[StBernard] Road Home promises, but family still waits

[Westley Annis]

By Coleman Warner
 
The morning the pathetic tale of his elderly parents' error-riddled Road
Home award letter hit the newspaper -- the program had estimated damage to
their destroyed house at a paltry $550 -- Alan Rubin got an effusively
apologetic phone call from a Road Home staffer. 
 
The woman apologized for the error and any pain it caused for his parents,
who Rubin said had been "terrified" by the letter because they had counted
on the grant for their financial security. The woman on the phone said she
would FedEx a corrected award letter within two days. 
 
And so the Rubins breathed a sigh of relief, hoping their bureaucratic
nightmare would soon end. And then they waited. 
 
They're still waiting. 
 
The corrected letter never came, and the Rubins still aren't sure how much
money they might ultimately receive from the unprecedented $7.5 billion
rebuilding and buyout grant program for owners of flooded homes. Holding
power of attorney for his parents, Saul and Mildred Rubin, both in their
90s, Alan Rubin was outraged by a Nov. 24 Road Home letter that gave the
woefully low estimate of damage to the couple's Lakeview home, which flooded
to the ceiling after the 17th Street Canal levee break. In their
calculation, the program's own formula seemed to put the true damage figure
in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The result of the faulty
calculation: The Rubins didn't qualify for any rebuilding grant at all. 
 
Calling on Dec. 14, the morning their story hit the news, the Road Home
representative estimated their true rebuilding cost topped $300,000, and,
with reductions for an earlier FEMA repair grant and for a penalty assessed
because the home was uninsured, the parents now would qualify for a
rebuilding award of $105,000. "She was very genuine and caring," Rubin
recalled. 
 
Still, the Rubins have seen no action. One day last week, the same Road Home
staffer called again, Alan Rubin said, apologizing for the delayed package,
and explaining that a computer had refused to process data for the file
correctly. 
 
Rubin relayed the conversation this way: 
 
"It sounds like you're having problems with your software," he said. 
" 'We are having big-time problems with our software,' " he said she
replied. 
 
"Well, are they working on it?" 
 
" 'The software people are aware of it but have not come up with an answer.'
" 
 
He said the woman promised a new letter when the software glitch was
resolved, but didn't say how long that might take, Rubin said. 
 
"She was very clear that she had no power in making those promises, because
she had no power over the software," Rubin said. 
 
A different woman from the Road Home program called Alan Rubin about two
weeks ago to tell him that his parents, because of their modest fixed
income, also qualified for a disaster rebuilding loan of $50,000, roughly
double the loan offered in the Nov. 24 letter. 
The staffer said she was putting information on that program in the mail
that same day. 
Rubin said Thursday he has yet to receive it. 
 
If a team of specially assigned staffers, responding to front-page
criticism, can't resolve his parents' case, Rubin wondered, what happens
with problem cases that don't draw publicity? 
Road Home spokesman Dwight Cunningham reiterated the program's refusal to
discuss any specific case, out of privacy concerns. 
 
As to any systemic problem with computers fouling up important data, that is
a baseless report, he said. 
 
"We're experiencing no software problems," he said.