by D. Cupples | It's downright heart breaking -- and disgusting. Will the Bush Administration never get it right with respect to helping the cities and the people whose lives Hurricane Katrina destroyed? Newsday reports:
"Imagine that your home was reduced to mold and wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government-provided trailer tainted with formaldehyde you finally win a federal grant.
"Then a collector calls with the staggering news that you have to pay back thousands of dollars...."
"Thousands of Katrina victims may be in that situation.
"A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments.
"The contractor, ICF International of Fairfax, Va., revealed the extent of the overpayments when it issued a March 11 request for bids from companies willing to handle "approximately 1,000 to 5,000 cases that will necessitate collection effort." (Newsday)
So many contractors were hired (and likely profited handsomely) to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. Here we are, two and a half years after the storm, and things are still a mess.
Other BN -Politics Posts:
* New Orleans: Still Suffering after 2 Years & Billions of Tax Dollars?
* Katrina Tax Breaks Got to Luxury Condos
* Hurricane Katrina's Second Anniversary Compels Cynicism
state disasters are originally based upon the particular city's governance and state's governance (a republic?..to ensure state's rights..so we dont have ONLY a central gov't) response.. all of which the prior were totally FUBAR...
eh?
Posted by: aw | March 31, 2008 at 07:26 PM