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v
The Incredible
Saga of Secrecy, Public Documents, and the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA)
Ø The founder of CHAT, Melanie Ehrlich, will describe
her attempt to obtain public documents about Road Home Program (RH) rules,
expenditures, and surveys of applicants
Ø The requests were directed to the LRA, which has
oversight of the RH
Ø This attempt to get some transparency in the RH
involved the Louisiana Public Records Request law
Ø It took one-and-a-half years from July 1, 2008 to
Dec. 20, 2009
Ø
It
required filing a legal complaint (Ehrlich vs. Rainwater) on March 31, 2009 and nine additional months of legal negotiations to get most of the documents
·
Click here to see the legal complaint
Ø
Here
is a brief chronology of the public requests that I made for which I had to
file for a hearing about LRA violating the Louisiana public records request law
·
My
public records request of July 1, 2008 was only partially filled
·
My
public records request of Oct. 20, 2008 was not filled at all, as of Mar. 2009,
when my lawyer started to write to LRA about a legal hearing
·
My
public records request of Dec. 15, 2008 was not filled at all as of Mar. 2009
Ø Chapter 1: First letter from my lawyer mentioning the
need to file a legal action
·
This
letter was sent on Mar. 12, 2009 to Dan Rees, LRA attorney
·
It
describes LRA not releasing documents that detail new policy changes affecting
applicants
·
I
was told by my attorney that any policy changes to state procedure were
supposed to be made publicly automatically
·
Instead,
LRA and the similar state agency Office of Community Development (OCD)
§
kept many of the rule changes for Road Home
secret
§
hid
important details about most rule changes from the public
ð
until
CHAT obtained the Change-Policy or CCB documents by public records requests
ð
For records requests for change-policy
documents filled in 2007, see http://www.chatushome.com:2500/chatus/published/HomePage#changepolicy
·
Assurances
were from Paul Rainwater, then LRA Executive Director and Custodian of LRA
records
·
Mr. Rainwater provided unfilled promises of
compliance on
·
Aug.
11, 2008 (mentions overdue response to my July 1, 2008 request for documents,
including documents describing major policy changes in the RH)
·
Oct.
17, 2008
·
Oct.
20, 2008
·
Dec.
18, 2008
·
Dec.
30, 2008
·
Feb.
25, 2009
Ø Chapter 3, Part1: Documents provided by the in-house
LRA attorney, Dan Rees, on Mar. 2, 2009
· These were the first
documents provided by LRA after notification that we would have to file for a
court hearing because LRA was ignoring my record requests for many months
· Mr. Rees sent a letter on Mar. 2, 2009 to my lawyer
with some of the missing documents
requested on Oct. 20, 2008
· His letter addressed none of the many missing
documents from my records request on July 1, 2008
· Still I had received none of the documents requested
on Dec. 15, 2008 and the letter did not even mention those requests
o
The
State Appeal Panel is the final appeals that LRA allows applicants
o
Mr.
Rainwater and Mr. Rees failed to provide what was clearly requested, guidelines
& procedures for the State Appeals Panel
o “Provide any and all policy, guideline, and procedure documents given to members of the State Review Panel, appeals advisors, and PALs for resolving dispute or appeals issues.”
Ø So LRA was still withholding a document with rules
for how to decide applicants’ appeals about mistakes in their grants
·
They were thereby keeping secret whether shortchanging grant
calculation mistakes were considered with consistent or fair methods by State
staff
·
These mistakes averaged over $25,000 per applicant for ~7,500
applicants who managed to win appeals (see road2la.com,
pipeline reports)
·
Was
there a vote by the State Appeals Panel to decide an appeal?
·
Did
it have to be unanimous for an appeal to be granted?
· What were the guidelines for weighing applicant
evidence vs. evidence
from the notoriously mistake-prone contractor, ICF International?
Ø
Chapter 3, Part 2: More State Secrets From Mr. Rees’ Mar. 2, 2009
Letter-- Who Is On the State Appeals Panel
& Applicant Documentation of Mistakes
The State Appeals Panel is supposed to “include at least 6 panelists
with the state and adhoc members from the
legislature.”
