State finds glitches on Road Home buyout list

BATON ROUGE -- The state agency that handles Road Home buyouts has made surprising discoveries during recent visits to more than 5,000 hurricane-damaged properties -- chief among them a smattering of dismayed homeowners who insisted they never sold their houses to the recovery program.

Contractors for the Louisiana Land Trust, which is responsible for landscaping and otherwise maintaining properties under the Road Home's control, also have stumbled upon lots still harboring occupied FEMA trailers, as well as some commercial buildings at the addresses provided in spreadsheets by the state's Office of Community Development, land trust Executive Director Nadine Jarmon said Tuesday. Commercial buildings aren't eligible for Road Home grants.

Glitches have arisen in about 5 percent of the 5,000 cases, and Jarmon traced the root of the problem to a more fundamental issue: Despite having to maintain buyout properties, the land trust has not received a single complete set of closing documents for any of the 5,161 properties that the state says it owns. Other problems could arise soon if the system is not streamlined, Jarmon told the Louisiana Recovery Authority board during its monthly meeting at Baton Rouge Community College.

Right now, we're basically taking their word that we own them," she said in an interview. "From here, the problem just kind of escalates, it dominoes."

The uncertainty about ownership status holds up various initiatives, Jarmon said. For instance, she said she has been working with federal officials to figure out whether the land trust can secure subsidies, either through FEMA's Public Assistance program or the Increased Cost of Compliance option of former owners' flood insurance policies, to cover some of the cost of demolishing buyout properties. Tapping either source would require proof of ownership, she said.

"For me, the big picture is you've got to be able to show ownership if you're going to advocate for any action on behalf of those properties," she said.

Documents in doubt

More important, without title documents, the land trust cannot turn over buyout properties to parish redevelopment authorities that are expected to return them to commerce, Jarmon said. Current estimates peg the eventual number of Road Home buyout properties in the range of 11,000 to 15,000, with at least 6,000 expected to end up in the hands of the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority.

"If we don't have our ownership documents, then there's something fundamentally wrong here," she said. "At some point, we just got to get it together."

A spokeswoman for the state Office of Community Development said that all sale and covenant documents for the transfer of Road Home buyouts are recorded at the parish level, while subcontractors handling closings for ICF, the state vendor running the grant program, are responsible for pulling together closing documents.

Spokeswoman GeGe Roulaine said that for the past several months, her department and ICF have been working with the land trust to put in place a computer system that will allow subcontractors to upload scanned images of all closing documents to a shared drive accessible by all parties. The process cannot be implemented fully, however, until the land trust finishes installing its own new computer system at its Baton Rouge offices, she said.

The land trust "did not want any paper documents. They wanted everything given to them only in digital," Roulaine said. "Until they're done developing their (computer management information system), we have to go with this temporary system of spreadsheets."

But in an interview, land trust consultant Terrie Walton responded: "Our computer systems are ready and our server is in place. We just need closing documents."
Rechecking information

Jarmon said the land trust is ready to accept the documents, adding that she has been lobbying quietly for access to complete closing records for the past three months. She is expected to make her case today at 10 a.m. during a hearing of the state Senate's Local and Municipal Affairs Committee.

In the meantime, Jarmon said she wants spreadsheets compiled by the state community development office to be scrubbed -- with a new check on the accuracy of the property status information.

"The issue has been (in) the accuracy of the information that we get from OCD," she said. "Right now we have properties (on our list) that have FEMA trailers on them. We have people who are still living on the property who say they were told at the closing that they can stay."

The land trust said it found 156 properties with FEMA trailers, some of which were occupied. It said it could find no lot to correspond with more than 40 addresses on the state spreadsheet.

Another OCD spokeswoman, Laura Robertson, said simple typographical mistakes likely are to blame for erroneous addresses on spreadsheets that led land trust contractors to properties that were not sold to the state through the Road Home. As for several residents who, according to Jarmon, told land trust contractors that Road Home officials said they could continue living at their properties after agreeing to a buyout, "that has never been our policy," Robertson said. "They have to vacate immediately."

FEMA Looks at Trains for Evacautions

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- The Federal Emergency Management Agency may expand the use of passenger trains to evacuate the sick and elderly in advance of hurricanes across the Gulf Coast, a FEMA official said.

