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Sun 27 Aug, 2006 09:40 am
Katrina's Damage to Bush's Standing Still Haunts His Presidency
Aug. 25 (Bloomberg)
Hurricane Katrina's flood waters have long since receded. The human toll and political wreckage wrought by the killer storm continue to haunt George W. Bush almost a year later.
As the president and still-reeling Gulf Coast residents prepared to mark Katrina's anniversary, political experts say that dismay over Bush's response to the disaster continues to undermine public confidence in his managerial abilities.
``It was Katrina that broke the sense that the Republicans could govern well,'' former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in an interview. Bush ``was still seen before Katrina as a relatively strong leader, and somewhere in this process there was a substantial erosion because Americans were shocked'' by the government's failure to perform.
Bush has never appeared comfortable talking about the catastrophe, and the storm's continuing ability to bedevil him makes it a domestic counterpart to the Iraq war -- a setback that fundamentally altered perceptions of a presidency.
The White House's Katrina relief effort seemed off-kilter from the start, said Gingrich, a Republican. Citing Bush's initial praise for then-Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, Gingrich said that ``from that point on, people just look at us and see `Brownie, you're doing a great job,' and they just think we're not in touch with reality.''
Swooping Over New Orleans
Bush waited for two days -- days filled with television images of anarchy and desperation -- before inspecting the storm area as Air Force One, returning from Waco, Texas, swooped low over New Orleans. He saw a surreal scene of burning buildings and submerged neighborhoods.
``President Bush seemed to be far above the fray and didn't really understand the scope of the damage,'' said Daniel Aldrich, a Tulane University professor who is researching the government's reaction to the disaster.
A year later, Democrats as well as many Republicans view the administration's Katrina response as a case study in bureaucratic failure. Among the causes cited: a detached White House high command, a FEMA team hobbled by political cronyism, and a president who oscillated between an emotional desire to aid storm victims and a conservative ideology that is leery of federal bailouts.
In ways large and small, Bush is still paying for the inadequate storm response.
``Sadly, George Bush has forgotten us,'' says a radio advertisement running this week in New Orleans. The narrator is Joe Lavigne, a Republican candidate who is seeking a House seat in November. Bush is ``spending too much time and money on Iraq and not enough living up to his promise to rebuild New Orleans,'' the ad asserts.
`Cronyism'
Bush's approval ratings were slipping even before the hurricane hit, said Charles Franklin, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who analyzes perceptions of the presidency. Backlash over the Iraq war and a polarizing debate with Democrats over Bush's call for partial privatization of Social Security were taking a toll.
``Katrina made the issue for the fall incompetence and cronyism,'' Franklin said. ``Some of the incompetence may still haunt the administration.''
Bush's handling of the emergency also hurt his already shaky ties to the black community, as TV viewers saw pictures of poor, largely black New Orleans residents abandoned to face the harsh aftermath of the storm.
``Republicans very much hoped to reach out to African- Americans and bring them into the Republican tent,'' said David Gergen, a government professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. ``Katrina really turned that around.''
Eight Trips
Scrambling to recover from initial missteps, Bush entered a frenetic Katrina-centric phase after the floodwaters receded. He traveled to the region eight times in the six weeks after the Aug. 29 hurricane hit and spoke of the disaster almost every day in September.
Then he fell largely silent on the topic and hardly mentioned the storm for the rest of the year. In his State of the Union speech in February, he didn't utter the word ``Katrina,'' and devoted only 160 words of a 5,400-word address to the costliest disaster in modern U.S. history.
This year, he traveled to Louisiana and Mississippi four times between January and April. On Aug. 29, he plans to spend the anniversary of Katrina by making his 13th post-Katrina stop to the storm zone with a visit to New Orleans and Mississippi. One point the president is sure to make: Washington has already promised $110 billion for victims.
More Attention
Still, the president hasn't paid enough attention, residents and local officials say.
