November Theatre
November 5, 2007
Daniel Rodrigue, Sr.
November 7, 2007
(AP) The state’s hurricane homeowner grant program, the Road Home, has been slowest in payments to the more than 15,000 owners of manufactured homes and condominiums.
The aid program, funded primarily with federal recovery money, didn’t figure out exactly how it should calculate awards for owners of mobile and shared-space properties until this spring, and few were ever informed of the delay.
Two weeks ago, the Road Home reported sending the first award letters to three of more than 900 condo owners.
Another 14,579 owners of manufactured homes also had to wait for state and Road Home officials to draft special policies, and only half the owners have passed through a separate verification process started in March.
“Every time I call, they say they can’t tell if I have a mobile home or a prefab home. It doesn’t look like a mobile home to them, I guess,” said Larry Dixon, a mobile home owner in Harvey.
Program officials said they couldn’t produce data for how many manufactured home applicants actually have gotten award letters or moved on to closings.
Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, said his state agency created the Road Home in June 2006 to include coverage for mobile homes and condos from the start. He said the program administrators have shown progress with these homeowners lately, but the latest numbers “clearly show the contractor has a long way to go.”
The Road Home contractor, ICF International Inc., has responsibility to come up with procedures to handle these applicants, Kopplin said. The only policy change the LRA made, late in 2006, was to include mobile homes and stick-built homes on leased land.
But officials at other agencies handling the Road Home program disagree with Kopplin.
Speaking on the program’s behalf, GeGe Roulaine of the governor’s Office of Community Development – the agency overseeing contractor ICF – said mobile homes and condos weren’t covered initially.
“It is understandable that homeowners may have received what they perceived as mixed messages as changes were made in program policies,” Roulaine said. “However, as these eligibility decisions were made, specialized teams were created to deal with mobile home applications and with condo applications to bring a higher level of expertise to their specific situations and are now moving them forward as quickly as possible.”
The Road Home began tracking its mobile home applicants in March, a few weeks after ICF finalized a process for calculating mobile home damages and values, to deal with the fact that mobile home values depreciate over time while traditional homes tend to appreciate.
The verification process changed again Aug. 24, when the program began requiring new sets of ownership documents to approve pre-storm values for manufactured homes.
It took even longer for the Road Home to develop a way to calculate damages and home values for condominiums with shared walls, utility service lines and common areas.
In June, the Road Home began tracking applicants who own condos, although Road Home spokeswoman Gentry Brann said a handful of them got grants before the procedures were developed, with their grants calculated as if they owned a freestanding house.
That may explain why condo owner JoAnn Albea of Kenner, a Jefferson Parish schoolteacher, is waiting for a response from the Road Home on the first anniversary of her application while a neighbor down the hall got a $52,000 grant in April. Albea said she called the Road Home constantly over the past year.
“Every time I was told that I was in the verification process,” Albea said. “I was never informed that condo owners were not being processed at all.”
Once the Road Home had a condo policy in effect, it began sending condo owners special forms. Albea called them unduly complicated, requiring extensive research about the history of the building, the condo association and details from insurance companies. They must be filled out before the Road Home will perform the damage evaluations that are typically done at the start of the process.
Bert Riggs Jr., 18, carries fishing nets from his flooded home north of Chauvin, La., after Hurricane Rita left parts of Terrebonne Parish underwater. The Road Home has recently been criticized for its slow response in helping mobile home and condominium owners recover. * AP Photo/The Advocate, Paul Rutherford
