Baton Rouge company also will help manage post-Hurricane Katrina rebuilding program
Despite the controversy that has surrounded the state's home-elevation grant program for the past year, the Shaw Group, the Baton Rouge company that has staffed and helped manage the program, is part of a team selected to manage it and the Road Home program going forward, the state confirmed Monday. Asked about an internal Shaw email message obtained by The Times-Picayune, state spokeswoman Christina Stephens acknowledged the award of a new contract for managing both the elevation grant program, a $750 million effort paid for by FEMA, and the Road Home, the massive home-rebuilding program that is winding down after having paid homeowners $9 billion in grants.
Home-elevation work has been plentiful in New Orleans in the years after Hurricane Katrina. That combined management contract will start in March and goes to the company that has been running the Road Home since 2009, Hammerman & Gainer's Lutcher-based HGI Catastrophe Services. Shaw would be a subcontractor to HGI. Other terms of the deal were unavailable late Monday.
Shaw was previously a key subcontractor on the Road Home program under controversial prime management contractor ICF International.
"The contract for Road Home was ending, and we determined that the most efficient way to move forward was to combine the management of the two programs into one contract, which would streamline the process, better serve homeowners and save taxpayer dollars," Stephens said.
For the past two years, Shaw held a $66 million contract to provide staff for the elevation program, supplementing the state's in-house staff, and it will continue to do so through October, Stephens said. But Shaw employees didn't just fill staff positions; they held key management jobs. There was also some bleed-over of state and Shaw employees in the program. In 2010, a top Shaw manager in the program, Bill Croft, was hired by the state as an independent contractor to oversee the work of his former employer. And the children of top state managers, Spring Garcia and David Knight, worked for Shaw in the program.
Shaw stands to be paid 10 percent of all grant payouts in the program, a rate in line with what the state paid ICF.
In his email message to Shaw's program staff Monday, David Odom, a Shaw director and deputy district manager for Shaw Environmental & Infrastructure's Gulf Central District, notes that Shaw "will be required to better align our program assignment criteria with those of the State. This includes providing the same background checks that are utilized by the State for its employees on the (elevation) project."
Earlier this month, Tanya Kenner, an employee of Shaw subcontractor GCR & Associates, was cleared in a criminal background check and hired to handle elevation grant files even though she was still serving probation on a federal bank theft conviction at the time. She was named in a state indictment in December for allegedly taking bribes to help specific elevation contractors get paid.
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David Hammer can be reached at dhammer@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3322.