U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

WASHINGTON : 

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office

Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512–1800; DC area (202) 512–1800

Fax: (202) 512–2104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC 20402–0001

35–527 PDF 2008

S. Hrg. 110–302

BEYOND TRAILERS: CREATING A MORE FLEXIBLE,

EFFICIENT, AND COST-EFFECTIVE FEDERAL

DISASTER HOUSING PROGRAM

HEARING

BEFORE THE

AD HOC SUBCOMMITTEE ON DISASTER RECOVERY

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON 

HOMELAND SECURITY AND 

GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

APRIL 24, 2007

Available via http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate

Printed for the use of the Committee on Homeland Security 

and Governmental Affairs

(

(II)

COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut, Chairman 

CARL LEVIN, Michigan 

DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii 

THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware 

MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas 

MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana 

BARACK OBAMA, Illinois 

CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri 

JON TESTER, Montana 

SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine 

TED STEVENS, Alaska 

GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio 

NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota 

TOM COBURN, Oklahoma 

PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico 

JOHN WARNER, Virginia 

JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire

MICHAEL L. ALEXANDER, Staff Director 

BRANDON L. MILHORN, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel 

TRINA DRIESSNACK TYRER, Chief Clerk 

AD HOC SUBCOMMITTEE ON DISASTER RECOVERY 

MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana, Chairman 

THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware 

MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas 

TED STEVENS, Alaska 

PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico

DONNY WILLIAMS, Staff Director 

CHIP ABERNATHY, Minority Staff Director 

AMANDA FOX, Chief Clerk 

(III)

C O N T E N T S 

Opening statements: Page 

Senator Landrieu .............................................................................................. 1

Senator Stevens ................................................................................................ 5

Senator Pryor .................................................................................................... 6

WITNESSES

TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2007

David E. Garratt, Acting Assistant Administrator, Disaster Assistance Directorate, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Department of Homeland Security ........................................................................................................ 8

Robert P. Hebert, Director of Hurrican Recovery, Charlotte County, Florida ... 10

Sheila Crowley, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer, National Low 

Income Housing Coalition ................................................................................... 12

William J. Croft, Director of Response and Recovery, The Shaw Group, Inc ..... 15

Matthew A. Jadacki, Deputy Inspector General for Disaster Assistance Oversight, U.S. Department of Homeland Security .................................................. 24

Gil H. Jamieson, Associate Deputy Administrator, Gulf Coast Recovery, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Department of Homeland Security ......................................................................................................................... 26

Major General John R. D’Araujo, Jr., (U.S. Army-Retired), Former Primary 

Selecting Official, Alternative Housing Pilot Program, Federal Emergency 

Management Agency, U.S. Department of Homeland Security ....................... 27

Andr ́es Duany, Founding Principal, Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company .......... 29

John Badman III, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, RE: Formed Systems, 

Inc. ......................................................................................................................... 32

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WITNESSES

Badman, John III: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 32

Prepared statement with an attachment ....................................................... 103

Croft, William J.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 15

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 88

Crowley, Sheila, Ph.D.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 12

Prepared statement with attachments ........................................................... 56

D’Araujo, Major General John R., Jr.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 27

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 99

Duany, Andre ́s: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 29

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 102

Garratt, David E.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 8

Joint prepared statement with Gil Jamieson ................................................. 41

Hebert, Robert P.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 10

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 50

Jadacki, Matthew A.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 24

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 92

Jamieson, Gil H.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 26

Joint prepared statement with David Garratt ............................................... 41

Page

IV

APPENDIX 

Letters submitted for the Record from: 

The National Association of Realtors .............................................................. 114

Henry J. Rodriguez, President, St. Bernard Parish ...................................... 117

Maria Foscarinis, Executive Director, National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty ........................................................................................... 124

Jonathan T.M. Reckford, CEO, Habitat for Humanity International .......... 129

Barbara R. Arnwine, Executive Director, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil 

Rights Under Law ......................................................................................... 132

Clovice Lewis, CEO, Advanced Housing Technologies, LLC ........................ 144

Questions and responses for the Record from: 

Mr. Garratt ....................................................................................................... 147

(1)

BEYOND TRAILERS: CREATING A MORE 

FLEXIBLE, EFFICIENT, AND COST-EFFECTIVE 

FEDERAL DISASTER HOUSING PROGRAM 

TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2007

U.S. SENATE,

AD HOC SUBCOMMITTEE ON DISASTER RECOVERY

OF THE COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY

AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS,

Washington, DC. 

