The audit is a follow-up to a 2010 report
WASHINGTON - A new federal report says 85 percent of homeowners who received federal grants to elevate their homes after Hurricane Katrina either had not completed the work, failed to respond to a survey asking about their progress, or didn't provide supporting documentation.
HUD Inspector General David Montoya.
The report, completed by the inspector general for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said it can't say how much of the $698.5 million allocated to the 24,000 Louisiana homeowners for home elevations went for the designated purpose of making them better able to stand up to future hurricanes.
"What we have is a $700 million dollar failure to meet the intent of a disaster relief program, paid for by taxpayers, that will leave communities vulnerable to the next storm," said HUD Inspector General David Montoya. He said there's blame to go around, but that homeowners who take federal grants for a specified purpose are responsible for using the money as intended.
Of the 28,188 recipients of elevation grants averaging $29,100, only 15 percent had demonstrated that they had used the money for the intended purpose, according to the IG report.
The audit is a follow-up to a 2010 report in which the IG dispatched staff to visit 199 homes that had received elevation funds. The finding: 158 of the 199 homes had not been elevated, though their owners had received $3.8 million to raise them.
The report said that only 18 homeowners in that initial group of 158 had returned grant funds in either full, or in part, to the state.
According to the IG, Louisiana officials had mailed surveys to 28,188 recipients of grants whose three-year timeframe to raise their homes had expired.
Here's what the state reported, according to the IG report.
- 4,132 homeowners elevated their homes in compliance with program requirements.
- 15,027 homeowners were noncompliant with one or more of the grant agreement requirements. Those homeowners received $437.5 million in elevation grant funds.
- 553 homeowners said they complied with the grant requirement to elevate their homes, but didn't provide documentation.
- 8,462 homeowners failed to respond to the state survey.
Since the compliance survey was completed last August, state officials said that 5,454 homeowners, who not been in compliance, have met the requirements of the program. In some cases, it was just a matter of providing one more document to their file, according to Angela Vanveckhoven, spokeswoman for the Louisiana Office of Community Development - Disaster Recovery Unit,.
The unit's executive director, Patrick Forbes, said that compliance efforts continue.
"We are working aggressively with HUD to get the remaining 19,000 homeowners in compliance," Forbes said.
The IG report said that the state should aggressively seek repayment of elevation grants from those who did not elevate them within three years of their grant award - as required under the federal program.
Montoya suggested that in the future HUD ought to consider giving out the elevation grants after the work is completed, though some homeowners and contractors have argued it would be hard to get such work done without at least a down payment.
In a separate report, the HUD inspector general said that the Gulf States had been allocated $24 billion in Disaster Recovery funds from the agency for hurricanes Katrina and Rita, but still have $5.6 billion unspent.
"Some of the delay in budgeting funds could be attributed to the states revising their programs, state delays encountered due to lawsuits, or HUD's reactions of a state Action plan," the report said.