Glenn Cannon, a FEMA assistant administrator, told a congressional subcommittee meeting in New Orleans on Monday that his agency is looking at passenger trains as a method of getting people out of harm's way.

After Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, Amtrak was hired to be on hand to evacuate people with special needs if another disaster hit. Cannon said FEMA is now devising disaster plans for other Gulf Coast cities based on the New Orleans model.

''We're changing our whole planning focus now from Louisiana-centric to Gulf Coast-centric,'' Cannon told the subcommittee.

But, he said, turning railways into evacuation routes won't be easy.

Rights of way for most railroads are privately owned by freight companies, and there is no congressional mandate to use railroads for evacuations. Also, the existing stock of passenger cars cannot accommodate evacuees unable to walk, he said.

City may move homeless from underpass to shelter

Mayor Ray Nagin's administration appears to be preparing to move the city's biggest homeless colony, a highly visible collection of people and bedrolls just off Canal Street, to a Central City emergency shelter.

Some City Council members and leading advocates for the homeless say they are not aware of the plan, although the director of the New Orleans Mission confirmed that the city accepted his proposal on Friday.

Nagin alluded to a plan for the homeless last week during an appearance on WWL-TV. He said he had recently seen a man in the encampment on Claiborne Avenue beneath Interstate 10 "drinking beer and just flipping the bird to citizens."

Calling the scene "a mess," Nagin said that before the end of February, the city will begin enforcing its "habitation laws."

"We've got more mental cases out there," the mayor said. "It's unsanitary under the bridge. And we have beds for these folks and they just don't want to take them. . . . So we're going to try to push the issue, if you will."

While Nagin did not specify which local habitation law he was referring to, the most often-used ordinance was found unconstitutional by the courts more than two decades ago and stricken from the municipal code six years ago. But in past years it still has been seen as a tool by local officials who wring their hands at the homeless people who linger in public spaces.

The fast-growing colony on Claiborne Avenue, now drawing more than 200 people a night, was repeatedly cited at a recent City Council meeting that featured testimony from social service officials.

"We cannot accept this any longer," Councilwoman Stacy Head said. "We've got to fix the problem and we've got to fix it in short order."

Martha Kegel, head of Unity of Greater New Orleans, a coalition that is working to house 250 people who previously camped out in Duncan Plaza, across from City Hall, told the council that homeless people are suffering at Claiborne Avenue. "We still have a humanitarian crisis," she said.

When asked about the mayor's plan to clear people out of the Claiborne site, neither Kegel, Head nor council President Arnie Fielkow knew anything about it this week.

Better or worse?

News of the mayor's televised comments traveled quickly to the hodgepodge of tents, sofas, blankets and mattresses now stretching across five blocks on a cement neutral ground beneath I-10.

People sleeping there said they feel targeted. Shouting to be heard over the din of cars passing overhead, they said they have little choice but to sleep at the site.
We're already on the streets, where else are we supposed to go?" asked Sara Brown, 40, who before Hurricane Katrina rented an apartment Uptown and worked as a dishwasher in the French Quarter. Like many others interviewed beneath the expressway, Brown is a native New Orleanian who was displaced by the storm and returned to the city to find rents sharply raised.

During a news conference called Wednesday to react to Nagin's comments, Mike Howells of the activist group C3/Hands Off Iberville said, "We're going to make the situation worse by arresting people for things we failed to do."

Sgt. Joe Narcisse, a spokesman for the New Orleans Police Department, said there are no orders to crack down on the homeless. "No plans have been shared with us," he said.

Law was struck down

According to mayoral spokeswoman Ceeon Quiett, the city planned to work with the NOPD Homeless Assistance Collaborative, a unit begun several years ago that uses social service methods, rather than arrests, in moving homeless individuals off the streets. But Quiett also said: "The habitation laws, as all city laws and ordinances, are enforceable and all citizens are expected to comply."

However, New Orleans' "unlawful public habitation" ordinance was thrown out by the courts more than 20 years ago, said Judson Mitchell, a Loyola University law clinic attorney.

Even if the mayor asked police to enforce public-habitation laws, the charges are sure to be thrown out in Municipal Court, he said.

