[Pages S11505-S11508]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

HURRICANE KATRINA RESPONSE

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, today I rise to discuss how we could be
doing better in our response to Hurricane Katrina. I just spoke with
one of Louisiana's Senators coming over to the Chamber to speak, and
the word that I heard with respect to the situation on the ground,
particularly the response of FEMA to the ongoing crisis, was
discouraging. We can do better. We have to be able to do better for the
people there and for those who are footing the bill, the taxpayers.
Hurricane Katrina was truly an unprecedented event. It was in all
likelihood the worst natural disaster in our Nation's history. It was
certainly the worst natural disaster I have witnessed in my lifetime. I
can understand then that there might be some mistakes made, that there
might not be easy solutions to some of the problems faced by millions
of Americans directly affected by this storm. But I believe there are
too many key areas where we have experienced clear failures that just
cannot be shrugged off. We have all heard about the slow initial
response to the storm. We have also heard about the no-bid contracts
that probably weren't necessary. But I am going to speak for a few
minutes today about a truly distressing failure that is leading to
hardship among Katrina evacuees and is also wasting a lot of Federal
taxpayer dollars.
As my colleagues are aware, hundreds of thousands of gulf coast
residents have seen their homes severely

[[Page S11506]]

damaged. Too many have seen them completely destroyed. Many of these
people are still living far away from home, with little or no hope of
returning to their communities any time soon, if ever. FEMA has moved
swiftly in recent weeks to move Katrina evacuees out of temporary mass
shelters that we saw in places such as the Astrodome in Houston. The
problem is that many evacuees are still living in hotels today, waiting
for FEMA to move them to longer term temporary housing. There have been
a number of media reports recently that FEMA is currently spending
millions of dollars every day to house hundreds of thousands of these
evacuees in hotels around our country. The total cost of this program,
according to the Washington Post this morning, will likely approach
$200 million by the end of this month alone. Worse yet, FEMA has
apparently not even been keeping track of the number of evacuees in
hotels.
I ask unanimous consent that several articles on this subject be
printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:

[From the Washington Post, Oct. 19, 2005]

A Big Cut in Katrina's Hotel Bill

(By Jacqueline L. Salmon and Spencer S. Hsu)

Program Evacuees Were Miscounted, Red Cross Says

The American Red Cross said yesterday that it has vastly
overstated the number--and potential cost--of Hurricane
Katrina evacuees staying in hotel rooms because of errors in
how it interpreted its data.
Embarrassed officials from the charity acknowledged that
instead of housing 600,000 displaced people, the hotel
program--paid for by the federal government--is housing
200,000 storm evacuees.
Red Cross officials attributed the error to the misreading
of daily reports from a consultant handling the hotel
placements: Staff members mistook a cumulative tally of
people who had lived in hotels to date for the daily hotel
population.
``Clearly, somewhere we went off the track,'' said Armond
Mascelli, Red Cross vice president for domestic response
operations.
Compounding the error, the Federal Emergency Management
Agency kept no independent count of the program's
beneficiaries or its costs, said FEMA spokeswoman Mary-
Margaret Walker. She said FEMA apparently was relying on the
erroneous numbers as it searched frantically for other
housing options for evacuees.
The revision in the number of people in hotels could cut in
half the $425 million estimate for the program. It is also
prompting FEMA to reevaluate long-term housing needs for
storm evacuees, said spokeswoman Frances Marine. This month,
FEMA's acting director, R. David Paulison, estimated that
400,000 to 600,000 households will require mid- to long-term
housing.
The Red Cross said yesterday that it now expects the
program to cost about $220 million. FEMA does not pay for
hotel rooms until it gets receipts, so the error has not cost
the agency, Marine said.
FEMA officials said 1.6 million people have registered for
assistance because of Hurricane Katrina and 700,000 people
have sought help for damage caused by Hurricane Rita.
The hotel program, conceived by the Red Cross as shelters
overflowed immediately after Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast,
has become the main housing program for evacuees.
This week, FEMA told housing industry representatives that
it plans to move storm evacuees out of hotels and into a less
costly rental-assistance program as soon as Dec. 1.
FEMA officials have concluded ``that it's going to be quite
a while before a lot of people can actually go back.
Therefore, keeping people in hotels and motels for any
extended period of time doesn't make sense,'' said Jim
Arbury, a senior vice president for the National Apartment
Association and National Multi Housing Council.
Red Cross officials said they learned of the error after a
New York Times reporter alerted them to it Monday night. It
comes as the charity tries to raise $2 billion in private
donations to cover its costs of caring for Katrina victims, a
figure that does not include the hotel program.
The blunder is a black eye for the Red Cross that could
taint the entire nonprofit sector, warned Paul Light, a New
York University professor of public service.
``It's hugely embarrassing for the sector,'' Light said.
``I don't believe there is any malfeasance here. But . . .
the notion that the Red Cross simply cannot track where the
money is going feeds into this growing concern that charities
cannot be trusted to spend their money wisely.''
____

