Woman accused of Road Home fraud

In the first federal case alleging Road Home fraud, a New Orleans woman was charged Friday with stealing $132,000 in homeowner aid for an Uptown home she did not rightfully own.


A federal grand jury in New Orleans handed up two felony counts against Barbara Simmons Dowl, 46: a count of theft of government funds and a count of wire fraud. She got an $85,930 check directly from the Road Home, financed by U.S. Housing and Urban Development money, and also caused the program to wire the other $46,000 of her grant to the Small Business Administration to pay off an SBA loan in her name, also for the property in question.

If convicted, Dowl faces as many as 30 years in prison, three years of supervised release, a $250,000 fine and possible forfeiture of her property. Contacted Friday, Dowl declined to comment.

In an elaborate scheme first exposed by The Times-Picayune in December, Dowl collected a Road Home grant for property previously owned by Nathaniel Dowl Jr., a man she identifies in court testimony as her ex-husband. Court records show Nathaniel Dowl lost the property in 2004 because of unpaid taxes.

After Hurricane Katrina, Nathaniel Dowl filed a "quit-claim deed" in New Orleans property records, falsely stating the city had sold the property at 8633 Zimpel St. to Barbara Dowl, even though in truth the city had sold it to local landlord and developer Brad Robinson and his wife, Michelle, two years earlier.

The deed is signed only by the supposed purchaser, Barbara Dowl, and not by a city official or the Robinsons. A judge declared it and other documents filed by the Dowls on the Zimpel Street property null and void.

"This is your money. This is my money. This is everybody's money," Brad Robinson said Friday. "There are people out there who deserve Road Home money who didn't get any while it went to people like the Dowls."

Nathaniel Dowl, a convicted thief and forger, faces separate state charges of filing false public records on multiple properties, including the quit-claim deed on 8633 Zimpel St., the one that allegedly helped Barbara Dowl collect the Road Home money.

U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said the federal case remains under investigation. Federal officials are expected to closely follow the state case against Nathaniel Dowl, which is scheduled to resume in Orleans Parish Criminal Court next month, and federal authorities can file a superseding indictment in federal court if they want to add charges or additional defendants.

There is evidence that Nathaniel Dowl was involved in similar schemes with Barbara Dowl. Barbara Dowl testified in an August 2006 eviction case about her role in filing a nearly identical quit-claim deed on another property, owned by Tracey and Oscar Poydras. Under oath in First City Court, she indicated little understanding of the quit-claim deed she signed, said Nathaniel Dowl prepared all the documents and added that she simply did what her ex-husband told her.

Federal officials heralded Friday's indictment as a sign they are serious about preventing fraud in the Road Home program and said there will be more indictments to come.

"This prosecution, although the first in our district, will not by any means be the last," Letten said.

According to Tom Luke, HUD's special agent in charge of investigations in Mississippi and Louisiana, this is the first federal fraud charges for Road Home theft in Louisiana, while a parallel homeowner aid program in Mississippi has yielded 53 indictments, 41 convictions and about $3.6 million in frozen or recovered grant funds.

This is despite the fact that Louisiana's program has paid out five times as many grants as Mississippi's.

Officials ascribe the relatively low levels of Road Home fraud to the maze-like verification measures in Louisiana's program, the policies that also have been blamed for slowing grant payouts.

Although Friday's indictment alleges Barbara Dowl also collected an SBA loan on the property she did not own, she has not been charged with fraud for that because she was living in Atlanta when she applied for the loan and a fraud investigation continues in that district, said Matthew Issman, SBA's special agent in charge in New Orleans.

Feds: Outside experts to review seeping La. levee

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Outside experts will review work at a canal where one of the New Orleans area's worst levee breaks occurred during Hurricane Katrina, and where water is seeping through the mushy ground despite $22 million in repairs, the Army Corps of Engineers said Thursday.

''I have agreed with southeastern (Louisiana) levee authorities as well as the state to go ahead and do an independent peer review, to put to rest what the issues are with the seepage,'' said Karen Durham-Aguilera, director of the corps task force responsible for restoring levees in the five-parish area.

Who will conduct the review has yet to be determined, she said.

Outside experts have told The Associated Press that the type of seepage spotted at the 17th Street Canal in the Lakeview neighborhood afflicts other New Orleans levees and could cause some to collapse if water in the canals gets within a foot of Katrina's 7-foot levels.

The repairs included driving interlocking sheets of metal 60 feet into the ground, 43 feet deeper than before the storm. However, there is evidence that canal water is seeping through the joints.

The corps has defended its work, but also has been digging a trench to find the precise source of wet spots inside the levees.

''Bringing in what we hope is a truly independent review to look at the leaks at the 17th Street Canal -- that is commendable,'' said Sandy Rosenthal, founder of Levees.org, a group that has lobbied for overhauling the Corps.

Aside from that, Rosenthal said in an interview, ''I'm not aware of anything that was presented that would give the citizens of this area any reason to feel safe.''

Aguilera spoke during a half-hour teleconference with General Douglas O'Dell, the federal coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding, and Brig. Gen. Michael J. Walsh, commander of the corps' Mississippi Valley division, as the June 1 start of hurricane season neared.

