Hurricane Katrina & Federal Flood, Scoutprime

ICF bonuses

From a CNN report today on the Road Home program in Louisiana…

SUSAN ROESGEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over: An empty lot is all
that’s left of Antoinette Page’s New Orleans home after hurricane
Katrina. But she’s still paying the mortgage on this invisible house
and getting deeper in debt. Insurance paid just $2,400 and Paige has
been waiting almost a year to get help from a Federally funded program
called the road home.

PAGE: This is unbelievable. I never
thought the day would come that this would happen to the citizens of
Louisiana and I know it’s just not me. A lot of people I’ve spoken to
are going through the same thing.

ROESGEN: She’s one of
nearly 140,000 people in Louisiana who have applied for road home
assistance and only 20,000 of those have actually gotten money. And the
private company hired by the state to run the program, ICF
International, which also runs several other programs, just gave its
top people big bonuses.ICFs chief financial officer Alan Stewart got a
bonus of $650,000. Chief operating officer John Wasson got a bonus of
$1 million. And ICF chairman Sudako Keshavek (ph) got $1.7 million
because ICF did pretty well last year. The company says those bonuses
have nothing to do with the success or failure of the road home
program. But, still, the fat paychecks are galling to people like
Antoinette Page who doesn’t have a dime to pay off the mortgage on her
empty lot.
(emphasis mine)

4 thoughts on “ICF bonuses”

  1. Sudhakar Keshavan – not that I like the man, but the least CNN can do is slight research to get the name right.

  2. Maltri, that “(ph)” after the name indicates that it’s a phonetic spelling taken off the audio portion of the broadcast. CNN does not prepare its own transcripts, either; there are actually a ton of private companies that do it. So it isn’t CNN’s lack of research, it’s some rapid transcriptionist causing the error. (Probably, knowing the way these things work from having been peripherally in the industry, that transcriptionist is a low-paid telecommuter on a very tight deadline, and working from a tape.)

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