[From the New York Times, Oct. 13, 2005]

$11 Million a Day Spent on Hotels for Storm Relief

(By Eric Lipton)

Washington, Oct. 12.--Straining to meet President Bush's
mid-October deadline to clear out shelters, the federal
government has moved hundreds of thousands of evacuees from
Hurricane Katrina into hotel rooms at a cost of about $11
million a night, a strategy local officials and some members
of Congress criticize as incoherent and wasteful.
The number of people in hotels has grown by 60 percent in
the past two weeks as some shelters closed, reaching nearly
600,000 as of Tuesday. Even so, relief officials say they
cannot meet the deadline, as more than 22,000 people were
still in shelters in 14 states on Wednesday.
The reliance on hotels has been necessary, housing
advocates say, because the Federal Emergency and Management
Agency has had problems installing mobile homes and travel
trailers for evacuees and has been slow to place victims in
apartments that real estate executives say are available
throughout the southeast.
Hotel costs are expected to grow to as much as $425 million
by Oct. 24, a large expense never anticipated by the FEMA,
which is footing the bill. While the agency cannot say how
that number will affect overall spending for storm relief,
critics point out that hotel rooms, at an average cost of $59
a night, are significantly more expensive than apartments and
are not suitable for months-long stays.
Officials in cities from Dallas to Atlanta, which are
accommodating thousands of evacuees, give credit for getting
90 percent of the victims out of shelters. But they say they
are frustrated by FEMA's record in helping place people in
more adequate housing.
``Deplorable. Disappointing. Outrageous. That is how I feel
about it,'' said the Atlanta mayor, Shirley Franklin, a
Democrat, in a telephone interview on Wednesday. ``The
federal response has just been unacceptable. It is like
talking to a brick wall.''
Even conservative housing experts have criticized the Bush
administration's handling of the temporary housing response.
``I am baffled,'' said Ronald D. Utt, a former senior
official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development
and Reagan administration aide who is now a senior fellow at
the Heritage Foundation, the conservative research
organization. ``This is not incompetence. This is willful.
That is the only way I can explain it.''
Nicol Andrews, a FEMA spokeswoman, said the federal
government was moving as quickly as it could to find
temporary housing. But the scale of the catastrophe has made
it difficult, she said.
``Clearly we have never encountered the size and scope of a
disaster like Hurricane Katrina,'' she said. ``Housing half a
million people is a challenge by any standard.''
The American Red Cross started the hotel program days after
Hurricane Katrina struck, when it became clear that the
shelters it had opened were not adequate to deal with the
600,000 to 700,000 families displaced by the storm, a
spokeswoman, Carrie Martin, said.
The hotel program was intended to last a couple of weeks
but has twice been extended by FEMA. Now Red Cross officials
are saying there is no end to the initiative, which pays for
192,424 rooms in 9,606 hotels across the United States, in a
range of cities as diverse as Casper, Wyo., and Anchorage,
Alaska.
Congress last month appropriated a $62.3 billion for the
relief effort, most of it designated for FEMA. The agency had
told Congress that it expected to spend more than $2 billion
to buy up to 300,000 travel trailers and mobile homes to
house displaced residents. The agency also planned to give
out $23.2 billion in assistance to victims for emergency
needs and for temporary housing and housing repairs.
But the temporary housing program has been troubled since
the start, observers say. Instead of setting up as many as
30,000 trailers and mobile homes every two weeks, as of
Tuesday, just 7,308 were occupied. Even counting berths on
the four ships that FEMA has leased and rooms on military
bases and elsewhere, the agency has provided only 10,940
occupied housing units for victims in the three Gulf states.
FEMA, reacting to criticism that it might create super-
concentrated slums, has scaled back plans to build so-called
FEMA villes with up to 25,000 trailers.
Even a less ambitious plan--complexes with 200 or so
units--has been slow to unfold. FEMA officials cite the
reluctance by some rural parishes or landowners to welcome
evacuees.
But landowners and some state officials in Louisiana blame
bureaucratic fumbles by FEMA. Bill Bacque, co-owner of a
trailer park in Lafayette, La., said he offered property for
45 trailers within days of the storm. Negotiations with FEMA
were still under way this week, he said. ``Things do not move
fast,'' Mr. Bacque said.
Late last month, FEMA began handing out $2,358 for three
months so that families in shelters or hotels could rent
apartments.
To date, more than 415,000 households have been approved
for that aid, totaling $979 million. But FEMA officials
cannot say how many families have used the money for
apartments, or simply spent it on expenses while also living
in a government-financed hotel room.
David Degruy, his wife, Debra, and their six children, of
New Orleans, have done just that while staying in two rooms
paid for by FEMA at the Greenway Inn and Suites in Houston.
``We're trying to save the money so that when do get in a
house we'll be able to buy things,'' Mr. Degruy said. ``We
eat out sometimes, we buy clothes, personal hygiene things.''
Some officials criticize FEMA for a passive approach in
dealing with cities and hurricane evacuees.