Homeless people sleeping in public once were routinely charged with "unlawful public habitation," but the ordinance was successfully challenged in federal court in 1986 by the New Orleans Legal Assistance Corp. and the American Civil Liberties Union.

But such arrests continued until recently. In 2000, for instance, N.O. police booked 657 people on the charge, according to police records at the time. In September 2001, the ordinance was wiped off the books. Still, during a French Quarter cleanup in 2002, five people were arrested under provisions of the defunct ordinance, records show.

Mitchell hasn't seen anyone charged with it lately. "The police seem to know that the ordinance doesn't exist anymore," he said. Municipal Court judges Paul Sens and Sean Early both labeled the once-common public habitation charge as "rare."

Mission to offer beds

People at the Claiborne encampment recalled seeing the mayor's sport utility vehicle pass. Referring to the mayor's comments about an obscene gesture, Brown said, "That man, he was flipping off the mayor . . . because we're out here and he's doing nothing for us."

In fact, the mayor is trying to find relief for the Claiborne assembly, Quiett said. What the mayor was speaking about on television was his work "with the religious community to make available additional bed space," she said. This month, the city plans "to transition many, if not all, of the homeless citizens inhabiting the areas under the Claiborne bridge to locations where they can receive shelter and social service care," she said.

More than 100 beds, Quiett said, will be provided in a tent behind the New Orleans Mission on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard in Central City. The mission's director, Ron Gonzales, confirmed that the mayor's office on Friday accepted his plan to provide shelter for the homeless on Claiborne Avenue. A timetable hasn't yet been set, he said.

Late last year, the city awarded the mission $100,000 to buy a tent with air-conditioning and heating that can sleep 130 men, he said. A facility for women run by the mission currently has openings for about a dozen people, he said.

In exchange for housing people, Gonzales has proposed that the city pay $200 a night to pay for a fire marshal who would stand guard at New Orleans Mission, a measure made necessary by fire hazards caused by storm damage. He also is asking the city to pay for some storm-related repairs to eliminate his code violations for good, he said.

Gonzales plans to keep people in his shelter while they grapple with addiction, mental illness and other challenges, he said.

"They'll be better able to deal with those issues because they'll be there with us," he said.

He conceded, however, that the mission isn't set up to deal with intensive mental illness. He said he has a case worker but no licensed social worker on staff.

The mission plan faces other hurdles. Brown said she would not go to the mission because she would have to be separated from her boyfriend. Others said they wouldn't sleep there because there's nowhere to stay during the day, forcing them to tote their possessions around town from morning until evening.

Gonzales said the new plan for housing the homeless is not yet final. But he talked optimistically about approaching the Claiborne crowd with a team of outreach workers, accompanied by police.

FEMA trailers deadline looming

Only three weeks remain for people living in FEMA trailers to get out for good under Jefferson Parish's continuing crackdown on the emergency housing units.

March 1 is the no-exceptions date when residents in about 1,500 remaining trailers will no longer be able to ask inspectors for more time. All cases will instead switch from inspectors to parish attorneys and be decided by parish hearing officers or in the courts.

Zoning laws against using the trailers as permanent housing in residential areas will return to full force, said D.J. Mumphrey, an executive assistant to Parish President Aaron Broussard who supervises the crackdown. He said residents' arguments that they still need the units as they rebuild from the 2005 hurricanes will be closely scrutinized.

It's going to be under a microscope," Mumphrey said, suggesting the parish will turn to judges in the 24th Judicial District Court or other venues to force residents out of their trailers. "It's our intent to go to the courts with this."

Mumphrey estimated that about 1,500 trailers remain in front of houses in the unincorporated parts of Jefferson that fall under the trailer removal campaign. Including cities and one remaining trailer group site operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a total of 2,168 units still dotted the parish at the end of January.

The big white boxes that symbolized the early phases of Hurricane Katrina recovery peaked in Jefferson Parish in 2006, when FEMA counted more than 19,000 of them in the parish.

Arguing for the need to restore normalcy in neighborhoods, the parish last year launched its effort to remove them, reestablishing the codes that prohibit them and sending teams of inspectors to post violation notices on trailer doors.

Inspectors granted extensions to residents who demonstrated their houses remained unlivable with storm damage, while other cases went to hearing officers who listened to residents' cases and allowed extensions or imposed fines.