O'Dell and Walsh said the New Orleans area's hurricane protection is better than it has ever been, but that parish or neighborhood risk estimates are not available.

''This is a very complex system, so to be able to talk in specific terms of neighborhood protection versus parish protection versus the entire system, probably defies the amount of time we have left on this call,'' O'Dell said.

The corps' goal, set by Congress, is protection by 2011 from a 100-year storm -- one with a 1 percent chance of hitting in any given year.

Leaky New Orleans levee alarms experts

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Despite more than $22 million in repairs, a levee that broke with catastrophic effect during Hurricane Katrina is leaking again because of the mushy ground on which New Orleans was built, raising serious questions about the reliability of the city's flood defenses.

Outside engineering experts who have studied the project told The Associated Press that the type of seepage spotted at the 17th Street Canal in the Lakeview neighborhood afflicts other New Orleans levees, too, and could cause some of them to collapse during a storm.

The Army Corps of Engineers has spent about $4 billion so far of the $14 billion set aside by Congress to repair and upgrade the metropolitan area's hundreds of miles of levees by 2011. Some outside experts said the leak could mean that billions more will be needed and that some of the work already completed may need to be redone.

"It is all based on a 30-year-old defunct model of thinking, and it means that when they wake up to this one -- really -- our cost is going to increase significantly," said Bob Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California at Berkeley.

The Army Corps of Engineers disputed the experts' dire assessment. The agency said it is taking the risk of seepage into account and rebuilding the levees with an adequate margin of safety.

"It's always a potential, so it is a design component for every feature," said Walter Baumy, the chief corps engineer in New Orleans.

The 17th Street Canal floodwall collapsed on the day Katrina surged over New Orleans in August 2005, and the failure severely damaged Lakeview. It was one of the biggest of about 50 levee breaches that contributed to the deaths of about 1,300 people.

Fixing the 17th Street Canal has been one of the most expensive and laborious repair jobs since the storm and has served as something of a test case for scientists and engineers, who plan to apply the lessons learned there to the city's other levees.

Among other things, they repaired the wall by driving interlocking sheets of steel 60 feet into the ground, compared with about 17 feet before the storm. The sheet metal is supposed to prevent canal water from seeping under the levee through the wet, toothpaste-like soil that lies beneath the city, which was built on reclaimed swamp and filled-in marsh.

Over the past few months, however, the corps found evidence that canal water is seeping through the joints in the sheet metal and then rising to the surface on the other side of the levee, forming puddles and other wet spots.

Engineers said the boggy ground is a more serious problem than the corps realizes. Bea said there is a roughly 40 percent chance of the 17th Street Canal levee collapsing if water rises higher than 6 feet above sea level. During Katrina, the water reached 7 feet in the canal.

John Schmertmann, a retired University of Florida professor and a consultant on foundations, agreed with Bea that the corps "may still be embedding some of these not-properly-considered factors, so the new walls may not do what the corps expects."

Reducing such seepage might require the driving of sheet metal far deeper into the ground than is done now, or some other solution, said Bea, who was part of a team of experts sent by the National Science Foundation to do an independent study of the levee failures during Katrina.

Donald Jolissaint, chief of the corps' technical support branch in New Orleans, denied the problem at the 17th Street Canal is serious.

"I personally do not at all believe that this little wet spot is anything that is going to cause a breach or a failure of any kind," he said. A newly installed floodgate could be used to cut off the flow of water into the canal and reduce pressure on the levee, he said.

Nevertheless, the corps is concerned enough that for weeks, workers have been analyzing the wet spots and digging a 160-foot-long, 10-foot-deep trench to zero in on the source. "We're doing everything we can to chase this down," Jolissaint said.

The corps is also spending about $100 million by taking more than 2,000 soil borings to find out what is under the ground and determine the best design.

Timothy Kusky, a geologist with Saint Louis University and an expert on the Mississippi River, said engineering a safe levee system in New Orleans will be very difficult because of the soil.

"You've got old riverbeds and floodplain deposits all interlayered and distributed laterally in a very complex way, and then you build a levee across them," Kusky said.

As a result, a levee sinks at different rates, and the sinking creates "little cracks in them that promote seepage, and also the old river channels and floodplain deposits have different potentials for underseepage," he said.

He said the corps understands a lot of the problems, but it takes a huge amount of data to map every weakness, and the agency does not have the manpower to see that every contractor is doing the job right.

Seepage was reported at the 17th Street Canal before Katrina. The corps denies that caused the collapse. Instead, the corps contends the floodwall flexed and finally cracked under the force of water piled against it by the storm.

Road Home slows insurance claim payoffs

Richard Barker reached a $60,000 settlement for wind damage on a home near Six Flags on Dec. 12, but his eastern New Orleans client hasn't seen a dime of the insurance money five months later because the Road Home hasn't signed off on the paperwork.