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Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who
sits on a House panel that helps oversee the housing effort,
complained that it was unreasonable for the federal
government to expect that a family led by jobless parents,
with no car, little savings and little familiarity with a new
city could independently find an apartment.
``The administration's policy is incoherent and socially
seriously flawed,'' he said in an interview.
Real estate officials say that although there are few
available apartments in Louisiana, there are many vacancies
in apartment buildings across the South, including perhaps
300,000 in Texas alone.
``What are these guys doing?'' Jim Arbury, an official with
the National Multi Housing Council, a group of building
owners and managers, said of FEMA. ``All of this housing is
available now.''
Some housing experts say the Bush administration should
follow the approach taken after the 1994 Northridge
earthquake in Los Angeles, when displaced residents were
given prepaid housing vouchers instead of having to negotiate
and pay a lease on their own.
``We are wasting money hand over fist because we did not
deploy the right policy tools,'' said Bruce Katz, a vice
president at the Brookings Institution, a liberal research
group in Washington. ``We could have thousands, if not tens
of thousands of families, in stable permanent housing right
now. And we would not have to turn to these costly measures,
like hotels, motels and cruise ships.''
Ms. Andrews, the FEMA spokeswoman, defended the housing
policy. ``The program is designed to give those who it
affects the most the control over their own lives,'' she
said.
Some cities, including Houston and San Antonio, have taken
an active role in helping families find housing by creating
their own voucher program, identifying vacant units, paying
for six-month leases and then turning over the unit to the
evacuees. FEMA has promised to reimburse the cities for the
housing costs.
``You can't just give people a check and say, `Good luck,
we will see you,' '' said San Antonio's assistant city
manager, Christopher J. Brady. ``It would not be a sufficient
solution.''
FEMA officials said other cities can set up similar
programs. But Mayor Franklin of Atlanta and Mayor Laura
Miller of Dallas have said they cannot do so without being
paid in advance by the federal government.
Expressing frustration that she could not offer more help
to the 39,000 displaced people who have come to Georgia,
Mayor Franklin said FEMA's expectations that her city could
advance housing money were unrealistic.
``Our government is not large enough to do that,'' she
said. ``We can't absorb the costs.''
____

