it wouldn’t speed help to homeowners to restart the program with a new contractor.

“The remedy for our people, who have endured so much through Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, is to move faster, not to start over from scratch,” the governor said in an ICF statement.

Meanwhile, lawmakers have asked their financial staff to look into whether they can oust ICF themselves or stop payments to the contractor until much more grant aid is delivered to homeowners.