Hundreds of homeowner insurance settlements are on hold because of a bottleneck at the Road Home program, and more are piling up every day, plaintiffs and defense attorneys say, because of the state's diligent checks to make sure that people aren't being overpaid and insurance companies aren't being subsidized.

"You can leave a voice mail once a day, and you're never going to get a return call. This is just an exercise in futility," said Barker, who plans to approach a judge with the insurance defense attorney on the case to see whether they can route around the grant program so the company can cut a check and close the claim.

As lawyers across the city grow exasperated, Soren Gisleson, head of the insurance section at the Louisiana Association for Justice, said several plaintiffs attorneys will meet with Louisiana Recovery Authority Executive Director Paul Rainwater and Office of Community Development Executive Counsel Dan Rees today to look for a way to break the logjam on insurance settlements.

"The problem is there's no time limit for Road Home to respond to the request," Gisleson said. "It's killing the homeowners. It's delaying all settlement checks."

Careful reviews required

Federal law requires Louisiana to make sure there is no duplication of benefits between Road Home grants and insurance payments. Although only additional insurance payments on structures are deducted from Road Home rebuilding grants, the program requires grant recipients to provide detailed information on any additional payments on structural damage, lost contents and displaced living expenses and send it to the state for a signature. If overpayments are discovered, the grant program must be repaid.

Recovery authority spokeswoman Christina Stephens said the state needs to review all of that information to watch for suspicious classifications of damage, such as putting everything on contents and living expenses to avoid having a grant reduced.

"They want to look at how the settlements are structured and to look at what funds are included in the settlement," Stephens said. "Sometimes we'll have questions for the insurance companies and questions for the homeowner."

The state Office of Community Development has six people working on the issue, two of them full time, and ICF International, the company that runs the Road Home program, has two people on insurance issues, one of them full time, Stephens said.

They have approved about 450 insurance settlements, and another 420 are pending, but the program is getting 10 to 15 new settlement approval requests a day as the pace of litigation settlements increases. "Our goal is to turn them around as quickly as possible," Stephens said.

Homeowners wait

The bottleneck is creating the unusual situation in which the grant program that was supposed to help homeowners is preventing them from collecting insurance coverage they paid for, in some cases even though the insurance settlement is worth more than the Road Home grant.

Barker's colleague, David Bernberg, has another eastern New Orleans case in which the Road Home gave his client a $600 grant, but won't sign off her insurance settlement of $55,000 in contents and $18,000 in additional living expenses.

While that type of case might set off a red flag with the recovery authority, from the plaintiffs attorney perspective, the settlement should just be waved through because there's no new money for structural damage that should affect the Road Home grant. "This poor lady can't get paid," Barker said.

While some note that every delay allows insurance companies to keep settlement money in their bank accounts, companies say they're eager to clear out Katrina claims.

"We've had some significant delays with getting settlements into the hands of our customers," said Phil Supple, a spokesman for State Farm, Louisiana's largest residential insurer. "I understand that they are woefully understaffed. We would be supportive of any efforts by the Road Home to resolve these issues to get settlements into the hands of policyholders."

Seeking a solution

To get around the Road Home inertia, some insurance companies have allowed homeowners to sign affidavits agreeing that they're responsible for repaying the Road Home if they collected too much money on their grants. In other cases, plaintiffs and defense attorneys are filing joint motions in court asking judges to declare that after, say, 30 days, the settlement can proceed without the Road Home's signature and the program will have to pursue any overpayments individually. Another idea has been to haul the Road Home into court for an answer and allow settlements to proceed if the program doesn't send anyone.

When plaintiffs attorneys meet with the recovery authority today, Gisleson said, they will ask the Road Home to allow homeowners to cash checks if the program hasn't flagged a problem in 30 days or accept settlements that have been approved by a third party such as a magistrate judge or a licensed mediator.

"We're talking about thousands and thousands of people" as settlements are reached, Gisleson said.

Texas firm taking over Katrina insurance cases

The Provost-Umphrey Law Firm based in Beaumont, Texas, is now representing about 200 policyholders whose disputes with State Farm were being handled by Dickie Scruggs and associated law firms.

Provost-Umphrey attorneys met with ex-Scruggs clients Thursday in Gulfport, said senior partner Bryan O. Blevins Jr.

"Hopefully, we can get this litigation back on track to benefit the clients and, ultimately, the courts," Blevins said Friday.

Scruggs had to relinquish the cases after he was charged in December with conspiring to bribe a North Mississippi judge. He subsequently pleaded guilty in the case. Once Scruggs was charged, State Farm asked a federal judge to dismiss other attorneys who had worked with him. A federal judge agreed to dismiss those lawyers, known as the Katrina Litigation Group.

Lexington attorney Don Barrett, who headed the Katrina Litigation Group, on April 18 wrote to the firm's 400 clients suggesting they hire Provost-Umphrey and also saying the new firm would be sending them contracts at Barrett's request.

Barrett said Friday he met managing partner Walter Umphrey during tobacco litigation. Umphrey's firm had represented the state of Texas during the 1990s lawsuits over what states spent on health-care costs related to smoking; Barrett had worked with Scruggs on Mississippi's case.

