Verifications blamed for Road Home payout woes

New Orleans CityBusiness, Jan 29, 2007 by Deon Roberts

The Road Home program is an uphill climb to Marrero resident Lillian Alexie.

Alexie, who has received only $6,000 from her insurance company after her home took on roughly 3 feet of water, applied to The Road Home in August. She gave Road Home officials copies of utility bills and a stack of other documentation Dec. 22 to prove she owns her home.

A week after her appointment, an inspector viewed her home and she was told she would get a grant three to four months later.

Road Home officials acknowledge payout problems persist.

"Actually there are those cases that are taking longer than they should, and we're trying to figure out why," said Michael Spletto, The Road Home housing manager in the state Office of Community Development.

Alexie still has not received an offer from The Road Home, which issues federal grants of up to $150,000 to rebuild homes. She said her award is apparently working its way through the program's verification process.

"I don't know what the problem is," said Alexie, a retired nurse who lives in a temporary trailer. "It seems like with the age of computers and everything ... it wouldn't be that hard to verify you owned the property and so forth."

Others are less critical of The Road Home.

"It went rather quickly. I'd say maybe three weeks from the time we had our initial appointment I received a confirmation letter saying what the amount would be. I don't think it could have gone any smoother or any quicker. But I was in the first 500 pilot group," said Steve Campbell, a Slidell resident who received a $46,000 grant.

Mike Byrne, who heads The Road Home program for Fairfax, Va.- based ICF International Inc., said verifications are a fact of life. ICF, which holds a $756-million state contract to administer The Road Home program, is required by Louisiana and federal governments to verify application data before a homeowner award is calculated.

"There's actually levels of verification," Byrne said. "The whole thing is a 12-step process, but each one of the steps has a number of processes in it."

Application backlog

Byrne said his goal is to award nearly all grants by the end of this year. More than 101,000 applications have been filed, but only 258 awards had been closed as of last Monday.

In the verification process, ICF researches whether a person filed for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. ICF also must determine whether the applicant lived in and owned a home before hurricanes Katrina and Rita and whether it was a primary residence, he said.

ICF also must determine how much insurance money the homeowner received.

"So there's a whole bunch of verifications that happens before the calculation," he said.

The Road Home spokesman Dwight Cunningham said if ICF does not conduct verifications, it is breaking laws designed to prevent fraud.

"This isn't anything that ICF dreamt up," Cunningham said. "This is designed to comply with (U.S. Housing and Urban Development) requirements."

Spletto said the state priority is speeding the closing process. The verification process is a lower priority, he said, but the process is being tweaked.

Spletto pointed to two key changes made about six weeks ago.

First, the state cleaned up FEMA data so ICF can more quickly determine whether a homeowner received FEMA aid, he said.

Second, the state worked with insurance companies to better access data on payments made to homeowners, he said.

But "not all of the insurance companies are giving the data to us," he said.

The Road Home program is now allowing homeowners to self-certify insurance payment data to keep the process moving, he said. Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco announced in December the acceptance of post-storm appraisals of pre-storm value to speed up The Road Home.

Unexplained holdups

Despite the streamlining efforts, some applicants are stuck in the verification process for reasons unknown to state officials.

"It's hard to get a handle on what's actually holding up the money," said Walter Leger, a member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, Blanco's rebuilding board. "They (ICF) claim it is actually completing the file, the full verifications. I haven't gotten an acceptable explanation from them as far as I'm concerned."

Spletto said it should take two to three weeks for the verification process after a homeowner's appointment.

"Actually there are those cases that are taking longer than they should, and we're trying to figure out why," he said.

When told Alexie had been waiting more than a month for an award calculation, Spletto said, "it should not take that long."

Verification delays also concern the Citizens' Road Home Action Team, a citizen advocacy group that has criticized the The Road Home's payout pace.

CHAT founder Melanie Ehrlich called the verification process a "key issue" in program delays.

"We know of people who are in the pilot program who still haven't received an offer," she said. "There are too many verifications."

Byrne is confident The Road Home's pace will pick up.

"We are at a staffing level that's above what was detailed in our contract. We pulled forward some of the capacity we would have in year three to increase and get the speed up at this point in time.