[From the Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2005]

Housing Aid Called Too Much, Too Little

(By Spencer S. Hsu)

fema critics cite waste as evacuees stran to pay rent

The Federal Emergency Management Agency's evolving efforts
to shelter Hurricane Katrina victims continue to waste huge
amounts of taxpayer dollars and could soon leave many
evacuees short of money and facing eviction, according to
renter advocates and housing industry officials.
The concerns focus on FEMA's extension of an $8.3 million-
a-day program to house 549,000 people in hotel rooms beyond
an Oct. 15 deadline and its handling of a new rental
assstance program, which offers displaced families a lump sum
of $2,358 for three months' rent. The disaster agency has
previously drawn criticism for its troubled $1 billion-plus
effort to house hurricane evacuees in 125,000 trailers.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition, an advocacy
group, said that ecause the rent program is based on the
$786-per-month national median rent for a two-bedroom
apartment--rather than city-by-city rates used by the
Department of Housing and Urban Development--many evacuees
taken to more costly cities are already short on cash.
Typically, the coalition said, renters must pay a deposit and
first month's rent; it cited Washington as an example, where
the average rent is about $1,100 and where about 5,000 people
have been resettled.
Apartment owners say they also are encountering problems
collecting rents because FEMA hands money directly to storm
victims, instead of using housing vouchers or payments to
landlords as HUD does for some low-income renters. Some
families that left their homes with only what they could
carry have used FEMA's cash for food, clothing and
transportation.
``We felt if we did the right thing, FEMA would step up and
provide housing assistance for all these folks. Here we are
four weeks later, and a lot of these folks simply do not have
rent money to pay,'' said Kirk H. Tate, a member of Houston's
Katrina housing task force and a parter at Orion Real Estate
Services Inc., which manages 12,000 apartments in the city.
Houston authorities welcomed 20,000 Katrina households into
rental units in as few as three or four days, mostly waiving
deposit and rent requirements, Tate said. ``The last thihg we
want to have to do is ask for them to move out when they
can't pay the rent,'' he said, but property owners have
mortgages, utilities and expenses to pay and may need to
start eviction proceedings by month's end.
Benicha McCraney, 49, left New Orleans two days before
Hurricane Katrina with two children and a suitcase holding
three days' worth of clothes. Now the family lives in a
$1,096-per-month two-bedroom apartment in a suburban Houston
complex called Tranquility Bay.
She received $2,358 for three months from FEMA but
estimates her monthly expenses at about $1,700.
With $1,500 in savings and her husband, a police officer,
fearing he will be laid off in New Orleans, McCraney is
worried about paying for children's clothes when the weather
cools.
McCraney is not facing eviction yet, but having lost her
home to floodwaters, she is postponing replacing the worn
tires on her car. ``I would like to stay here as long as I
can,'' she said. ``I don't have anywhere else in the world to
go.''
The warnings come as a wide range of players in the
nation's housing and lodging industries express mounting
exasperation with FEMA's shifting efforts to cope with the
evacuee crisis. Although the administration has proposed
cruise ships, trailers, President Bush's nascent ``urban
homesteading'' initiative, hotels and now apartment grants,
they say FEMA is ignoring advice from experts inside and
outside the government.
``The normal FEMA programs just aren't working. They may be
good for 1,500, 2,000 people, but when you're talking a half
a million, they do not work,'' said Douglas S. Culkin,
