Anyone wanna dis on Governor Blanco at this point?

Anyone wanna dis on Governor Blanco at this point?

EDITORIAL: Clear the roadway

Monday, November 13, 2006

If things don't speed up significantly, the state may have to call its housing grant program the Long and Winding Road Home.
Beleaguered homeowners who need help to rebuild their flooded homes or who want to sell out and start over elsewhere are stuck waiting for long-promised federal grant money. Just figuring out how to apply for assistance has been a headache. And some applicants who have been lucky enough to get an appointment with a grant counselor were given incorrect or misleading information.
To its credit, the Louisiana Recovery Authority is pushing to speed up the process and to correct confusing and conflicting information. The success of those efforts, though, ultimately depends on the contractor hired by the LRA to administer the housing program.

<SCRIPT language=JavaScript></SCRIPT>ICF International is being paid $756 million to manage the grant payouts, and it ought to provide stellar service for that kind of money. So far, the work has not been entirely impressive.
Even making allowances for the complexity of the situation, more South Louisiana residents should have money in hand by now. As of Monday, program officials say they had calculated 1,721 grants totaling $110.3 million in benefits. Calculating a grant and cutting a check are not the same thing, though. And the program has a backlog of roughly 79,000 applications. Since the application rate is lower than expected, that number almost certainly will grow.
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