[StBernard] Road Home Money could Soon be Gone

[Westley Annis]

Louisiana's Road Home project will shut down next month, leaving as many as
60,000 people holding nothing but a worthless application in their hands.
That's the information Louisiana's legislative auditor told the audit
advisory committee Monday morning. WAFB's Jim Shannon
<mailto:jshannon at wafb.com>  has the latest information on this situation. 
 
If nothing happens, in terms of getting more federal dollars, the Road Home
will lead to nowhere for thousands of Louisiana's storm-ravaged citizens.
The legislative auditor's information is troubling for people counting on
Road Home money to get back into their homes. Legislative Auditor Steve
Theriot says, "Which is gonna mean under the gross calculation, about 90,000
that won't be served or under OCD calculations, about 60,000 that might not
be served, predicated on any additional funding."
 
Basically, that means Road Home will run out of money in the middle of next
month, if nothing is done. Members of the committee struggled to find the
answers as to exactly why the multi-billion dollar federal bailout has run
out of cash. State Representative Warren Triche of Thibodaux asks, "And
we're paying these people a gazillion dollars to run this program from the
federal government and they can't come up with this kind of information?"
That leads some members wondering if once the federal government audits the
Road Home program and finds mistakes, will the state have to make up the
difference? That could mean a major payback to the federal government. State
Senator Robert Barham of Oak Ridge says, "Absolutely certain it's gonna end
up in court. From the test sample that we did initially of 10,000 loan
applications, there were almost 40% that were not correct."
However, the people over the Road Home program would disagree with those
statistics, saying the mistakes are less than 2%. Depending on who's
talking, it's not so bad, but you're not going to get that impression from
the committee. Senator Barham says, "Well, I don't want to say they couldn't
have done a worse job, but I'll have to be convinced that they could have
done better."
 
9NEWS spoke with the governor's office Monday afternoon on the efforts to
finish funding Road Home. Marie Centanni says the governor is heading to
Washington next month. They hope to get additional funding tacked on an
Iraqi War spending bill to fully fund the Road Home. Depending on who you
ask, the program is short either $6 billion or $4 billion.
 
Reporter:  Jim Shannon, WAFB 9NEWS <mailto:jshannon at wafb.com>