They're still thinking about it

This site was never a great store of content anyway but if anyone is wondering why it's been especially sparse lately, it's because I just am using the phone to do short posts (sometimes) until the laptop is fixed. But most of the time if I have my phone in my hand and a link to share, I just end up tweeting it out. I know this is riveting. 

But I do like to use this blog to make notes when I can so can remember stuff later. It's much better for that purpose than Twitter, which can be kind of a black hole.   For example, I am right now using it to post this story from yesterday's T-P about the continuing victimization of people by the Road Home program some 16 years later. 

In 2008, the state of Louisiana offered Matthews $30,000 through the federally funded Road Home program to elevate her house to reduce the risk of future flooding. But her home was still unlivable, and she desperately needed the cash for repairs. To her relief, she said, a Road Home representative told her she could use the elevation grant to instead pay for repairs. So she did.

Now, more than a decade later, the state wanted the money back.

Only the latest reminder of the cruel stupidity of the regime people live under here. Poor people pay the costs of corruption. Every time.

Louisiana has sued about 3,500 people — about one in every nine people who received an elevation grant — for failing to use the grants to raise their homes after hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck in 2005.

The real problem, however, wasn’t that people ignored the rules, according to an investigation by The Advocate | The Times-Picayune, WWL-TV and ProPublica. It’s that the state Office of Community Development and a contractor it hired in 2006, ICF Emergency Management Services, mismanaged the program. For more than a decade since, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has insisted that the state recoup the money from people who are noncompliant.

 Y'all remember ICF, right? Only Katrina kids know.  Jarvis DeBerry wrote this seven years ago. 

Who's really to blame for homeowners getting more money than they ought to have received: ICF or the state of Louisiana itself? In some cases it may be ICF. In other cases it may the state. But none of that matters to homeowners caught between these two warring parties. If they've been mailed letters suggesting that they acted fraudulently when they didn't do anything wrong, then they should be provided documentation that clears everything up, a letter that gives them permission to never have to think about Road Home again.

Yeah, well, turns out that in 2022 they still gotta think about it.  

Also here's one more thing from that story to think about as we approach another hurricane season.  The costs of each disaster, and its associated mishandled response is only getting worse. 

 

Welcome, again, to the shitty part of the year.