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8A NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
MONDAY, MARCH 31, 2008
NATIONAL
Grant program overpays Katrina victims
Hired contractors to require aid recipients to repay funds provided for hurricane relief
ASSOCIATED PRESS
New Orleans City Council members, from left, Shelley Midura, Stacey Head Arnie Fielkow and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco listen to Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, right, before the start of a news conference opening the Road Home office in New Orleans Aug. 22, 2006. The private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW ORLEANS — Imagine that your home was reduced to mold and wood framing by Hurricane Katrina.
Then a collector calls with the staggering news that you have to pay back thousands of dollars.
Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government-provided trailer tainted with formaldehyde you finally win a federal grant.
Thousands of Katrina victims may be in that situation.
A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims said that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments.
The contractor, ICFInternational of Fairfax, Va., revealed the extent of the overpayments when it issued a March 11 request for bids from companies willing to handle "approximately 1,000 to 5,000 cases that will necessitate collection effort."
The bid invitation said: "The average amount to be collected is estimated to be approximately $35,000, but in some cases may be as high as $100,000 to $150,000."
The biggest grant amount allowed by the Road Home program is $150,000, so ICF believes it paid some recipients the maximum when they should not have received a penny. If ICF's highest estimate of 5,000 collection cases — overpaid by an average of $35,000 — proves to be true, that means applicants will have to pay back a total of $175 million.
One-third of qualified applicants
for Road Home help had yet to receive any rebuilding check as of this past week. The program, which has come to symbolize the lurching Katrina recovery effort, is financed by $11 billion in federal funds.
ICF spokeswoman Gentry Brann said in an e-mail Friday that the overpayments are the inevitable result of the Road Home grant being recalculated to account for insurance money and government aid given to Katrina victims.
Brann said there was a sense of urgency in paying Road Home applicants, and ICF and the state knew applicants would have to return some money.
"The choice was either to process grants immediately or wait until the March 2008 deadline (for submitting Road Home applications) before disbursing any funds," Brann said in her e-mail.
Brann pointed out that 5,000 collections cases would represent a four percent error rate for the Road Home that is "quite good for large federal programs."
Frank Silvestri, co-chair of the Citizen's Road Home Action Team, a group that formed out of frustrations with ICF, sees it far differently.
"They want people to pay for their incompetence and their mistakes. What they need to be is aggressive about finding the underpayments," he said. "People relied, to their detriment, on their (ICFs) expertise and rebuilt their houses and now they want to squeeze this money back out of them."
The prospect of Road Home grant collections comes less than two weeks after the Louisiana inspector general and the legislative auditor said they were investigating why former Gov, Kathleen Blanco paid ICF an extra $156 million in her waning days in office to
administer the program. With the increase, ICF stands to earn $912 million to run Road Home, a contract that also sweetened its initial public stock offering, and helped it buy out four other companies. It now reaches into government contracting sectors that include national defense and the environment.
Paul Rainwater, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the state body that asked for the Blanco-ICF investigations, acknowledged the collections could be painful for applicants, many of whom have used up their nest eggs
to rebuild.
"The state must walk a fine line of treating homeowners who have been overpaid with fairness and compassion and ensuring that all federal funds are used for their intended purpose," said Rainwater, an appointee of new Gov. Bobby Jindal.
Upon receiving money from Road Home, grantees sign a batch of forms, including one that says they must refund any overpayments.
Melanie Ehrlich, co-chair of Citizen's Road Home Action Team, which has documented Road Home
cases that appear littered with mistakes, said she had no confidence that ICF had correctly calculated overpayments. She charged that the company was more likely using collections as retribution against people who had appealed their award amounts in effort to get the aid they deserved.
"I think they are looking for ways to decrease awards and that's part of dissuading people," she said.
Brann said applicants are told an appeal could boost or diminish their award. She called Ehrlich's charge "a totally unfounded assertion."
MOVIES
'21'tops box office,
'Horton's slips to second
LOS ANGELES — Movie-goers laid their money down on "21," a gambling romp that was the weekend's box-office high roller with a $23.7 million debut, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth and Jim Sturgess as math geniuses who make a killing at Vegas' blackjack tables, Sony's "21" bumped off "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!", which had been No. 1 the previous two weekends.
"Horton Hears a Who," distributed by 20th Century Fox, slipped to second place with $17.4 million, raising its total to $117.3 million. It is the first movie this year to pass the $100 million mark.
Despite solid holdover crowds for "Horton," overall business continued to dip. The top 12 movies took in $90 million, down 23 percent from the same weekend last year, when "Blades of Glory" was No. 1 with $33 million.
Hollywood started 2008 with a strong uptick in January, but revenues have trailed off steadily since. Movie admissions had been up as much as 10 percent in early February but now are 2.6 percent behind 2007's, according to box-office tracker Media By Numbers.
By this time last year, Hollywood already had churned out a blockbuster with "300," which eventually topped $200 million, and other hits that included "Wild Hogs" and "Meet the Robinsons."
"Last year was very,very strong at this point.It's made comparisons very tough," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media By Numbers."We're not that far into the year,so every down weekend has a huge impact on the bottom line."
Associated Press
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ELECTIONS Complex printing process causes shortage of ballots
It's a simple question with no simple answer: Why do polling places across America keep running out of ballots when it's no secret that this contentious primary season keeps breaking voter turnout records?
For one, even the best-made plans have gone awry; officials in state after state have ordered more ballots, only to see turnouts exceed their most ambitious estimates.
Some states — California, for example — extended registration deadlines, in part to give would-be
voters more time to sign up for the first Democratic presidential nomination race between a black man and a woman.
But some election officials say those extensions have necessitated a form of fortune telling when it comes to deciding how many ballots to order.
Not helping is the fact that ballot printing is a highly specialized field with a limited number of companies willing to take on the heavily monitored and time-consuming burden of producing and delivering voting cards, Price per ballot can range from 20 cents to more than $1, depending on complexity. Lead times for printing can range from months to weeks to days, depending on circumstances, including the proximity of Election Day.
So with Pennsylvania's important April 22 primary looming, and nine other state nominating contests scheduled for May, election activists wonder if even more voters could be subject to huge lines and disenfranchisement caused by an insufficient supply of ballots.
"We're going to keep having this problem," said Doug Lewis, director of the Election Center, which represents voting officials across the country. "Running an election sounds pretty simple until you try to do it. Folks just don't understand how much advance planning goes into setting this up."
Associated Press
WINONA LA DUKE
INDIGENOUS THINKING
IN A TIME OF
CLIMATE CHANGE
7:30 PM
MONDAY
MARCH 31, 2008
AT THE DOLE INSTITUTE OF POLITICS
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