Posted on 03/29/2008 12:00:06 PM PDT by TornadoAlley3
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Imagine that your home was reduced to mold-covered wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government provided-trailer that gives off formaldehyde fumes you finally win a federal grant.
Then a collector announces that you have to pay back thousands of dollars.
Thousands of Katrina victims may be in the same boat.
A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments.
The contractor, ICF International of Fairfax, Va., revealed the extent of the overpayments when it issued a March 11 request for bids from companies willing to handle "approximately 1,000 to 5,000 cases that will necessitate collection effort."
The bid invitation said: "The average amount to be collected is estimated to be approximately $35,000, but in some cases may be as high as $100,000 to $150,000."
The biggest grant amount allowed by the Road Home program is $150,000, so ICF believes it paid some recipients the maximum when they should not have received a penny. If ICF's highest estimate of 5,000 collection cases — overpaid by an average of $35,000 — proves to be true, that means applicants will have to pay back a total of $175 million.
One-third of qualified applicants for Road Home help had yet to receive any rebuilding check as of this past week. The program, which has come to symbolize the lurching Katrina recovery effort, has $11 billion in federal funds.
ICF spokeswoman Gentry Brann said in an e-mail Friday that the overpayment recovery effort was made inevitable when insurance and other aid to Katrina victims was eventually measured against what an applicant received from the Road Home program.
Brann said there was a sense of urgency in paying Road Home applicants, and ICF knew applicants might eventually have to return some money.
"The choice was either to process grants immediately or wait until the March 2008 deadline (for submitting Road Home applications) before disbursing any funds," Brann said in her e-mail.
Brann pointed out that 5,000 collections cases would represent a 4-percent error rate for the Road Home that is "quite good for large federal programs."
Frank Silvestri, co-chair of the Citizen's Road Home Action Team, a group that formed out of frustrations with ICF, sees it far differently.
"They want people to pay for their incompetence and their mistakes. What they need to be is aggressive about finding the underpayments," he said. "People relied, to their detriment, on their (ICFs) expertise and rebuilt their houses and now they want to squeeze this money back out of them."
The prospect of Road Home grant collections comes less than two weeks after the Louisiana inspector general and the legislative auditor said they were investigating why former Gov. Kathleen Blanco paid ICF an extra $156 million in her waning days in office to administer the program. With the increase, ICF stands to earn $912 million to run Road Home, a contract that also sweetened its initial public stock offering, helping it buy out four other companies and enter government contracting in sectors including national defense and the environment.
Paul Rainwater, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the state body that asked for the Blanco-ICF investigations, acknowledged the collections could be painful for applicants, many of whom have used up their nest eggs to rebuild.
"The state must walk a fine line of treating homeowners who have been overpaid with fairness and compassion and ensuring that all federal funds are used for their intended purpose," said Rainwater, an appointee of new Gov. Bobby Jindal.
Upon receiving money from Road Home, grantees sign forms that say they must refund any overpayments.
Melanie Ehrlich, co-chair of Citizen's Road Home Action Team, which has documented Road Home cases that appear littered with mistakes, said she had no confidence that ICF had correctly calculated overpayments. She charged that the company was more likely using collections as retribution against people who had appealed their award amounts in effort to get the aid they deserved.
"I think they are looking for ways to decrease awards and that's part of dissuading people," she said.
Brann said applicants are told an appeal could boost or diminish their award. She called Ehrlich's charge "a totally unfounded assertion."
“Imagine that your home was reduced to mold-covered wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government provided-trailer that gives off formaldehyde fumes you finally win a federal grant.”
No agenda here from the MSM, move along.
...and some people still think the Fed Gov’t is capable of running healthcare. What a bunch of morons.
Blanco and her Road Home program screwed up.
“Gov. Kathleen Blanco paid ICF an extra $156 million in her waning days in office to administer the program. With the increase, ICF stands to earn $912 million to run Road Home, a contract that also sweetened its initial public stock offering, helping it buy out four other companies and enter government contracting in sectors including national defense and the environment.”
Follow the money, and where does it lead? Why, to more LA Dem-corruption, of course!
This isn’t a surprise. Bureaucrats think like this. They treat their employees and soldiers like this also. They screw up and then they screw you for their mistake. The difference is that unlike collection agencies and such you have no recourse and they can just take your money out of your paycheck. There have been cases where soldiers have been asked to pay for the proverbial boots that were blown off with their legs. It happens all the time and usually in those cases it gets fixed through embarrassing them because like the devil bureaucracy can not stand to be mocked but the idea that it happens at all and even that anyone could possibly be so detached to think in such a way should bring pause to anyone who looks to the government for solutions.
