Legislature looking to streamline recovery effort
House Committee Meetings
Appropriations. 5 p.m. in Committee Room 5. Agenda includes:
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After Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, Louisiana officials set up a patchwork of recovery efforts, a fractured system without a clear recovery chief, where one agency devised recovery plans and another agency signed the contracts to pay for them.
Now, nearly three years later, the Legislature is poised to streamline the efforts and give Louisiana the sort of recovery czar it hasn’t had since the storm and the follow-up blow of Hurricane Rita.
Former Gov. Kathleen Blanco said it’s the type of system she wanted all along, but couldn’t get lawmakers to create in 2005. Gov. Bobby Jindal created it earlier this year by executive order, and he’s on track to get the idea codified into law by the Legislature after repeated complaints the previous system was dysfunctional, fragmented and a drag on recovery efforts.
Jindal’s tapped Paul Rainwater for the role, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority — but with broadened powers to oversee recovery spending in the governor’s Office of Community Development and to control its recovery programs, like the often-maligned Road Home grant program for homeowners.
Lawmakers are considering a bill by House Speaker Jim Tucker, R-Terrytown, that would broaden the LRA’s power from deciding recovery policy to also overseeing the implementation of those policies. The LRA would directly control the billions of dollars in federal financing of recovery programs for rebuilding after Katrina and Rita, rather than OCD. The House agreed to the proposal, and it awaits debate in the Senate.
Katrina devastated southeast Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2005, followed nearly a month later by Rita in southwest Louisiana on Sept. 24. Blanco created the LRA by executive order on Oct. 17 to guide monumental recovery efforts for storms unlike any the state had ever seen and to oversee the spending of billions of dollars in federal aid expected to flow to Louisiana.
But Blanco needed legislative approval to set up the LRA as a continuing state agency, and lawmakers in early 2006 bristled at giving the recovery authority the ability to spend money, sign contracts and control dollars.
So, when lawmakers agreed to create the LRA as a state agency, they added more legislative scrutiny to spending plans, and they didn’t give it the ability to oversee the implementation of the plans it devised. At the time, lawmakers said they were worried the LRA would try to usurp the power of the purse.
The contract signing and oversight role fell to the governor’s Office of Community Development, which went from a tiny office that oversaw several million dollars each year in federal block grant aid to an office responsible for managing billions of dollars in recovery block grants allocated to the state by Congress.
Tucker said his bill would set up “more seamless operations ... and eliminate some of the problems we’ve had in the past.”
On the interNet:
House Bill 622 can be found at http://www.legis.state.la.us
