[StBernard] ICF official backs off pledge

[Westley Annis]

The much-maligned administrator of Louisiana's Road Home program is backing
off a statement last month that it would hand out 500 grants a day to
homeowners by the end of January. 

In the 25 days since Road Home administrator Michael Byrne assured angry
Louisiana Recovery Authority board members of the impending flow of housing
aid, the program has average a less than three closings a day.

ICF International, the company with a $756 million state contract to handle
federal funds - including $7.5 billion in grants for homeowners - came under
fire late last year for errors and slowdowns. State legislators recommended
firing the company. 

On Dec. 15, with the politicians up in arms and fewer than 100 grants
delivered, ICF's Byrne was grilled by the appointed members of Gov. Kathleen
Blanco's Louisiana Recovery Authority. LRA member Tim Coulon asked when they
could expect a dramatic increase in closings. 

"I think you're seeing it right now," he said, then added he hoped to see
500 grant closings a day by some time in January. 

Board member Walter Leger, an attorney, took the extra step of clarifying
the comment for the record. 

"Five hundred a day in January, right? I can write that down?" Leger said.
"Yes," the Road Home official said. 

Now Byrne is saying that isn't what he meant. He said Wednesday that he
intended to say the title company in charge of the closings, First American
Title Insurance Co., would be able to handle 500 closings a day by the end
of January. 

"The Road Home program never established a specific goal for closings in
January or any other month," Byrne said in an e-mail statement. "We do
estimate targets for capacity. We are building a pipeline that can handle a
certain volume, but we can't control whether the capacity is achieved as
many of the factors determining our volume are established outside of our
program." 

A frustrated Leger doesn't buy Byrne's latest explanation. 

"I'm very precise with my questions. I do it for a living," said Leger,
whose Arabi house took 14 feet of water after Hurricane Katrina. "What
relevance does the ability of First American to do them have unless they're
doing them? He may have been meaning that, but that wasn't the question." 

Sam Jones, deputy director of the Governor's Office of Community Programs,
further doubts Byrne's explanation, because First American's capacity, or
lack of it, never caused the holdup. First American already had told the
state as far back as mid-November that it could handle 100 closings a day,
and would need just two weeks' notice to ramp up to 500 closings a day. 

"I don't know how they could have done" 500 closings a day, Jones, one of
the company's harshest critics, said of ICF International. 

As of Tuesday, 97,167 homeowners' applications had yielded 153 closings. In
the 25 days since Byrne's promise of a significant increase in closings,
there have been 68 closings - a rate of 2.7 a day. 

Although the LRA doesn't have oversight power over ICF - the LRA designed
the program, but the OCD manages it - Leger promised to hold Byrne
accountable. 

Coulon, the chairman of the Superdome Commission and a former Jefferson
Parish president, said he would demand answers at Friday's meeting. 

"We're the sounding board, and so we're subject to the same criticism" as
ICF, he said. "We'll consider all options for ICF at this point, including
canceling their contract, although I don't know if that's in our best
interest at this point." 

Leger, Coulon and David Voelker, another New Orleans area LRA member, all
say ICF probably shouldn't be fired. Even if they perform poorly, bringing
in a new contractor likely could create more problems and delays than it
might solve, the members said. 

As of Tuesday, ICF had an addition 161 closings scheduled. 

"Like every other step of this process, we've learned the hard way that
things end up being more complicated than they appear on the surface," Byrne
said. 

He said the company must go through 40 separate steps before staff can
schedule a closing. Some of those steps only take a few moments and are
"trivial," Byrne acknowledged, including making sure the right person signed
the acceptance letter. 

But others can be time-consuming, he said. ICF sometimes must wait several
weeks for parishes to provide property tax information and to find out if an
applicant has received additional funds from other sources, such as checks
from private insurance companies or loans from the U.S. Small Business
Administration. In addition, required title searches and other verifications
can drag on for two or three weeks. 

Jones said he's been urging ICF to send closing files to First American
while the contractor completes its verifications, which he believes could
cut a week or two off the wait. 

The Road Home program has seen more progress in speeding up its processing
of final award letters, the so-called "gold letters," printed on yellow
paper to distinguish them from the "preliminary" letters ICF first sent out,
causing a firestorm of criticism because the offered no final answers. In
the last 25 days, about 15,000 of the final letters have been sent to
applicants, more than doubling the total produced in the last three months
of 2005. 

But ICF faces another obstacle in holding more closings: Fewer people
receiving the grant letters have responded by choosing one of two options
available under the program: rebuilding their homes or selling the property
to the state's Road Home Corp., a choice that must be made before closing on
the grant. At first, many grant recipients responded quickly. More than half
of the first 10,000 homeowners to get final award letters made their choice
by Dec. 15. But only about one in six of those who have received award
letters since then have committed to staying or leaving. And a third of the
families who participated in the original Road Home pilot program are yet to
choose the rebuild or buyout option. 

ICF spokeswoman Gentry Brann said the contractor wants applicants to at
least respond to their award letters within 30 days and explain why they
aren't ready to make a choice. 

"We're hoping within the next 30 to 60 days that we'll hear back from enough
people to know what the problem is," she said. 

There's a simple explanation for this homeowner-instituted delay,
particularly in New Orleans, said Jim Baronet, a spokesman for the state
Office of Community Development, which oversees ICF: They don't know if
their neighbors will return. For example, the Unified New Orleans Plan,
which is expected to sketch out where public services should be fixed or
expanded in the city, has not yet been presented. 

"I'd want to see what happens in my neighborhood" before choosing to stay or
go, Baronet said. "I don't want to choose and be the only one in my
neighborhood when they decide not to rebuild there." 

Leger, the head of the LRA's Housing Committee, said he's hearing from more
homeowners each week who are happy with their award letters, but he's
concerned that the spate of problems last fall have caused some to take a
wait-and-see approach. 

Melanie Ehrlich, founder of the watchdog group Citizens' Road Home Action
Team, or CHAT, said many in New Orleans have lost confidence in the program
because of ICF's initial missteps and have given up on applying altogether.
Others are waiting in hopes that mistakes will be fixed and the process
streamlined before the contractor processes their grant.. Either way, the
delays could compromise the ultimate usefulness of the Road Home program,
she said. 

"If they're giving awards two years into the program, they're not luring
people into the city who really need it," she said. "They're just giving
money to the people who would have rebuilt anyway."