Umphrey's firm also subleases office space in Nashville from Barrett's nephew, who has a law firm there. Barrett is listed as an attorney with his nephew's firm. Barrett said he recommended the firm because it has the resources to handle the cases and Umphrey agreed to take them on, large or small.

Also on April 18, State Farm sent letters to Scruggs clients saying their attorneys had been disqualified and that any new attorney hired should contact one of the insurer's lawyers in Oxford.

The letter also said: "We would like to see if we can resolve any remaining issues without the need for further litigation" and gave policyholders a telephone number to call.

About 15 cases have since been settled out of the 178 the Katrina Litigation Group had pending in federal court. Barrett said the group had a total of 400 clients, not all of whom had filed lawsuits yet.

One couple who has settled with State Farm, Thomas and Ann Arnold, were plaintiffs in a racketeering lawsuit filed against the company by multiple policyholders. The lead plaintiff, Glenda Shows, has signed up with Provost-Umphrey, as have some other parties to that lawsuit.

Other policyholders have found their way to Coast law firms that handle insurance cases, some of whose members were miffed by the Katrina Litigation Group's decision to recommend a personal-injury law firm based in Texas.

Corps may have to rebuild floodwall sections

The Army Corps of Engineers may have to rebuild sections of hurricane protection walls on the lakefront to meet engineering standards adopted in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according to floodwall studies done by the corps.

The walls stretch from earthen levees on Lake Pontchartrain to floodgates installed after Katrina on the Orleans Avenue and London Avenue canals. Because these sections of floodwalls are outside the new gates, they are the sole defense to block storm surge from the lake from pouring into such neighborhoods as Lakeshore, Lake Vista and Lake Terrace, as well as the University of New Orleans campus.

The cost of those repairs would be about $4.3 million. Geotechnical engineer John Grieshaber, technical support chief for the corps' Hurricane Protection Office, who hadn't seen the reports, said they still must undergo internal review.

If officials conclude the threats to the walls require immediate response, repairs could be ordered immediately. Otherwise, they would be completed after the reports are finalized, and before the June 2011 deadline for completing the first phase of levee improvements, he said.

Evolving standards

The walls were strengthened after Hurricane Katrina but before the new engineering standards for walls were adopted. Both are now about 16 feet high, which is expected to be high enough to meet the requirements of the new 100-year protection system.

In the past, the walls were only required to meet standards for water rising in the canal to a pre-determined "project height," which was below the top of the wall. Now, the walls are required to withstand the pressure of water rising all the way to the wall's top, even when water shoves the wall a bit out of place, forming a crack between its hard surface and the earth into which it is built.

On each wall, one section was identified that does not meet the new engineering standards and may collapse under extreme circumstances during a so-called 100-year hurricane, or a storm with a 1-in-100 chance of occurring in any given year.

--For the Orleans Avenue Canal wall, the report cites an unacceptable reading based on soil-sample results taken close to the wall; additional sampling is likely to indicate the wall does meet the standards.

--At the London Avenue Canal wall, the report recommended that a stability berm -- a layer of clay that would add weight and mass to offset the water pressure -- be added on the protected side of the wall.

The reports also concluded that the "stick-up" of parts of the Orleans wall -- the area of the wall between its top and the earthen levee into which it was built -- was as much as a foot higher than the post-Katrina 4-foot limit for I-walls. Still, that's a foot lower than an earlier interim standard, the report noted, which might be acceptable.

But where masonry boxes containing utilities, such as electrical cables, were built a few feet from the walls, short sections of the walls were uncovered for 7 feet above the earthen embankment, which would be two feet higher than the new standard.

Overlapping demands

Studies of the I-wall segments are among dozens of investigations of features of the 350 miles of hurricane levees, either as part of continuing efforts to improve protection to pre-Katrina standards or as part of the redesign and rebuilding of the system to withstand the forces of 100-year hurricanes by 2011.

The mouths of the two canals are typical of the overlapping construction demands facing corps designers, said Grieshaber, the geotechnical engineer. The designers are scrambling to make sure that remaining immediate repairs meet the pre-Katrina design standards, while also redesigning them to meet the new 100-year standards that must be in place by June 2011.

Grieshaber said he expects these sections of I-wall and others in the system eventually will be replaced with stronger inverted T-walls as part of the 100-year improvements.

An I-wall has a concrete wall sitting atop sheet piling driven deep enough to block water from moving beneath it, while an inverted T-wall also includes a concrete platform at the base of the wall and a series of deeper, square pilings installed at angles to provide better stability.

The reports recommended replacing the concrete pad on the canal side of the Orleans wall with reinforced concrete that would be directly connected to the existing I-wall, making it into a single unit that would prevent the wall from leaning and creating a crack. It also recommended relocating the masonry boxes or building a different kind of wall at the box that would be more stable. The second alternative would cost less, it said.

The reports also recommended building a concrete cap on top of the outer layer of sheet piling on the Orleans canal and atop sheet piling that is uncapped along the London canal, which would reduce wear and make them more attractive.