``We don't have transportation, we don't have health care, there are a lot of places that still don't have electricity,'' said Roger Villere, a New Orleans florist and chairman of the state Republican Party. ``Things don't look much different than they did a year ago.''
Some of the unhappiness stems from an address Bush made in New Orleans on Sept. 15. Designed to regain the political initiative, the speech seemed to promise an expansive federal relief effort. In language that evoked President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, he pledged: ``We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.''
Blank Check
Although much of Bush's relief plan was based on conservative principles -- local control, regulatory easements, tax-advantaged opportunity zones, aid vouchers -- Republican fiscal conservatives cringed at what they deemed was a blank check. They saw it as an open-ended commitment that ran counter to the free-market principles of a president who took office in 2001 pledging to play a ``limited'' role in people's lives because ``too much government crowds out initiative and hard work, private charity and the private economy.''
In trying to appeal to Katrina victims calling for a massive aid package and conservatives urging a limited bailout, Bush managed to disappoint both camps.
As a believer in self-reliance, ``Bush's first inkling is always to let people do their job,'' said James Carafano, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based think- tank that favors limited government. The result was that ``Bush took it on the chin.''
As criticism mounted, the president tried to reach out to friendly locals. In March, he stopped by the freshly painted sandwich shop of Calvin Stewart Jr. in New Orleans' Ninth Ward.
``Everybody's hollering about the president,'' Stewart said in an interview six months after Bush posed for pictures in his restaurant. ``I'm not going to put it on the president, because right here in this state they're not doing nearly enough themselves to help.''
Bigger and Better
Bush's prediction that citizens would flock back to a bigger, better, New Orleans hasn't panned out so far. The reasons range from a lack of skilled workers to bureaucratic delays in obtaining temporary trailers to fears that the repaired levees aren't safe.
More federal relief funds are on the way, said Donald Powell, Bush's Gulf Coast coordinator. About $77 billion in aid for the region has been allotted, $44 billion of which has been spent. The balance, about $30 billion, will be distributed in coming months.
As the anniversary of the storm approaches, Bush is reaching out to some of the victims. Rockey Vaccarella, 41, who lost his home in Saint Bernard Parish, spent time with Bush at the White House two days ago to ``remind the president that the job's not done.''
It isn't as if Bush needs much reminding on that score.
``Katrina is one piece of a larger theme that the president is struggling with: that he's out of touch with what's going on,'' said Michael Dimock, associate director of research at the Pew Center for the People and the Press, a Washington-based polling outfit. ``That totally knocked the administration off its feet. And in some ways, they have never recovered.''
Katrina Aid Far From Flowing
By Ann M. Simmons, Richard Fausset and Stephen Braun, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
August 27, 2006
NEW ORLEANS A year after the hurricane, some federal agencies are dispensing available funds at a trickle: $110 billion has been approved, $44 billion spent.
From the ghostly streets of New Orleans' abandoned neighborhoods to Mississippi's downtrodden coastline, the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's onslaught is arriving with emerging signs of federal money at work ?- rented trailers parked in the driveways of flood-ravaged homesteads, teams of Army engineers overseeing levee repairs, beaches swept clean of debris.
But the federal government has spent less than half the rebuilding funds that it amassed for Katrina recovery, which has raised sharp questions about the Bush administration's stewardship of the Gulf Coast's reconstruction and has provoked a chorus of complaints about excessive delays and government sluggishness.
Despite four emergency spending bills approved by Congress to provide more than $110 billion in aid, federal agencies have spent only $44 billion. Even as President Bush insisted last week and in his radio address Saturday that $110 billion was a strong commitment, he conceded that the recovery effort was plagued with bureaucratic hurdles.
The scale of the catastrophe continues to overwhelm the government's capacity to respond. Aid agencies are only now contending with the long-term needs of hundreds of thousands of evacuees and with the landscape of shattered houses and public infrastructure that will take years to restore.
Many homeowners and business owners have waited impatiently for promised grants and loans as federal and state officials have spent months dickering over how much and where to spend aid ?- and officials remain at odds over who bears the blame for the inconsistent flow of Katrina aid.
