As we drove through the lower 9th ward in March I was explaining the Road Home program to A. and Mr. A. — $7 billion allocated for about 120,000 homeowners to get up to $150,000. It took less than a minute for Mr A. to say “Wait a minute I did the math and there’s no way all those folks will get anything close $150,000.”
The Road Home program is short $2.9 billion. Louisiana had been seeking help from the feds but the Bush administration is taking a page from the insurance companies apparently (or is that the other way around). From WaPo…
The massive federally funded program for rebuilding hurricane-damaged Louisiana
homes is short nearly $3 billion largely because Louisiana officials
are compensating thousands of homeowners who were not originally
supposed to benefit, according to an analysis by the Bush
administration.The money was supposed to pay for rebuilding
flooded homes but not those damaged by wind, said federal officials
familiar with the negotiations between the administration and the state
officials who designed the program.SNIP
State officials responded that it is unfair to compensate some
owners but not others, depending on which hurricane phenomenon wrecked
their home.“The Bush Administration has been asking us to
discriminate against storm victims since day one,” Andy Kopplin,
director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, said in a written
statement last night. “We rejected it then and we reject it today. . .
. These are American citizens we’re talking about, and they’ve been out
of their homes for almost two years now. Enough is enough.”
It’s never enough with the Bushies. They can always sink lower. I’d like to see the administration’s analysis by the way.
UPDATE: The Times Picayune has a better article on this. Interesting that the WaPo article with a slant towards the Bush position and a subtitle of…”U.S. Officials Say Fund Was Limited To Flooded Homes”…did not include all of what LRA director, Andy Kopplin had to say as included in TP article…
“These are American citizens we’re talking
about, and they’ve been out of their homes for almost
two years now. Enough is enough,” he said.“If
there was a federal directive against covering wind damage,
why would HUD (Housing and Urban Development) have approved
our plan?”(my emphasis)
UPDATE: I contacted the WaPo reporter and he stated it was cut for brevity sake but Kopplin’s point was made elsewhere in the article with the following graph…
Kopplin said the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development eventually agreed to cover both flood and wind damage.
The hurricane was a natural phenomenon. The Federal Flood was just that, levees that broke thanks to poorly-constructed and maintained federal levees. My house had wind and water damage, but no flood damage, and insurance took care of it. However, those whose homes were flooded due to federal- and local-level negligence (a majority of homes in Orleans Parish) are still jilted by a system that kicked them out of their homes in the first place. They should get the first dibs, if you ask me.
This doesn’t exonerate the sans-cojones Bushies in any way, shape or form because, if you look at the current state of our City Planning, they would rather that us taxpaying citizens not get one red cent to rebuild this city. I am beyond disappointed in the Bush administration for taking away money for domestic initiatives while pouring money into a country that doesn’t even want us there. Just because it’s a hurricane, global warming or tornado and not named Ahmed or Mohammed does not make it any less a threat to national security.