Nearly 40,000 Katrina families still in mobile homes

ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - Almost three years after Hurricane Katrina, nearly 40,000 families still are living in vulnerable mobile homes and trailers across the U.S. Gulf Coast with another hurricane season just two months away, the top U.S. disaster official said on Wednesday.

The number is down from about 100,000 families, or some 300,000 people, in April 2006. At one point following the devastating 2005 hurricane season, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency was housing 143,000 families in mobile homes and trailers.

FEMA Administrator David Paulison said the agency, which was heavily criticized for its hapless response when Katrina swamped New Orleans, is moving about 800 families a week into hotels, motels or apartments.

The families are either living at group sites or in trailers in the driveways of their homes as they rebuild.

The six-month Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1. Forecasters are expecting above-average storm activity.

"As far as rebuilding, I did expect it to take this long," Paulison told a small group of reporters at the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando. "But as far as housing people, I did not foresee that they would be there almost three years later."

Katrina killed 1,500 people and caused $80 billion in damage when it swept ashore in late August 2005 near New Orleans, shattering the levees protecting the low-lying city and swamping entire neighborhoods.

The three worst storms of 2005 -- Katrina, Rita and Wilma -- together caused about $110 billion in damages. The record-shattering season produced 28 tropical storms.

The presence of so many people in the flimsy temporary housing complicates preparations for the hurricane season because those families must be evacuated in the event of a threatening storm.

Paulison said the agency was on target to move everyone from the group sites by June 1 but was having "a lot of trouble" getting some of those displaced by Katrina to move again, even from cramped mobile homes that are often reduced to rubble in big storms.

"People simply don't want to move," he said. "It hasn't been as easy a task to get people out as we thought it might be."

Filling holes dug to build levees could cost $2.5 billion

It could cost as much as $2.5 billion to refill all the clay pits that might be dug during construction of levee improvements in southeast Louisiana, according to recent estimates by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Not only would backfilling add a huge expense, some of which would likely be billed to the state and local levee districts, it also could double the number of trucks using regional roadways and local streets to travel between the pits and construction sites, corps representatives said.

If it takes 50,000 dump truck trips, for example, to haul levee-building clay away from one fully excavated 40-acre pit, it would take twice that many round trips total to haul sand or some other material back in to refill the cavity.

Then there's the issue of where to get the material to refill the pits, once they are excavated for the levee-building clay needed to construct a more robust hurricane flood defense system by 2011.

"Some of the (backfill) could come from the river ... but it could result in more pits being dug in the region," said Col. Al Lee, corps' commander in New Orleans.

"Policies are typically set up for normal circumstances," he said. "The situation here is anything but normal. The enormity of this situation is such that we're hoping they'll revisit the policy to see if there is any flexibility for us to respond to this issue," he said, referring to national corps officials.

The effects of backfilling versus leaving behind 20-foot craters are being spelled out in an issue paper Lee's staff is drafting and will soon send to corps headquarters for review.

The document also will discuss the extra cost of backfilling, which could range from a $500 million to $2.5 billion.

"There are a lot of potential problems with trying to backfill ... including the fact that the president's proposed fiscal year '09 budget includes no money to backfill," said corps section chief Brett Herr.

Maj. Gen. Don Riley, the corps' deputy chief of engineers and deputy commanding general, said Wednesday that the issue is getting serious attention.

"We are clearly considering it, but we're looking at more than just the economics of it," Riley said. "We're looking at the ecology of it, the environmental impacts, where all this would come from," referring to the backfill.

The issue of backfilling the so-called "borrow" pits surfaced last year as residents and local governments learned that in keeping with past practice, the corps did not plan to refill the pits.

But the sheer volume of material needed for post-Katrina construction -- estimated to be enough clay to fill more than 20 Superdomes -- means digging an unprecedented number of borrow pits in some of the communities hit hardest by the 2005 hurricane.

If left open, critics say the pits could hold standing water, potentially breed mosquitoes and become liabilities for landowners.

Local governments in at least three jurisdictions, including Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes, have either already passed or are considering ordinances that would require the pits to be refilled once all useable clay is removed.

Although the corps is searching for ways to import as much clay as possible from outside the region, officials said the demand is so great that several regional pits also will be needed.

Ongoing environmental assessments indicate the noise, vibration and dust that will be generated by digging and hauling clay will have a negative impact on immediate neighbors and, to a lesser degree, those living along the routes trucks will travel between pits and construction sites.

Backfilling could easily double truck traffic to and from those pits that can be filled only with hauled materials.

For pits near the Mississippi River, Herr said it could be possible to use hydraulically pumped sand at a cost estimated at $5 to $10 a cubic yard.

But for those farther out, from 10 to 20 miles away from the river, he said trucks would have to haul in fill at a cost of $15 to $25 a cubic yard.

Sheila Grissett can be reached at sgrissett@timespicayune.com or (504) 717-7700.

N.O. housing is still in crisis

While more than 70 percent of New Orleans' displaced public housing residents want to return to the city, most of those surveyed recently by the University of Texas at Arlington said they have no desire to return to New Orleans' public housing complexes.