The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:30 a.m., in Room 

SD–342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Mary Landrieu, 

Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding. 

Present: Senators Landrieu, Pryor, and Stevens. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN LANDRIEU 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Good morning. The Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery will come to order. I thank my colleagues Senator 

Stevens and Senator Pryor for joining us this morning, and I thank 

the panels for being available. 

We have two excellent panels to talk about a very important aspect of the recovery, which is housing, but transitional and temporary housing, some of the problems associated with trailers and 

some of the options that we have for moving to a more effective 

procedure. 

Before we start, I will give a brief opening statement and then 

ask my colleagues to join me, and then I would be happy to hear 

the testimony from the panelists assembled. 

One of the quotes that I came across which was stirring to me 

was one by Mary Comerio, a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, who studied disaster recovery 

agrees, noting, ‘‘The U.S. is facing a situation similar to what many 

developing countries have faced after massive disasters: How to 

house large displaced populations. The solution is often to lay down 

as many units of housing in a grid as quickly as possible. This is 

great for politicians and terrible for the people who end up living 

there.’’

Another quote that caught my attention was, ‘‘Katrina taught us 

much about ourselves, but for all that New Orleans lays claim to 

eccentric ways and a special place in our culture, it is at heart an 

American city—a great American city now testing the greatness of 

America to save it for and from itself.’’

As I have said many times, this disaster did not affect just New 

Orleans. It just happens to be the largest city that was affected, a 

2

city that once had 460,000 people that today is housing less than 

200,000. 

The Federal Disaster Housing Program, in my view, is inflexible, 

wasteful, and unimaginative. It is a program full of inefficient provisions that cause difficulties to disaster victims and cost taxpayers 

millions of dollars. In Hurricane Katrina, 205,000 homes were completely destroyed in Louisiana and 68,729 in Mississippi, displacing 

nearly 605,000 people. Estimates show as much as $82 billion in 

property damage, with insured losses exceeding $40 billion. Then 

4 weeks later, Hurricane Rita made landfall near Texas and Louisiana, causing approximately $10 billion in estimated damage, destroyed 23,600 homes. 

The Trailer Program makes trailers available to eligible applicants as soon as they are shipped and installed. The program is designed to last 18 months, but that time period is allowed to be extended if the President decides to do so. In February, the 18-month 

deadline passed. President Bush extended it for 6 months. That obviously may be too short to deal with the situation that we are 

dealing with now. 

Disaster assistance is delivered through provisions in Section 408 

of the Stafford Act, which addresses intermediate or transitional 

housing. Obviously, there are many problems, one of which is it is 

capped at $26,000 per family, regardless of whether you are a family of one or a family of ten, which makes virtually no sense. 

Today there are 9,412 people in Louisiana and 557 people in Mississippi receiving direct assistance and rentals. There are 56,000 

people in Louisiana in trailers and 27,000 in Mississippi in trailers. 

There have been significant problems with the management of this 

program, which range from site locations to multiple trailer parks 

to the situation in Arkansas, which I am sure my colleague, Senator Pryor, will address, trailers deteriorating in an open field at 

a great waste to taxpayers, and frustrating to all those trying to 

find appropriate housing and shelter for people in such desperate 

need. It is obvious to me that this transitional housing program is 

grossly flawed. It needs to be basically completely rewritten. 

So the first panel will address the current program. On the second panel, we will hear from former Federal officials associated 

with the program that we asked to test out some new and alternative models and what happened when this directive went to the 

Executive Branch. 

I will submit the rest of my statement for the record, and I will 

just end with, we have got a popular saying in the South: ‘‘You can 

put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig.’’ You can put porches or 

air conditioning in a trailer, but if it is still on wheels, it is still 

a trailer, and we need to talk about how to get a better system of 

temporary and transitional housing for the hundreds of thousands 

of people that are desperate for us to get it right. 