Last week, federal recovery director Donald E. Powell attributed the pace of aid payments to the "balance in attention between getting the money out fast and getting the money out responsibly fast."
But after a year of fielding constituents' pleas for help, Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) said, "We're seeing the same thing going on with the recovery as we did with the immediate response. We're going through another unfolding disaster."
In the Democratic response to Bush's radio address Saturday, Landrieu said, "Too often federal agencies are slow to move and encumbered by red tape."
Some federal agencies acted quickly to help Katrina victims. Flood insurance payments moved early and efficiently, according to Landrieu and others who have analyzed the aid flow. But other agencies proved inflexible and overwhelmed, making little effort to clear bureaucratic obstructions and releasing available aid at a trickle.
In July, Congress' nonpartisan Government Accountability Office reported that disbursement of Small Business Administration recovery loans was marred by "significant delays." A report last week from Democrats on the House Small Business Committee said that of $10 billion approved for such loans, just 20% had reached recipients. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the administration's top recovery authority, already attacked for its response to the storm, has again taken heat.
Until last week, when the White House Office of Management and Budget released an agencywide breakdown of recovery spending, the administration had not provided a clear overview of how the money was being doled out. For much of the year, elected officials, government auditors and outside experts had to rely on fragmentary indicators of the pace of recovery spending, which handicapped efforts to monitor the process.
"It's not only that we don't know what's been spent. We haven't even had an accurate description of what 'spent' means," said Rob Nabors, Democratic staff director for the House Appropriations Committee. "They talk about 'commitments' and 'obligations' ?- they've invented new terms for not spending money."
Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said: "The government is barely adequate at counting how much money goes out the door, but it's terrible when it comes to tracking how much reaches the ground."
The telltale effects of the unspent billions emerge in the bitter accounts of homeowners who have waited for months for trailers that have not arrived, merchants who agonize over government loans still pending, town officials frustrated by rebuilding efforts stalled by the vagaries of federal regulations.
The toll taken by the government's slow-motion funding reveals itself in miniature on Flood Street, an aptly named stretch of flood-scarred dwellings in New Orleans' devastated Lower 9th Ward where the Kent brothers are trying to resettle their family home.
Lonnie Kent applied to FEMA six months ago for a trailer where he and his brother Clark Gable Kent could live while repairing their mother's mold-infested house, the only one on the block someone has returned to. Only last month did a FEMA agent show up to survey where the trailer would go. But the agent departed without making a commitment, leaving the brothers to wait it out in a house where sheetrock walls are exposed and the roof leaks.
"They said they couldn't hook up the trailer because an electrical line was [hanging] too low," said Lonnie Kent. "But ain't no trailer that high."
FEMA officials said more than 19,000 trailers had been delivered to displaced homeowners in New Orleans. But many others are still waiting, including 4,200 in New Orleans and nearly 4,000 in neighboring parishes.
The anxiety of waiting afflicts the city's affluent as well. Colleen Monaghan, 44, lived in the once-thriving neighborhood of Lakeview, where blocks of water-damaged homes sit vacant and exposed. The wall of floodwater that broke over poorly built levees caused $470,000 in damage to her home.With only $26,000 in insurance coverage, Monaghan turned to the Small Business Administration, which provides loans to homes and businesses damaged in natural disasters. She said she applied for a loan to rebuild her house a month after Katrina struck. In November, the agency informed her she would receive a $200,000 loan. But it was not until Wednesday that Monaghan received the money.
"It's been an ongoing nightmare for the one whole year," said Monaghan. "I feel I'm finally beginning to see the light. I'm proud to be an American, but I've lost all confidence in our government."
Bush administration officials emphasized that the $44 billion paid out so far was not a complete portrait of government efforts. Powell and other senior officials pointed to more than $77 billion in Katrina "obligations" ?- a term the administration uses for federal money that has been allocated but not yet disbursed to state governments or through direct loans and grants.