executive vice president of the National Apartment
Association.
Culkin said 1 million rental units are vacant in the
southeastern United States at half the rate of FEMA's $1,770-
a-month hotel program. He called the current spending rate of
$250 million a month ``a horrendous waste of tax dollars.''
Linda Couch, deputy director of the low-income housing
coalition, agreed that taxpayer money could be saved by using
vacant apartment units. ``If the federal government made a
choice to subsidize them at the rents they are available at,
it looks like it still would be less than having them live in
a hotel,'' she said.
FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews said that the agency's
rental aid program can be extended to 18 months. If renters
keep receipts and show that their housing costs exceed $786 a
month, FEMA will allow them to spend more on rent, Andrews
said. But Congress has set a $26,200 limit per family for
FEMA aid of all kinds, including home repairs, for Katrina
victims.
Andrews acknowledged that the trailer process is not moving
as fast as the agency would like. She declined to comment on
criticism from the housing sector but noted that FEMA is
establishing huge new programs and that shelter populations
have dropped 75 percent in two weeks.
The scale of Katrina's exodus is immense and growing. On
Thursday, FEMA's acting director, R. David Paulison,
increased the agency's estimate of the number of families
expected to need housing for up to several months, from
300,000 to between 400,000 and 600,000.
FEMA said Friday that the number of people in temporary
shelters, which Bush has pledged to clear by mid-October, has
fallen to 31,500 from a peak of more than 300,000. FEMA is
providing rental assistance to 412,000 displaced households
and has registered 2 million storm victims.
``The recovery process for Hurricane Katrina will be
neither fast nor easy,'' Paulison said. ``Many . . .
rightfully are concerned about the cost, as we all are.''
Critics in Congress and elsewhere have focused on large
trailer contracts and the difficulty FEMA has encountered in
acquiring trailers and sites for trailer parks. So far about
6,800 FEMA trailers are occupied by emergency workers and
evacuees across the Gulf Coast. Some also have criticized
spending $236 million to house 7,000 people on three Carnival
Cruise Lines ships.
Last week, three major national apartment owner
associations criticized FEMA for ignoring their offers of
help and expressed bewilderment over why the agency extended
the hotel program. The average room rate of $59 per day is
more than twice the cost of rental vouchers in HUD's low-
income Section 8 housing program and the rental aid provided
by FEMA and HUD to Katrina victims. It also exceeds the
median monthly rent in some of the nation's most expensive
cities.
The groups cited 50,000 vacant apartments in Dallas-Fort
Worth alone and 1 million in the southeastern United States
at rents that range from $700 to $1,200 a month-- vacancy
totals confirmed by others outside the industry.
``Our message is simple. There are currently tens of
thousands of available rental units that would offer evacuees
the opportunity to more quickly recover from their
devastating losses,'' the National Multi Housing Council, the
National Apartment Association and the National Leased
Housing Association wrote to HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson
and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. ``To extend
the hotel program indefinitely prolongs homelessness and
makes no sense,'' they said.
Housing officials point to the city of Dallas's Project
Exodus as an example of better planning. It has placed about
1,000 people in 481 apartments using $2.5 million raised
through contributions by individuals and large companies. The
units rent for HUD market rates, including utilities.
Although city funds are set to expire after 60 days, Dallas
expects FEMA to pick up costs after that.