[The prepared statement of Chairman Landrieu follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT SENATOR LANDRIEU 

Today we will talk about perhaps one of the most pressing of disaster recovery 

issues: Disaster housing. The 2005 hurricane season exposed our methods and approaches as narrow-minded and uncreative. It became clear—quickly—that America 

has not taken the time to truly consider what can happen when an even larger caVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:56 Mar 06, 2008 Jkt 037358 PO 00000 Frm 00006 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6621 P:\DOCS\35527.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
3

tastrophe strikes and millions of individuals are forced from their homes indefinitely. 

In Hurricane Katrina, 205,330 homes were destroyed in Louisiana and 68,729 in 

Mississippi, displacing nearly 605,000 people. Estimates show as many as $82 billion in property damage with insured losses exceeding $40 billion. Then, to add insult to injury, Hurricane Rita displaced many of those same people again. Hurricane 

Rita made landfall near the Texas and Louisiana Border causing approximately $10 

billion in estimated property damage. Hurricane Rita created and caused significant 

damage from Alabama to eastern Texas and caused flooding in some areas of Louisiana that had seen flooding from Hurricane Katrina about a month earlier. Hurricane Rita severely damaged or destroyed more than 23,600 housing units in Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas. The storms of the 2005 hurricane season 

brought about perhaps the greatest housing challenge faced in this country’s history. 

As the levees broke and our communities filled with water, people had to wade 

out of their homes, taking whatever belongings they could physically carry with 

their hands, and loading their elderly relatives on makeshift rafts. As these people 

tried to reestablish their lives, they made their homes temporarily with relatives, 

with friends, in hotels, and on cruise ships. Then, they were told, they would be 

given FEMA trailers. The trailer program makes trailers available to eligible applicants as soon as they are shipped and installed. The program is designed to last 

18 months, but that time period is allowed to be extended if the President decides 

to do so. In February, the 18 month deadline passed and President Bush extended 

it for 6 months—a ridiculously short amount of time for a disaster recover expected 

to last another 10 years. 

Disaster housing assistance is delivered through provisions in Section 408 of the 

Stafford Act, which addresses intermediate- to long-term housing needs. Section 408 

assistance is referred to as the Individual and Households Program (IHP), which 

provides both financial and direct assistance to approved applicants. 

• IHP’s financial assistance provides up to $26,200 for home repair, home replacement, and 

• ‘‘Other Needs Assistance,’’ which includes replacing clothes, TV’s, furniture 

etc.

That $26,200 cap also includes rental payments for individuals unable to remain 

in their homes following a disaster. IHP’s direct assistance program enables the 

President to provide dwellings for individuals and has traditionally used trailers 

and mobile homes as the model. 

According to a March 25th FEMA document:

• Rental assistance is being provided to: 

• 9,412 people in Louisiana and 

• 557 in Mississippi. 

• Direct assistance in the form of trailers and mobile homes is being provided 

to: 

• 56,668 people in Louisiana and 

• 27,198 in Mississippi.

These are still huge numbers nearly 2 years away from the storms. 

There have been significant problems with the management of FEMA’s trailer 

program, which range from problems locating sites for multi-trailer ‘‘parks’’ for large 

groups of disaster victims, to problems maintaining the parks, to issues with utility 

hook ups, and as in Arkansas, problems with FEMA’s storage of thousands of trailers which are wasting away. 

To be sure, FEMA housed a historic number of individuals through its trailer program. Because of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, FEMA made the decision on August 31, 2005, to procure 20,000 manufactured housing units, for approximately $1 

billion, to address anticipated housing needs and planned to purchase over 100,000 

units. By September 6, 2005, FEMA’s priority issues in Louisiana were stabilizing 

shelter operations and food distribution; in Mississippi it was supporting shelters 

and the relocating of evacuees as well as identifying emergency group sites for travel trailers; and in Alabama it was coordinating the installation of travel trailers on 

individual private sites and developing group sites. FEMA began moving approximately 5,000 manufactured homes from its inventory to staging areas, had 60,000 

travel trailers being produced at the rate of approximately 120 per day, and awarded a contract for 1,500 modular structures. The first family to be placed in a travel 

trailer occurred 12 days after the disaster was declared, but it would be hundreds 

of days before large numbers began to be moved. 