Assessing the government's recovery efforts depends on how success or failure is defined. Federal officials, for example, promote FEMA's commitment to spend $35.4 billion out of its Disaster Relief Fund for essential public infrastructure repair and emergency aid, but critics say the agency has managed to actually spend only $21.9 billion of its $42.6 billion allocation.
ADVERTISEMENTAt times, FEMA's slowness to provide funds has paralyzed state agencies required under federal law to match 10% of the cost of repair work, said Amy Liu, deputy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution think tank. Local governments confronting damaged roads and buildings have sometimes waited months for funding, Liu said.
"FEMA provided the most cumbersome, reflexively slow response we've ever seen when it comes to disaster assistance," said Liu, a former Clinton administration official who studied the allocations for a recent Brookings assessment of Katrina aid.
When the Office of Management and Budget released its spending overview last week, the numbers did little to dampen criticism. The figures showed, for example, that the Department of Housing and Urban Development had committed $11.5 billion in block grants, mostly through housing reconstruction programs administered by Louisiana and Mississippi. But the same breakdown showed that HUD had spent only $100 million of its overall $17.1 billion congressional allocation.
The failure to start a full-scale housing reconstruction program until nearly a year after Katrina, critics contend, left thousands of storm and flood victims in the lurch.
A senior Senate Republican aide said the Bush administration was largely to blame for the late start. The administration's first request for Katrina aid, in October 2005, included only $1.5 billion in HUD block grants. "It was a token," said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "By the time we got real money in the pipeline, six months had passed."
Louisiana's $10.2 billion in federal housing obligations were not secured until June 15, after a rancorous debate between state and federal officials over how housing money would be administered. More than 100,000 homeowners have since applied for HUD-originated grants under Louisiana's Road Home program, which is to provide up to 60% of a home's pre-storm value (capped at $150,000).
The first money to reach homeowners under that program arrived Friday . Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco announced that 42 homeowners were expected to get $1.5 million in aid "in the next few weeks."
In neighboring Mississippi, displaced Gulf Coast homeowners are frustrated by the late start of a $5 billion federal block-grant program that is the cornerstone of the state's recovery plan. About 17,000 Mississippi households have applied for grants of up to $150,000 to repair their homes. But the state has sent out only about two dozen checks so far, said Scott Hamilton, a spokesman for the Mississippi Development Authority.
Some say Gov. Haley Barbour ?- a Republican stalwart and Bush ally who designed the rebuilding plan ?- could not move any more quickly. "I haven't seen any of the money here yet, but I feel like Gov. Barbour attacked it in totally the correct way," said Mayor Billy Skellie of Long Beach, a coastal Mississippi city of 18,000 that saw a third of its 6,000 properties destroyed or damaged in the storm.
But others say that both the federal and state governments paid scant attention to Katrina's most vulnerable victims. They say the governor unwisely earmarked much of the HUD money for one group of homeowners ?- those who lived outside the flood zone and had homeowners' insurance ?- while neglecting owners inside the flood zone, renters and the poor.
"The people who need it the most are not getting the assistance they deserve," said Minor Sinclair, U.S. regional grant-making director for Oxfam America, a nonprofit aid group.
The inequities in the flow of federal funding sometimes show up in the contrasting experiences of Katrina victims living just a few miles apart.
Near the Biloxi shoreline last week, Katherine and Walter Blessey had a work crew hammering away on their badly damaged home, which took 6 feet of water and is still missing large sections of its floor.
The Blesseys' estimated damage was $650,000. But they have already received the maximum of $350,000 allowed under the federal National Flood Insurance Program, which indemnifies homeowners in high-risk flood areas.
Though FEMA is savaged for its performance in other areas, its flood insurance program is credited with dispensing money rapidly. Congress allowed FEMA to borrow $19 billion to cover Katrina-related claims, and the program has already paid out about $15.6 billion for more than 210,000 claims, said FEMA spokesman Butch Kinerney.
