Advocates call for lifting Katrina aid deadlines

After city officials joined them, the state may backpedal--even as the program drags on past the third anniversary of the disaster.

The Road Home was created in 2006 under the administration of former Gov. Kathleen Blanco to compensate victims of Katrina, which struck in August 2005, for the failure of government-run levees and for those deluged by Hurricane Rita, which hit the state a month later. Federally funded and administered by the Fairfax, Va. contractor ICF International Inc., it offers applicants up to $150,000 to rebuild their homes.

The Louisiana Recovery Authority wants to impose Sept. 5 and Oct. 1 deadlines on some 14,000 people in several categories who it says did not submit follow up documents to receive grants. State officials have defended the deadlines as a way to shed inactive applications from the $10.3 billion program that has been called slow-moving and needlessly complex.

But advocates say many applicants are low-income Katrina victims who were given conflicting instructions on how to navigate the Road Home bureaucracy.

"The reality is the Road Home program has been a dysfunctional program since its inception," said City Councilman Arnie Fielkow, who with councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis endorsed a city resolution that asks the state to scrap the deadlines.

"The program is broken," added Davida Finger, staff attorney at the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. "The solution is not now to impose an arbitrary deadline for those applications."

LRA spokeswoman Christina Stephens said the deadlines were imposed as a way to "nudge" people toward completing their applications. But she acknowledged: "If we see an overall adverse effect to all homeowners, we're going to be reconsidering" the deadlines.

In March, the Associated Press reported that ICF planned to hire a collections agency to go after 1,000 to 5,000 Katrina victims who were collectively overpaid as much as $175 million by the program. The state scuttled the collections effort and replaced it with a three-member panel to hear overpayment cases.

Stephens said ICF's contract would not be renewed when it expires in July. The deadlines were designed to minimize the number of applicants still in the system when the state takes over the company's duties, she said.