You do not get those solutions for free and even if you did they may cost you more in your personal sovereignty then any sane person would ever pay if they were making decisions outside of the shortsightedness of what is often seen as immediate need. The government has become a parent figure for far too many citizens. That is why they find it so easy to ask bureaucracy for that which they would never ask a friend or even ask of themselves. Never mind that the government takes directly from their friends, family, and countless others who they do not know.
Not to mention "solving" our economic problems.
Ohhhhhh. I see what's going on here. This is nothing more than ammo to pin on Bobby Jindal in the event he gets the notion he might want to be President one day. Or Vice-President for that matter.
“NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Imagine that you chose to live below sea-level and had no insurance and your home was reduced to mold-covered wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Lacking any money to rebuild, you expect the government to provide you with a new house, and after months of living in a government provided-trailer that gives has “that new car smell” you finally receive a federal grant.
Then a collector reminds you about the terms of the grant- you have to re-pay thousands of dollars.
Thousands of irresponsible people live in New Orleans.”
There...fixed it!
No hurricanes in La. this year; they will all be in Fla and along the Atlantic coast
NO hurricanes,eh?
Did someone go to a mountaintop and get a promise written in stone and signed by God?
This kind of ‘magical thinking’ makes me want to scream.
There is NO such law of nature that protects any area previously hit by a hurricane, and pretending there is some cosmic law at work is ignorant. It will also get people killed.
I hope you were being facetious, because people SERIOUSLY insist that there is a hard and fast law of averages that will protect N.O. from hurricanes for 20 or more years. As if nature can be held to any law but its own.
Anyone remember Florida getting hit 3 times in one year? So much for the ‘odds’, eh?
One hundred year storm events my rear end! I’ve experienced 3 ‘once in a lifetime’ storms in less than 50 years-let science ‘splain that!!
There is NOTHING preventing one or more hurricanes as strong as Katrina from hitting the Gulf Coast this year, or any year! To believe otherwise is suicidal and monumentally ignorant.
I now return anyone who insists that nature can be held to our wishful fantasies to their heel-clicking and magic incantations.
Look how the propaganda press has them labeled as “Katrina Victims” How can someone be a Victim of nature, since when is nature a criminal. Should it not read Katrina survivors?
Imagine self-responsibility.
“What about being grateful for the gifts they did receive?”
Contrary to what you may believe, based on some of the stories in the press, the residents of this area are profoundly grateful for everything they have received. People from all over the nation and the world have opened their hearts to us in what can only be an unprecedented display of love and unity. Maybe someday someone will write the definitive book about what has gone on here in the aftermath of Katrina, the heartaches and the triumphs. In the interim, here is an article that I posted before.
http://blog.nola.com/chrisrose/2008/03/chris_rose.html
Leave the victims alone. Get the money by cutting back on the excessive foreign aid that seems to end up in the Swiss bank accounts of foreign despots.
Oh well...just wishful thinking...
I am one of those people you refer to that “chose” to live below sea level. I have lived in this area all my 60 year life, and even if my grandma would be alive today, and she would be 102 if she were still alive, neither of us have or would have lived through anything like this before. There is hardly any place in these United States of America that is 100% safe and free from disaster. If the powers-that-be had done their job and built decent levees, and in the case of those of us who live in Jefferson Parish, had a Parish President who didn’t turn the pumps off and sent the pump workers miles away, this wouldn’t have been the disaster that it was. Now I did have insurance, but my damages far outweighed any insurance payments I received. I am still trying to get my house back, and it’s making progress, but it still has a little ways to go.
The Road Home program has been screwing with people since its inception. My opinion is that those who are running it never had the intention of paying people their entire grants, and that’s why it started out by paying out in increments. But when they were ordered to give people their entire grants, they were caught flat-footed, and suddenly they couldn’t come up with the money. Now they want to get what money they paid out back. This is corruption run amok,if that’s possible.
While I am sorry for your loss, all the levees and pumps in the world are not goung to stop the Mississipee River or hold back Lake Ponch or correct the abject stupidity of your elected officials.
So where should I live? Upriver along the banks of the Mississippi around Missouri and Arkansas where they had massive flooding these past few weeks? Or in California along the San Andreas Fault? Or in the Midwest in Tornado Alley? Or what about along the Atlantic Seaboard where they have had a few devastating hurricanes themselves? Tell me of a 100% safe place to live, where there can be no floods, earthquakes, wildfires, tornadoes, or any other natural disasters?
How about higher ground for a start? Again, sorry your house was under-insured. Is that the government’s fault? BTW I was flooded out in Allison, but my living quarters are on the second floor.
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