And there's another striking finding, especially when cast against the backdrop of a raging debate over plans to demolish the city's "Big Four" complexes: More than 80 percent of those families who lived in C.J. Peete, B.W. Cooper, St. Bernard and Lafitte, the developments slated for the wrecking ball, said they now would prefer to live elsewhere.

Among pre-Katrina HANO tenants who say they favor living back in their old apartments, 20 percent of the total -- virtually all of them -- are already doing so, survey results show.

The survey of 2,109 families who lived in Housing Authority of New Orleans complexes before Hurricane Katrina was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the agency that wants to demolish most buildings in the storm-damaged developments and replace them with a newer model of mixed-income units.

HANO plans to replace 4,500 demolished public housing units with 3,200 public housing units and 1,765 subsidized affordable units, for people at slightly higher income levels.

While the survey seems to validate HUD's strategy for ensuring housing slots for all displaced HANO residents who want to return, Bill Quigley, a lawyer for demolition opponents, said the broader housing needs of low-income families must be addressed.

Competition is fierce

"They're saying 3,200 is enough for the ones who lived in HANO units, but there are many more who lived in other subsidized housing," he said. "The competition for the 1,765 affordable subsidized housing units is 7,000 people," according to an earlier survey by the social action group PolicyLink, he said.

In addition, Quigley said, Katrina's destruction created a new population of needy families who also weren't considered in HUD's survey.

"At the end of the day, you can't then say this is enough housing for them (HUD) to meet their duty under the law, which is to provide enough housing for the community," he said.

The number of survey respondents equaled 41 percent of the 5,146 families who occupied HANO units at the time of Hurricane Katrina.

HUD hailed the survey as highly representative because, in addition to the large sample size, the distribution of respondents' pre-Katrina residences closely mirrored how families were spread among the 10 public housing developments and scattered-site HANO units in New Orleans.

C. Donald Babers, the lone member of the HUD receivership board that runs HANO, said the survey proved that the government's plan to replace traditional public housing with mixed-income complexes and other homes would be sufficient to meet the needs of those who want to come back. He said that flew in the face of housing advocates' demands for a one-for-one replacement of the traditional complexes.

It also could be used to counter arguments by housing advocates and even two United Nations experts that HUD's demolition plans discriminated against black people and violated international human rights law.

'Ready to move'

The HUD survey results were announced just hours before a U.N. panel, meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, was scheduled to rule on whether the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina had violated an international anti-racism treaty, but Babers said the timing was purely coincidental.

If the preferences expressed by the survey respondents were to bear out for all 5,146 affected families, about 1,800 will want to return to HANO facilities and 1,900 would prefer obtaining Section 8 vouchers for private apartments in New Orleans. Public housing residents and advocates generally accepted the survey results as highly indicative of the desires of the displaced, some representatives said.

"It's true, a lot of people were ready to move and wanted to get Section 8 vouchers even before the storm," said Cynthia Wiggins, a current resident of the Guste complex who was part of a residents group that helped formulate the survey questions and track down the displaced. "There's no doubt in my mind that is the case."

Responses to some questions may be affected by what residents knew about plans for their old neighborhoods. Former residents may have been aware that their old apartments were scheduled for demolition, or that they are already gone. Also, Quigley said the question of whether people want to return to their old apartments doesn't make clear that renovating the old units would make them better.

The University of Texas at Arlington researchers and a contracted survey team from Survey Communications Inc. of Baton Rouge developed the survey questions in consultation with HUD and resident leaders, with input from critics of HUD's plans, such as U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and housing activists.

Don't know about benefit

The survey included former housing complex residents who are now scattered around the country, but half of the respondents are back in New Orleans, either living in restored HANO units or in private apartments on HUD vouchers.

The survey also probed still-displaced residents' reasons for not coming home, and exposed a weakness in HUD's relocation efforts. Nearly 80 percent of those outside New Orleans who want to return said they wanted to be back home within the next six months, but the vast majority of that group said their return would be delayed by a lack of transportation or by moving expenses.

Babers said it was disheartening to see the persistence of such perceived barriers when HUD has a contract with U-Haul to pay for travel and moving expenses of returning families. He said HUD needs to do a better job of advertising and explaining the program.

Critics admit they didn't visit, research post-Katrina New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS | A United Nations panel will decide Friday whether the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina violated a treaty on racism, and its ruling could be influenced by a controversial statement from two U.N. advisers who last week labeled the planned demolition of four New Orleans public housing complexes as "discriminatory" even though neither visited the city to research the issue.

Last week's statement drew international media coverage and was hailed by opponents of a plan to replace the four housing complexes with mixed-income neighborhoods, although the plan also calls for the Department of Housing and Urban Development to retain several other public housing complexes in New Orleans. HUD also has provided vouchers through which former public housing residents can rent private apartments across the city.

The U.N. specialists now acknowledge that they haven't been to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina and were basing their opinion largely on the views of activists who have waged an unsuccessful campaign to halt the demolitions.

Miloon Kothari of New Delhi, India, the U.N. Human Rights Council's specialist on adequate housing, and Gay McDougall of Washington, D.C., the U.N. independent expert on minority issues, joined ranks with opponents of the demolitions already under way at the St. Bernard, C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper complexes.