· According to LRA (and contrary to state law),
applicants have no right to go to court, so this panel is supposedly the last
body who could review claims by applicants of RH mistakes or even misdeeds
· When I requested the names of the Panel members (in
July 1, 2008), Mr. Rees finally responded on Mar. 2, 2009 that
§
“It
is not appropriate to be disseminating the personal information of
non-management personal.”
§
And,
no, he wrote, state legislators (who at least would have provided some element
of impartiality to the state-run appeals) had not been on the appeal panels
(contrary to LRA rules)
· No rules were provided about what kinds of documents
applicants should provide during state appeals
· Documents, including photos of damage that had since
been repaired, were often rejected by staff from the RH contractor
· Applicants
seem to have been rarely, if ever, asked to give specific documents during
State Review Panel proceedings
· In fact, sometimes applicants told us that State
appeals were decided so fast, “it would make your head spin” and other times
their cases languished for many months, as if in limbo
Ø
So the State Appeals for RH, which were decided in the applicants’
favor only 6% of the time, were conducted by individuals whose identity was
hidden from the public (even after a records request was filed) and the Panel
used secret rules or no rules to arrive at their conclusions
Ø Recently, LONG AFTER HER STATE APPEAL WAS DENIED, an
applicant was told that she should have hired an appraiser to document a
mistake in RH’s determination of the square footage
of her house even though she previously provided three other forms of
documentation to correct that mistake
· This applicant, like many others, had SBA or
municipal documentation correcting RH mistakes but this was ignored by the
Appeals Board
· Many applicants with obviously mistaken RH damage
assessments had originally been told by RH staff that they had more than 50%
damage but, later, had their damage assessments & grants reduced
· This 50% damage threshold was a critical determinant
of grant size
Ø Who were the lucky applicants who managed to win
State Appeals?
· One lawyer, who wrote a very long and detailed
legal-type document won his appeal about a damage assessment that violated RH
rules
· One elderly mother whose lawyer-son hired a surveyor
to document that her single-story New Orleans home, which stewed in 9 feet of
filthy water, really did have more than 50% damage
§
He
hired the surveyor because he had been told that applicants appealing wrong
damage assessments hardly ever win appeals
Ø
Wrong damage estimates that deprived applicants of their rightful
grants according to RH rules were the most frequent source of denied appeals,
as a RH official told us and ICF staffers confirmed
§
But
Paul Rainwater, former Exec. Dir. of LRA and now in Gov. Bobby Jindal’s inner staff, repeatedly argued that Charity
Hospital with 20 stories, a flooded basement, and 3 ft of water in the first
floor was more than 50% damaged by
Hurricane Katrina so that FEMA would give the state more money
§
But, falsely and hurtfully to human victims of Hurricane Katrina,
Mr. Rainwater would not reverse RH decisions that outrageously called one- and
two-story New Orleans & St. Bernard homes with 5-12 feet of water less than
50% damaged
Ø
Chapter 3,
Part 3: LRA Withheld the Names of First-Level Appeals Subcontractors for 7 Months
·
In my public records request of Oct. 20, 2008, I
asked LRA to:
a)
Provide the names of any and all subcontractor(s) who
are conducting appeals.
The answer from Mr. Rees was “I am awaiting receipt of this data.”
b)
Provide the
names of any and all subcontractor(s) who are providing the case managers (PALs) for resolving dispute issues with applicants.
The answer again from Mr. Rees was “I am
awaiting receipt of this data.”
Although these names of state subcontractors were obviously readily
available and should be public information, it was not until 8 weeks after
filing a court order for LRA to produce documents and 11 weeks after this
letter from LRA attorney Dan Rees that I
received subcontractor names formally requested 7 months earlier.
c)
The answer to both of these requests was finally
provided on May 27, 2009 by an outside attorney, T. Allen Usry,
hired at public taxpayer expense ($175 per hour; total expense for him and the
other outside attorney, E. Wade Shows, hired for my public records request case
was over $20,000).
d)
For both
requests, the answer was as follows:
“Quadel,
Providence, and Franklin Industries. Worley did some elevation PAL work.”