Walter Blessey, an attorney, was annoyed that the government wouldn't allow him to take out more flood insurance. But the payout, which came in two phases in December and February, was enough for them to start rebuilding. "We were really grateful," Katherine Blessey said.
A few miles down the coast in east Gulfport, ferry operator Louis Skrmetta has not been so lucky. His sturdy brick home, situated 800 feet from the shore, is still inundated and needs major repairs.
Because Skrmetta lives outside the flood zone drawn up by FEMA, he only purchased regular homeowners insurance, assuming that there was no need to take out FEMA's national flood policy. After Katrina, having received only minimal coverage from his private insurer, Skrmetta turned early to the HUD block grant money for help.
He applied in April, but he has yet to hear if he has qualified. He and his wife have done fitful work on the house, raising extra money by selling a 1970 Corvette he had parked in the garage.
Tourism is way down these days, and his ferry business to nearby Ship Island has been suffering. Skrmetta says they'll have to stop renovations until more money comes in.
"We are the poster child for the grant," he said. "But now our government is being mysterious about the grant money."
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Simmons reported from New Orleans, Fausset from Biloxi and Gulfport, Miss., and Braun from Washington. Times researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this report.
I wonder if it isn't the nature of our government, regardless of party to screw up things like this? I've tried to view it from different perspectives, and I can't help believing the same thing would have happened under Clinton, former Bush, Reagan and Carter.
Edgar
edgarblythe wrote:I wonder if it isn't the nature of our government, regardless of party to screw up things like this? I've tried to view it from different perspectives, and I can't help believing the same thing would have happened under Clinton, former Bush, Reagan and Carter.
Under Clinton, James Witt created and managed a well-functioning and effective FEMA. Witt was an expert in after devastation recovery. Expertise is lacking among Bush's appointees.
BBB
Whistleblowers Say State Farm Cheated Katrina Victims
Exclusive: Whistleblowers Say State Farm Cheated Katrina Victims
By Brian Ross and Joseph Rhee
ABC News
Friday 25 August 2006
State Farm Insurance supervisors systematically demanded that Hurricane Katrina damage reports be buried or replaced or changed so that the company would not have to pay policyholders' claims in Mississippi, two State Farm insiders tell ABC News.
Kerri and Cori Rigsby, independent adjusters who had worked for State Farm exclusively for eight years, say they have turned over thousands of internal company documents and their own detailed statement to the FBI and Mississippi state investigators.
In an exclusive interview with ABC news, to be broadcast on 20/20 - Watch 20/20 tonight at 10 - and World News, the Rigsby sisters say they saw "widespread" fraud at the State Farm offices in Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi.
"Katrina was devastating, but so was State Farm," says Cori Rigsby.
At one point, they say State Farm brought in a special shredding truck they believe was used to destroy key documents. State Farm says shredding is standard to protect policyholders' privacy.
The sisters say they saw supervisors go to great lengths to pressure outside engineers to prepare reports concluding that damage was caused by water, not covered under State Farm policies, rather than by wind.
They say reports that concluded that damage was caused by wind, for which State Farm would have to pay, were hidden in a special file and new reports were ordered.
Cori Rigsby says she recalls a senior coordinator ordering that an engineering company be told to alter the findings in its report so that State Farm would not have to pay. "Tell them if they don't change their report, we're not paying their invoice," she remembers the supervisor saying.
A lawyer for State Farm, Wayne Drinkwater, told ABC News he was unfamiliar with the Rigsby sisters but denied State Farm cheated policyholders or pressured outside engineers to reach particular conclusions in their damage reports.
"We, of course, have not been cheating," Drinkwater said.
The allegations, if proven, would support the suspicions of thousands of homeowners along the Mississippi Gulf Coast who have been unable to collect enough insurance money to rebuild their homes.
Many have filed lawsuits against State Farm and other insurance companies alleging the companies of wrongly denying or low-balling their claims. The Rigsby sisters' allegations are now a key part of suits filed against State Farm by well-known Mississippi lawyer Dickie Scruggs, famous for taking on the tobacco companies.
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