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Sun May 14, 2006 at 02:49 AM CDT
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| After Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last year, I volunteered down at the Astrodome with evacuees and met a woman named Dorothy Broussard. She's eighty-eight years old and is living on $600 a month from Social Security and SSI. Aside from a great granddaughter in Hawaii, she doesn't have close relations with any of her family. I visit her pretty regularly at a low-income housing place for seniors up on I-45 North, and it was quite a shock to come to her door at her apartment last week and find a posting on her door notifying of that FEMA was cutting off her utilities aid at the end of May:
FEMA is moving evacuees from the emergency assistance program, which provides vouchers that cover rent and utilities, to an individual assistance program that only covers rent. As many as 20,000 Houston evacuees recently received letters from FEMA stating that they were ineligible for the individual assistance program.
FEMA granted emergency assistance to survivors of the storm, promising a year of rent and utilities until people got back on their feet. Now that they're reneging, churches and organizations like The Metropolitan Organization have been organizing to challenge FEMA's ruling, saying that it's unfair to pull out the support ladder from underneath evacuees feet when they were promised otherwise:
"What we're asking FEMA to do is keep its written promise of one year rent and utility assistance for evacuees," said Anna Babin, president of the United Way of the Texas Gulf Coast. "Evacuees were counting on this assistance while they got employed and settled in Houston. It's very hard when the rules keep changing to get settled."
So why has FEMA decided to discontinue this aid? More below the fold. |
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| FEMA is claiming that the rent assistance contacts they granted said "up to" one year of assistance, meaning they don't have to provide a full year, and that the homes of many evacuees are in sound enough condition for them to move back. But Houston Mayor Bill White has questioned both those claims, arguing that FEMA promised a year of assistance and that many of the houses FEMA claims to be livable just clearly arent. Recently the city successfully lobbied for a month extension until the aid is discontinued to allow more time to negotiate with FEMA. Ancedotally, I remember helping to fill out the paperwork for the emergency assitance aid last September, and FEMA gave no impression other than that this aid would last for a full twelve months.
It's bad public policy to make a decision that renegs on a promise and that could potentially put thousands of people out on the streets, but this story hits me on a personal level. Dorothy Broussard, the woman I mentioned above, has lived through a lot in her life; for FEMA to pull the rug out from underneath her and thousands like her is pretty lousy decision making that makes the big media push FEMA made last week claiming they had gotten their act together as a bureaucracy ring all the more hollow.
Several groups in Houston are lobbying Senator Hutchison to place a provision in an emergency spending bill that is coming to conference next week to extend the deadline to a year from when the emergency assistance was granted. It wouldn't hurt to contact her office to let her know that it isn't right to do what FEMA is doing to New Orleans evacuees. |
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