[[Page S11508]]

Houston also has agreed to pay up to 12 months of housing
assistance for Katrina victims, hoping for FEMA
reimbursement, Tate said.
About 37,000 evacuees are in Dallas area hotel rooms, said
Miller, and more than 150,000 evacuees are in rooms across
Texas.
``We said, We can't wait for FEMA,''' said Dallas Mayor
Laura Miller. ``What worries me is reading about all these
other cities who are waiting for trailer homes to show up so
they can re-create these trailer villages. That would be the
worst thing you can do.''

Mr. CARPER. While it is certainly reasonable to house evacuees in
hotels on a short-term basis, this situation is simply unacceptable
nearly 2 months after Katrina struck the coast. I am told that real
estate and housing experts have pointed out that perhaps hundreds of
thousands of suitable and likely much more affordable apartments could
be had throughout the gulf coast region. I am certain that they could
probably be had for significantly less than the cost of a hotel room.
In addition, the Washington Post recently reported that a joint FEMA-
HUD rental assistance program is likely wasting millions of dollars. In
at least some cases, the program is not doing much to help evacuees in
some parts of the country find suitable housing.
Each evacuee participating in the voucher program, according to the
Post, initially receives a subsidy amount based on the national median
rent for 3 months. In some parts of the country, such as Houston, the
national median rent probably isn't enough to find suitable housing. In
other communities, it might be more than enough. This means that
Katrina evacuees in some parts of the country may be getting more
assistance than they need, and those in higher cost areas might not be
getting what they need to provide for their families.
It has been suggested that the solution to the housing crisis in the
gulf might be to place evacuees in trailers or some other form of
manufactured housing. But I have heard reports that FEMA is buying many
of its trailers straight off the lot at retail prices. I have also
heard that there are thousands of trailers just sitting around
unoccupied in vacant lots. We have all heard stories about how
miserable some of the trailer camps are to live in that FEMA has set up
in places like Florida.
We can do better than this. FEMA owes it to Katrina victims and to
the American taxpayers to find a more comfortable, less expensive way
to house our fellow Americans who are going through such a difficult
time right now. That is why I am sending a letter today to Acting FEMA
Director David Paulison to ask him to tell us exactly what FEMA's plan
is to get Katrina evacuees out of hotels and into more stable living
environments so that they can begin the process of bringing their lives
as close to normal as possible.
The problems and the waste we are seeing in FEMA's Katrina housing
program remind me yet again that we need to do some work to ensure that
the money we are spending to help Katrina victims is spent wisely and
effectively. To date we have approved in the Congress $62 billion for
Katrina. More money will probably be needed, but given the number of
stories we see almost on a daily basis now about financial
mismanagement, about confusion at FEMA, and the Department of Homeland
Security, we should not be writing a blank check.
A recovery effort this large needs additional oversight to make sure
the money we are spending is going to the people who need it most, to
make sure we eliminate wasteful spending and get the most bang for our
buck, and to make sure we reduce the potential for fraud.
It is my understanding that we are not sure what legislation is
coming to the floor next week. I have a suggestion. The Homeland
Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, of which I am a member,
approved two bills a couple of weeks ago that I believe are desperately
needed to make sure Katrina recovery funds are spent properly and go to
the people who are most in need.
One of the bills we passed would appoint a chief financial officer to
oversee the day-to-day use of Federal funds in the cleanup and
reconstruction efforts underway in the gulf. I cosponsored this
legislation with Senator Coburn of Oklahoma and Senator Obama of
Illinois. It enjoys bipartisan support, including the cosponsorship, I
believe, of both the Republican leader and Democratic leader of the
Senate.
The chief financial officer would oversee the various Federal
agencies involved in the recovery efforts and hold them financially
accountable. The CFO would be Congress's personal watchdog, issuing
periodic financial reports about whether the money is going to the
people who need it the most and whether it is being used to hire local
workers who need jobs.
The second bill would expand the authority of the inspector general
assigned to Iraq reconstruction to oversee the Katrina recovery
efforts. The expanded office would audit recovery operations and
investigate allegations of waste, fraud, and inefficiency.
Together, these two bills would better protect American taxpayers and
bring some much-needed accountability to the recovery efforts.
We shouldn't settle for the stories we see in the papers every day
about the lack of decent housing for Katrina victims or the lack of
competition for Federal contracts. We shouldn't read stories about
waste and resign ourselves to the fact that waste is just something
that happens in the Federal Government. We can do better, and we must.
We owe it to the American taxpayers to do better, and we owe it to
Katrina's victims to do better.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I ask permission to speak in morning
business until Senator Brownback arrives.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

____________________