Pause, on pause

FEMA tries to pause La. role
Agency says state not engaged enough in long-term planning
By MIKE DUNNE
Advocate staff writer
Published: Feb 11, 2006
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has told Gov. Kathleen Blanco that state and local officials need to take on more leadership in planning Louisiana’s long-term recovery.

This week, FEMA put out a notice to workers that it would put on “pause” the long-term recovery planning process known as ESF-14. It is designed to spur not only recovery but to build in elements that would avert or mitigate damages from future disasters.

FEMA told workers the pause was for at least two weeks. However, officials at the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the advisory partner in the process, were stumped when they started getting calls about the “pause.”

Late Friday, LRA spokeswoman Pam Laborde said the “pause is on pause.” Apparently, when word reached Blanco on Friday, she called Acting FEMA Director R. David Paulison to find out what was happening.

James McIntyre, a spokesman for the FEMA Baton Rouge recovery field office, said Blanco and Paulison “came to an agreement” to continue the process but “with state and local governments taking more ownership of the process and the federal government taking more of a support role than a lead role.”

Earlier in the day, FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews in Washington, D.C., said the long-term recovery planning process was “paused” because of a lack of “engagement” in the state.

The process has worked well in Florida and elsewhere after disasters and is working in Mississippi, but is not working in Louisiana, Andrews said.

Later in the day, McIntyre said FEMA and state officials will meet next week to work out how the state will take more ownership. He was unsure when that might happen.

Meanwhile, Blanco and the Legislature are meeting in another special session on hurricane recovery related issues.

Laborde said the LRA has “been an active partner” with FEMA, working in 26 parishes and using 50 state employees on the effort. The LRA Foundation generated extra private funds to hire a “dream team” of planners to advise the process. Planning meetings have been going on this week in Lake Charles and are planned for next week in Abbeville.

Local plans are due to the state by the end of March and will be put into a state plan that will address housing and community development, environmental and coastal issues, human services, transportation and infrastructure and economic development.

An environmental activist who has been following the process, Darryl Malek-Wiley of the Sierra Club, said midday Friday that, “I am very disappointed this process has been put on hold.”

The state helped host a series of meetings in four states on Jan. 21 to get public input on what the recovery priorities should be. Levee protection, affordable housing, jobs and better schools surfaced as the main topics.

Malek-Wiley attended one of those meetings in San Antonio where people “were very engaged. I did hear that no public attended a meeting in Shreveport.”

He questioned whether sufficient effort has been put into the process to reach out and engage residents.

The people attending in San Antonio, many of them evacuees bused to the meeting from shelters, “were pleased with the discussion” and the ability to take part in the process, he said.

The ESF-14 process is important because “any future federal dollars can be directed by this plan,” Malek-Wiley said.

“At one session, a FEMA representative talked about building a new 20,000-unit housing development at Lapalco Boulevard and U.S. Highway 90 (on the west bank of Jefferson Parish) and we were able to point out that area is very low,” Malek-Wiley said.