[StBernard] Kopplin Op-Ed: Stafford Act breeds paperwork, stalls real work

[Westley Annis]

LRA Executive Director's Op-Ed Calls for Stafford Act Reform

NEW ORLEANS (September 7, 2007) - Today the New Orleans Times Picayune published an op-ed submitted by Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA). The op-ed, which highlights the ongoing challenges facing Louisiana's recovery and calls for Stafford Act reform, is attached below in its entirety. 

POINT OF VIEW: Andy Kopplin
Stafford Act breeds paperwork, stalls real work
New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 7, 2007

On his visit to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School in the Lower Ninth Ward, President Bush said the school gives us an opportunity to herald excellence. Sadly, the school's gleaming renovation, as one national report described it, is no testament to the effectiveness of the Stafford Act-the federal law that governs FEMA and its rebuilding programs after a disaster. 

Instead, it is evidence that in order rebuild, state and local officials must risk millions of dollars to get around the Stafford Act's Byzantine requirements. Bringing back the12-year-old school that had water up to its rooftop took $6.4 million. To date, FEMA has paid less than a third of that. To get the work done in a timely fashion, the state of Louisiana advanced funds and took the risk that the cost of most repairs would someday be reimbursed.

This completed project is the exception post-Katrina, as state and local governments along the Gulf Coast stretch their resources to bankroll billions of dollars in reconstruction work while awaiting FEMA's final verdict on the costs it will cover. Similar issues have delayed critical repairs to the sewage treatment system in St. Bernard Parish, as well as the Mahalia Jackson Center for the Performing Arts in Armstrong Park.

As children begin a new school year at King Charter School, thousands of hard-working government employees and contractors will create project worksheets that attempt to document the precise dollar value of what was lost when our federal levees failed. They will literally go classroom by classroom, desk by desk and pencil by pencil in our schools, being sure to deduct deferred maintenance and insurance penalties before configuring estimates on more than 20,000 separate project worksheets that will be filed through FEMA's public assistance program in the coming months and years. 

They will forward these reams of paper to higher-ranking bureaucrats, who will haggle over the estimates before forwarding recommendations to top officials at the Department of Homeland Security for final approval. If those approved estimates are too low, more rounds of haggling will ensue as architecture and engineering estimates and actual contractor bids are used to justify the real costs of rebuilding.

These people are good folks working quickly and hard-but the work they are doing, in most cases, is superfluous. Instead of building schools or hospitals, they are building a mountain of paper that will tower 1.3 million documents high before the hammering can even begin. 

That the federal government doesn't follow the Stafford Act for its own buildings is perhaps the best argument for reform.

Recently federal officials cut the ribbon on a reconstructed Job Corps Center in New Orleans and announced a downtown site for construction of a brand new Veterans Administration Hospital. At historic Jackson Barracks along the Mississippi River, $140 million in new military construction is underway. 

There was no haggling over deferred maintenance deductions, no counting of pencils, no mountain of paperwork-just the money and the clear directive to get the job done.

When the Veterans Administration sought funds to rebuild its devastated New Orleans Hospital, it did not wait for FEMA to approve a project worksheet and haggle for months and years to get the value correct. Congress appropriated $550 million to build a new hospital in December 2005.

By contrast, two years after Katrina, FEMA has only approved $28 million to replace the legendary Charity Hospital which sits right next door and suffered similar devastation. 

After a catastrophe, the Stafford Act doesn't work. We've got all the proof we need in our growing mountain of paper. 

New Orleans has enjoyed the visits of one president and five presidential hopefuls recently. Last month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a delegation to the Gulf Coast to see the results of congressional action to waive the Stafford Act's local match requirements and learn what else they could do to cut the red tape. 

Reform the Stafford Act to speed rebuilding after catastrophes, we told them. 

Appropriate the money needed to do the job so we can rebuild safer, stronger and smarter-and focus accountability on getting public facilities rebuilt and services restored, not on quantifying to the pencil how much was lost and how little can be covered by the act that is supposed to save us. 

Andy Kopplin is Executive Director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. 

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