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Road Home meets target for closings

Section: Community

David Hammer

After a late push to schedule applicants for grant closings, the state's Road Home homeowner aid program successfully met a contractual deadline to finalize 90,000 grants by the end of 2007.

The state's Road Home reached the mark by 3 p.m. Monday, said Mike Taylor, director of the state's Disaster Recovery Unit, which oversees the Road Home program.

"It's a huge milestone and one that we've had targeted for months and months," Taylor said Monday. "I think it will build confidence for everyone involved that those families have their money in hand and can do what they determine to be in their best interest."
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He said reaching the 90,000 benchmark speaks to the "evolution of the program" and sends a "tremendous signal."

"One of things we knew all along is that any program of this type is going to start slowly and build momentum," Taylor said.

Taylor said the Road Home staff has focused its efforts on reaching its 90,000 benchmark and will announce new performance measurements in the next 21 days.

The Road Home expects to ramp up closings again in the next two weeks, and dispense 90 percent to 95 percent of grants by the middle of this year, Taylor said.

"We absolutely have to keep up this pace" to meet that goal, he said.

Road Home officials have said they can sustain 10,000 closings a month in 2008.

An unknown number accepted less than they think they deserve, and retained the right to appeal for larger grants within 90 days.

If the Road Home had fallen short of 90,000 closings by Monday, the lead contractor running the program, Virginia-based ICF International, would have had $150,000 docked from its $756 million contract, or the equivalent of about two average grants.

More significantly, it also had a Monday deadline to pay at least 85 percent of the applicants who chose to rebuild and 75 percent of those who chose to sell their damaged property to the state, but it could take days to determine whether it achieved those goals.

Failure to meet those benchmarks could lead to fines of up to $1 million, depending on the shortfall. But it remained unclear how many closings were needed to meet those goals because the number of eligible cases in each category is a moving target and isn't publicly reported.
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Despite the negligible penalty connected to the 90,000-closings target, the program pulled out all the stops to reach it. Several applicants said they got multiple phone calls in the last few days pushing them to close in December, even though some said other program officials had been telling them they couldn't close because of unresolved problems with their files.

The applicants reported a lack of coordination that led to repetitive conversations with state and program officials, and at least one applicant traveled to Louisiana from out of the state, only to learn that she should not have been given a closing appointment in the first place.

Mary Beth Maumus and her husband, eastern New Orleans residents who were displaced to Kennesaw, Ga., after Hurricane Katrina, said they got a call from Road Home officials the day after Christmas, informing them they were scheduled to close Sunday morning, four days later. They had been challenging a previous award letter that said they would get nothing and welcomed the sudden news that they would get $50,000, relayed over the phone by a Road Home staffer, they said.

But after coming to New Orleans and renting a hotel room, they got a call from Road Home saying their closing had been canceled. Later they found out from another staffer the problem stemmed from a miscalculation involving their insurance benefits.

Other applicants reported being called by Road Home staffers looking to move up their closing dates, and reported program staffers telling them they must reschedule their closing for December, or risk have it delayed significantly.

Road Home spokeswoman Gentry Brann said it's true that those who weren't willing to close in the final days of December must wait until January to schedule a later closing. But she said any reports of staffers threatening to delay closings was "absolutely not the direction the program is giving."

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