The remaining cases involve disagreements between residents and the parish that inspectors and code officials cannot resolve, so parish attorneys will now take over the effort, said Louis Savoye, code enforcement director.

"There's a vast majority that probably, in our eyes, aren't justified," Savoye said. "In the owners' eyes, they are."

We feel like these decisions are too critical for us bureaucrats to make," he said.
Because FEMA must honor local laws, Savoye said the parish might refer some cases to the federal agency, giving federal officials notice that trailers are in violation of codes and must be removed.

"We have been as cooperative and as helpful as we can to the vast majority of the citizens," Savoye said. "You have to be compassionate, but if you sit around, people will take advantage of you. You have to be compassionate, but aggressive."

Trailer dwellers who still need housing help as they recover from Katrina can seek rental assistance through FEMA, parish officials said.

Gina Cortez, a spokeswoman for the agency, said case workers can help people locate apartments and qualify for rental aid in a program that has been operated jointly by FEMA and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development since December.

That program is also slated to phase out. Beginning in March, people receiving disaster rental help will have to pay $50 toward the cost of their rent, a number that will rise by $50 each month until residents are covering their entire housing bills or the assistance program ends entirely in March 2009.

The program, however, also refers people to social services and job training, Cortez said. "What we want is to work with them step by step to help them get back on their feet," she said.
Cortez said FEMA is cooperating with Jefferson to move residents from trailers and into the rental assistance program.

Partly under pressure from the parish, the agency has closed all but one of the 13 trailer enclaves that it once operated in Jefferson for storm victims who did not have another place to put a trailer. The remaining site, near Louis Armstrong International Airport, is scheduled to close in April.

Savoye said a handful of trailers remain installed outside businesses, but they occupy a low priority in the parish's trailer removal push because officials have not received any complaints about trailers in commercial areas.

The Jefferson trailer drawdown is a piece of a broader, post-Katrina code enforcement campaign in Jefferson that has also targeted rental storage units, blighted buildings, overgrown lots and abandoned swimming pools.

Katrina Nursing Home Case Costly for La.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- Louisiana taxpayers paid more than $360,000 for the failed prosecution of the owners of a nursing home where 35 people died during Hurricane Katrina, according to documents obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

The money spent by former state Attorney General Charles Foti include nearly $82,000 for lessons in jury selection and advice on running the trial, the documents show.

Sal and Mabel Mangano owned St. Rita's Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish, which was flooded by the hurricane that hit Aug. 29, 2005. Prosecutors said they should have evacuated the home, and they charged the couple with 35 counts of negligent homicide and 24 counts of cruelty to the elderly or infirm.

A jury took less than four hours to find the couple not guilty after the 2 1/2-week trial.
''This is a colossal waste of taxpayers' money on a case that should never have come to trial,'' said James Cobb, one of the lawyers who represented the Manganos.
Foti, now in private practice with a New Orleans law firm, did not immediately return a call for comment Friday.

Foti's office drew heavy criticism for prosecuting the Manganos and, in a separate case, prosecuting a doctor and two nurses for the post-hurricane deaths of nine patients at a New Orleans hospital. An accounting of the expenses from that case is not yet available.

Foti has repeatedly denied accusations that he used the trials to grandstand for his re-election bid. He lost last fall's Republican primary, and Democrat Buddy Caldwell became the new attorney general in a runoff election.

The initial expense figures in the Mangano case, provided by Caldwell's office, include $81,533 to Courtroom Sciences Inc., the company that instructed the assistant district attorneys who conducted the trial on jury selection, opening statements and trial tactics.

Other expenses include $58,401 for hurricane expert Brian Jarvinen, $72,018.82 to psychiatry professor Robert Stall and $52,607 to Dr. Stanford Finkel, a gerontologist.
It was not clear from the documents how Jarvinen, Stall and Finkel aided the prosecution.

In the hospital case, Foti led investigations that resulted in the arrests of cancer specialist Dr. Anna Pou and nurses Lori Budo and Cheri Landry, who worked at the flooded Memorial Medical Center after the storm.

A grand jury last year refused to indict Pou. Landry and Budo testified before the panel under immunity and were not indicted.