The statement implied that the demolition of public housing in New Orleans would end up "increasing poverty and homelessness," particularly for black hurricane victims. It called for more planning input from residents and former residents. It also dismissed the HUD plans as too slow and insufficient for the 5,000 residents of traditional public housing units displaced after the storm.

Local and federal public housing officials argue that public housing families who want to return are being served through traditional public housing or private apartments. And they say plans for a shift to mixed-income housing will better serve the families who remain.

World watching
Although the duo say they released the statement to influence the U.S. Congress, the timing of their comments could have broader influence.

The statement was released in Geneva, Switzerland, last Thursday, a day before a U.N. treaty enforcement panel -- meeting in the same European city but with no link to the two advisers -- was to discuss U.S. government responses to Hurricane Katrina. That committee is scheduled to decide Friday whether 12 nations, including the United States, are adhering to the International Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

The committee isn't likely to go beyond a public shaming if it finds the United States in violation of the treaty, but even that step could be damaging. In the past, the panel has denounced Australia's policies toward Aborigines and genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Kothari and McDougall's statement made the case that public housing plans in New Orleans amount to a violation of international human rights law. They say "the inability of former residents of public housing to return to the homes they occupied prior to Hurricane Katrina would in practice amount to an eviction for those who returned or wish to return." In telephone interviews, they later called for a one-for-one replacement of any public housing units that are demolished.

'I haven't studied it'
The treaty under review in Geneva, however, upholds only a right to adequate housing, not a right to return to the exact housing that was lost. When asked this week about the U.S. government's plans to continue providing apartment vouchers to displaced tenants while developers carry out a new model for public housing, Kothari demurred.

"Of course, if the situation is that people are arriving back to New Orleans and their housing is demolished, you have to provide alternative housing," he said. Asked whether the U.S. government is doing just that, he said: "I don't know. I haven't studied it."

Kothari and McDougall said their statement last week had nothing to do with the Geneva treaty review, but rather was part of their own attempts to engage U.S. authorities over recovery issues in New Orleans. They consulted with non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, some of which protested the demolitions in the city. But they acknowledged they had no feedback from the other side of the debate because federal officials didn't respond to questions they posed in December.

They said they were prohibited by U.N. protocol from going directly to Mayor Ray Nagin, the City Council or any other local or state officials.

"We haven't done a formal fact-finding in New Orleans. Some of our (U.N.) colleagues have, but we haven't," Kothari said in a telephone interview from his home in India. "The intention of our statement was to raise the issues, to say, look, these are the problems, and we expect a formal response from the (U.S.) State Department."

The colleagues he referred to include David Stanfield, who is crafting a U.N. report on land-rights issues after Katrina, and Walter Kaelin, the U.N. secretary-general's specialist on displaced people. Both have visited New Orleans recently.

Feedback questioned
The statement by Kothari and McDougall implied that the shuttering of public housing complexes has contributed to the growth of a homeless population in the New Orleans area now estimated at 12,000. But Kothari later said he has no evidence of that.

Also, the statement claimed affected families weren't meaningfully consulted about the demolition plans, but Kothari later acknowledged that some residents did meet with developers.

"Yes, some people were consulted," Kothari said, "but the fact that people's property was destroyed, the fact that not every unit is going to be replaced, the fact that there's an affordability crisis, and with the pressure HUD put on the City Council and the mayor -- that subsidies would be withdrawn if they didn't go on with the demolitions -- the question is: Has there been clear and informed participation in the redevelopment of the whole city?"

Kothari said letters from U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson to Nagin threatening to cut off some federal subsidies if demolitions were halted amounted to institutional racial discrimination.

Federal and local officials reacted strongly last week to the pair's statement. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., called it "theater of the absurd."

HUD said Kothari and McDougall "are misinformed about the state of public housing in New Orleans," adding that the plans to demolish old, hurricane-damaged complexes is part of a wider effort to move to a mixed-income model that will help "minority and low-income Americans .¤.¤. live in a socially and economically integrated environment."

The New Orleans City Council said it approved the demolitions after hearing extensive public feedback.

Ruling coming Friday
The International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination will rule Friday on U.S. compliance with the treaty it joined in 1994. The ruling will be based on a report the United States provided in 2007.

In its report, the U.S. government argued there was no racial discrimination in the response to Katrina. It said the disparate effects of Hurricane Katrina on housing for minorities stemmed from poverty issues, not race.

U.S. activist groups responded by filing so-called "shadow reports" to the U.N. treaty panel. They argued that international law's standard for discrimination is not whether the government intends to discriminate, but whether the end result of its policies have a disproportionately negative impact on minorities.

Creole Craftsman Helps Rebuild N.O.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Smiling with satisfaction, Earl Barthe pushes back his wide-brimmed hat and runs his eyes over the intricate plaster trim of the Luling Mansion.

He's sure his family helped form the room's original decorations, elaborate patterns on the ceilings and even likenesses of the first owner's daughter, who died of yellow fever.

