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La. Aid Discrepancy an Issue of Wind, Water
Workers clear debris off Delery Street in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans a year ago. "Road Home" funding was intended to help such flood-ravaged areas.
(By Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post)
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Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) scheduled today's hearing to consider the issues, among them, delays in delivering the money to homeowners.
More than 20 months after the Katrina catastrophe, tens of thousands of Louisiana houses remain vacant, in part because of administrative delays in the aid program. As of early May, only 16,000 of 130,000 applicants had received money.
The Road Home program was developed after hurricanes Katrina and Rita by Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and the Louisiana Recovery Authority in negotiations with the White House and Powell.
It provides rebuilding grants of up to $150,000 per home and is expected to benefit more than 130,000 owners.
Kopplin said the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development eventually agreed to cover both flood and wind damage.
But federal officials said that during the negotiations over how much federal money would go into the program, they made it clear that only flood damage should be covered.
The reasoning was that the worst destruction was in areas flooded because of storm surges and levee breaches, and that those areas needed the money most. Moreover, many noted that the federal government bore a special responsibility to pay for flood damage in New Orleans because the flooding there was caused by failures of federal levees and flood walls.
Proponents of the flood-only policy argued that homeowners should have had homeowners insurance to cover wind damage. The federal money is not covering wind-damaged homes in other states affected by the storms, officials said.
