The Louisiana Office of Community Development has wrapped up a series of seven meetings in flood-affected regions of the state. The meetings offered residents an opportunity to learn about allocation plans for the initial $438 million installment of federal flood recovery funding. At a meeting in Baton Rouge many attended hoping they'd find help, but left disappointed.
About a hundred people filled a room at the BREC headquarters on a Monday night to hear the state's flood recovery action plan. Pat Forbes who heads the Office of Community Development says they’ve seen about 60 people at most of their meetings so this is a record. Forbes stands in front of a room full of people whose needs lie beyond the reach of the $438 million dollars of federal recovery funds.
“That is about an eighth of the money that the Governor has asked the President and Congress for for a complete recovery, so it’s a ridiculously small amount of money for the scale of the problem we have,” Forbes said.
The proposal focuses on three areas: homeowner rehabilitation, rental housing and business recovery.
“We’ve had to prioritize who we’ll be able to serve on this first batch of funds and so the priorities are people who have major or severe damage from the floods,” Forbes says. “They’re homeowners, they don’t live in the a special flood hazard area, they don’t have flood insurance, they’re low to moderate income and addition to all those things either the applicant is elderly or there is a person with disabilities living in the household.”
Forbes explains the plan with the help of two large screens, a Power Point presentation and a laser pointer. When he opens the floor to comments and questions. Betty Wienhoff raises her hand and the mic is passed to her.
“On your priority list you have one two three, five priorities. Now would an individual have to meet all five, or a part of those?” Wienhoff asks.
Forbes replies, “All five.”
Hearing that, Wienhoff, who had flood insurance, but not enough to complete work on her home, stood and walked out of the room.
"I'm still not in the house - I'm in a hotel. My family and I, my two grandchildren, and so we have not returned to the home and I thought this program, this $438 million dollar program, was going to help everyone in this flooded area so I'm just now very saddened by it,” Wienhoff says.
“Folks are frustrated; they want it to go faster, we want it to go faster. They want us to have more money so we could help more people. We want that. There are limitations we have so our work is to do the best job we can within those limitations.”
According to the proposals timeline, even those who fit the criteria for the initial money won't see it until spring.
“We got to not only get HUD approval they then have to sign a grant agreement with us. We can’t effect that timeline they then have to go through the process of getting money in the account for us in the line of credit, at the same time we have to get a contractor in place to do all the work of getting money to homeowners of establishing that they’re eligible, figuring out who they are where they are how much damage they had we gotta do all those things too. We doing that simultaneously but they all take time.”
For those who aren't prioritized in this round of funding, Forbes says there's hope of expanding the criteria with the latest recovery amount approved by Congress of $1.2 billion -- still about $2 billion short of what Gov. John Bel Edwards has requested.
This report has been brought to you by the Louisiana Public Radio Partnership, and made possible with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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