·
So, the same subcontractors who
supposedly helped applicants with disputed issues during the
compulsory pre-appeals review were paid to administer the subsequent
appeals.
·
Despite the fact that some appeals staff tried
to be as fair as management would allow them to be, how could that double role for
the three subcontractors provide fair appeals of contractor mistakes?
·
In
summary, the contractor hired subcontractors who reviewed the contractor’s
mistakes at pre-appeal level (the so-called PALs
misnamed Personal Assistant Liasons) and the same
subcontractors handled first-level appeals.
a)
The PAL system was
a compulsory pre-appeal system instituted by Mike Spletto
and Suzie Elkins, previously heads of the state Office of Community
Development, OCD, and Paul Rainwater of LRA; it was little better than the
previous, also misnamed, Dispute Resolution pre-appeal system.
b)
Not to worry. If
you did not get an unbiased assessment during first-level appeals, there was
always the state appeals, your final level of appeals, conducted by unknown
state personnel by unknown rules (see Chapter 3 Part B).
c)
If
you want to avail yourself of the guaranteed-by-law right of judicial review of
state decisions for individual citizens, LRA is claiming in the Louisiana
Supreme Court, that you have no access to a judicial hearing even if RH takes
your house and doesn’t give you any of your money after a duly signed closing
(a real previous RH legal case).
Road Home has left many on the road: An editorial, Times-Picayune,
January 06, 2010, http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2010/01/road_home_has_left_many_on_the.html
Road Home program still a dead end for some New Orleans homeowners, David Hammer,
Times-Picayune, December 28, 2009, http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/12/post_225.html
·
Why did Paul Rainwater Executive Director of the Louisiana
Recovery Authority (LRA) and LRA attorney Dan Rees go to such extents to keep
secret the subcontractors for the main Road Home Program (RHP) contractor, ICF?
·
They did this even
though
a) the state
senators voted almost unanimously to fire this contractor
http://www.trinitynola.com/Document.Doc?&id=372;
Dec. 15, 2006, Louisiana Senate votes 97 to 1 to cancel the ICF contract, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/katrina/etc/cron.html
b) it was common
knowledge that the contractor was extraordinarily deficient in running the
program
"The reality is the Road Home program has been a
dysfunctional program since its inception," said City Councilman Arnie Fielkow. Loyola
University press release - August 15, 2008
http://www.loyno.edu/news/story/2008/8/15/1545; “Road Home Fix Falls Short”
“The Road Home Program
has messed over so many people in so many ways over such a long period of time
that, at this point, it takes a particularly egregious error to attract
attention now. “
http://blog.nola.com/jarvisdeberry/2008/10/lose_the_attitude_not_the_pape.html
v
Recent CHAT
Newsletters:
HMGP
News from LRA, News from Applicants
FEMA documents
about mitigation grants
(complicated
stuff; difficult to get clarification from Road Home; see above newsletter for
the link to Road Home information NOT at the RH site,
but at the LRA site)
·
Natl.
Flood Insurance Booklet
·
Mitigation
reconstruction guidance
·
Reconstruction
Grant Unit Cost Guidance
o Note the word “guidance”
o Reconstruction grants refer to those who demolish their
hurricane/flood-ruined home and rebuilt
Including Important Newspaper Article About
Frank Silvestri, CHAT Co-Chair & About Denial of
Assess to Court for RH Applicants
Chapter
1-Records Requests Of LRA & More HMGP House
Elevation Grant Problems
v
See our CHAT Blog
for news: http://www.chatushome.com/blog/?p=64
v
The Project on Government Oversight, an independent nonprofit
that investigates and exposes corruption and other misconduct in order to
achieve a more effective and accountable, open and ethical government, has
posted at its blog an article entitled
v “The Far Too Long and Winding Road Home Program”
v To read or comment at the Blog, see http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2009/09/the-far-too-long-and-winding-road-home-program.html
v
Their blog posting was done after an
investigator from the Wash. D.C.-based organization studied CHAT documents,
including:
v
CHAT’s
complaint to the HUD Inspector General
v
CHAT survey information from hundreds
of applicants
v Summaries
of reports and documents with links to the originals
v