Today, Barthe (pronounced bar-THAY) is busy restoring the 165-year-old building.

''You look at this kind of work and you're looking at the pride people took in what they did,'' said Barthe, a fifth-generation master plasterer whose family's work can be found in New Orleans' historic homes and churches and even the Louisiana Superdome.

But in a city known for its arts traditions, Barthe is one of the few remaining craftsmen in what once was a flourishing trade.

His face lined from days in the sun, Barthe, who won't say how old he is but acknowledges working the family business for 70 years, wears the white shirt and pants traditional to the trade. He insists his workers carry on the custom, too.

The Barthe family settled in New Orleans in the early 1800s. The business was established by his great-great-grandfather, a master plasterer from Nice, France, who married a woman from Haiti.

The family was known in the term of the time as ''free people of color.'' These days Barthe refers to his family as Creoles, but most of all, he calls them plasterers.

''My father was a plasterer, his father was a plasterer, his uncles and everybody else were plasterers,'' he said. ''The Barthe children knew they had to be plasterers. Daddy didn't want me to be a doctor, a lawyer or an Indian chief.''

In fine hotels, the old stores along Canal Street, the St. Charles Avenue mansions and the cemeteries' tombs, you'll likely see the work of Barthe and his family.

''Every job is a hard job because of the time and care you have to take with it, the attention you have to pay,'' Barthe said. ''And it's hard work climbing that scaffolding, hauling around the plaster. It's the kind of work that makes you know you've done a full day when you stop.''

Barthe said about a dozen families were engaged in the business in its heyday.

''It was all men, and the one who had the most sons got the most respect,'' Barthe said. ''And those boys knew they better live up to what their fathers expected. If you did something wrong it reflected on the family. Nobody wanted that.''

To become a plasterer requires a three- to four-year apprenticeship, learning the tools, and how to mix plaster and prepare walls. The task can be daunting in old New Orleans homes; often walls reach up to 14-foot ceilings.

Patience and attention to detail are the keys to turning out the ornate medallions and trim a master plasterer can produce, or even a smooth wall of plaster. A worker will go over the surface repeatedly, blending the plaster, polishing and blending until the surface is seamless.

It's not a job that young people now flock to. The last official apprenticeship class was in 1980, according to Terry Barthe, Earl's daughter, who now runs the business.

''Americans don't want to work hard,'' Terry Barthe said. ''We don't want to sweat anymore. We don't want to 'earn' a living, and that's why it's a dying art.''

Part of that is due to the use of drywall, which is cheaper than plaster and easier to learn to install.

''Don't even say that word to me, it's a dirty word,'' Earl Barthe said. ''Just look at what happened with Hurricane Katrina. If you had sheet rock you had to rip it out and throw it away. If you had plaster you just washed down and were ready to go.''

In his own house, Barthe said, floodwaters were more than 3 feet deep, and although he had to replace floors, roofs and windows, his plaster walls stood strong.

''When you have plaster you have a building that will be there for a while,'' he said. ''You can count on your grandchildren living there after you.''

Terry Barthe, 50, decided to get into the family business to pay off college loans, then got hooked.

''To take nothing and make something, the greatest analogy is God forming the earth out of a clump of clay,'' she said. ''When I look at a handful of lime and plaster, it's nothing, it's just dust; but I can make anything out of it.''

Will Anderson, 26, started working for Barthe while still in school. ''I love to do the work, the craftsmanship of it,'' he said.

Earl Barthe's skills were featured in a New Orleans Museum of Art exhibition titled ''Raised to the Trade: Creole Building Arts in New Orleans'' and in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival's ''Masters of the Building Arts'' program in 2001.

He has been inducted into the Louisiana AFL-CIO Labor Hall of Fame, and in 2005 received the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship.

Passing that heritage along by training apprentices is his goal now.

''I'd like to see another generation do the kind of work their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will one day appreciate,'' Barthe said.

Supreme Court declines to hear flood insurance plea

The U.S. Supreme Court won't hear a federal lawsuit brought by Hurricane Katrina victims against private insurance companies, but a similar case at the state level will go to Louisiana's highest court next week.

The federal high court rejected appeals by Xavier University and 68 other individuals and businesses who claimed their hazard insurance policies should have covered flooding caused by the failure of man-made levees.

Last August, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a district court ruling that said the policies' flood exceptions were vague. The appeals court panel, comprised of three Texas judges, said that the waters that covered 80 percent of the city after Hurricane Katrina constituted a "flood," even though the policies didn't specifically include man-made failures in its definition of the word.

In the federal case, federal judges were interpreting Louisiana insurance law. But another hurricane victim, Joseph Sher of Uptown New Orleans, made nearly the same argument in state court to challenge his insurer's decision not to cover his flood damages. So far, the district and appeals courts have ruled in his favor. The state Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments for next Tuesday.

Attorneys on both sides of the Sher case have said the ruling could determine the future of millions of dollars worth of insurance claims from the 2005 hurricanes.
To read the story on the federal 5th Circuit's ruling in the Xavier case last August, click here.