4

FEMA experienced difficulty in identifying acceptable sites to place units and was 

slow in identifying applicants to occupy units. For example, several sites initially 

identified by FEMA in Louisiana to place multiple units were not well coordinated 

with local officials, and local officials determined placement was not acceptable. Because of their lack of planning and preparation, FEMA over purchased manufactured homes and they also purchased the wrong type of homes. FEMA regulations 

prohibit using manufactured homes in flood plains; therefore, the manufactured 

homes and modular homes cannot be used where most needed, i.e., in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi. In the most famous case, due to FEMA’s failure to procure 

the proper types of manufactured homes, thousands were left in a lot in Arkansas 

to rot and waste away. Many remain in that same spot as we speak. 

Before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, housing 40,000 individuals in trailers was 

a record number and had pushed FEMA to its limits. However, after the storms of 

2005, over 120,000 were needed. 

We have invited Dave Garratt, the acting FEMA official in charge of this program. We will ask him to address some of the concerns that have become apparent 

through press articles and other reports of issues and concerns facing the program 

participants. We will also ask that he provide a report on the progress of the development and implementation of the National Disaster Housing Strategy and the Individuals and Households Pilot Program, both created as part of the Homeland Security Appropriations Act of 2007 enacted late last year. We will hear from Henry 

‘‘Junior’’ Rodriguez, President of St. Bernard Parish, who will provide a State perspective. He will talk about his experiences with FEMA and the program, specifically as it relates to trailers. We will also hear from Sheila Crowley of the National 

Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) who has been an advocate for disaster victims receiving this assistance. The NLIHC worked hand and hand with the Lawyers 

Committee on Civil Rights, who brought a suite against FEMA that resulted in 

FEMA restarting benefits to some of the individuals who lost their assistance in the 

transfer from Section 403 to Section 408 assistance. Lastly, we will hear from Bill 

Croft of the Shaw group who will talk about trailer management from the industry/

contractor point of view. 

After the storms, Congress began to look for ways to provide more flexibility for 

disaster housing. In an attempt to explore new models for transitional housing, in 

the fourth emergency supplemental appropriations bill last year, the Congress created the Alternative Housing Pilot Program (AHPP). This program was created with 

the specific purpose to better serve the housing needs of homeowners displaced by 

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and, at the same time, to spur new alternatives to the 

trailer housing traditionally deployed by FEMA following such disasters. The program received $400 million which was to go to the ‘‘hardest hit areas’’ from the 2005 

hurricanes with the goal both to provide immediate housing for victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and to allow FEMA to look beyond its existing model, which 

only allows for temporary housing projects. 

The program was created with these goals in mind and was given a sizable 

amount of funding with which to fully explore innovative and different ways to move 

away from the standard FEMA approaches. Unfortunately, it is not clear that this 

has been the result. That is why we are holding this hearing today—to see if the 

goals Congress set have been met, to ensure that FEMA is utilizing the taxpayers’ 

funds effectively, to encourage FEMA to fully explore the best new ways to provide 

immediate housing to provide significant benefits and immediate housing for our 

Gulf Coast residents. 

At this point, let me state for the record that I believe FEMA failed miserably 

in effectively utilizing this $400 million and this one-time exemption from Stafford 

Act regulations. FEMA was consistently contacted by Members of Congress to ensure that the AHPP was not a wasted opportunity and I submit for the Record six 

letters to FEMA from the Louisiana Congressional delegation on this issue. I should 

note that the first of these letters was sent on July 7, 2006—at least 3 months before FEMA issued its guidelines for the program. I would also like to submit for the 

record three letters from FEMA. 

FEMA took an opportunity to ‘‘think outside the box’’ and instead created a program that was flawed from the start. First, FEMA created the AHPP as a competitive grant program, which under normal circumstances should allow the best proposals to win out. However, FEMA did not cap individual awards for the program, 

allowing for the possibility, however remote it might have seemed at the time, of 

a ‘‘winner-take-all’’ program. Second, with very vague guidelines, the agency gave 

States 35 days to develop as many project proposals as they wanted to submit by 

October 25, 2006 deadline. For a massive $400 million program, and the fact that 

they were asking for new, innovative proposals this seems to many, including myself, as a very short timeframe in which to fully develop substantive proposals. I 

5

am aware that the State of Louisiana requested an extension of this short deadline, 

but was declined by FEMA. 

Next, after all the States submitted their proposals, 29 in total, FEMA convened 

an AHPP Review Panel in Denver, Colorado in November 2006 to review and rank 

the various proposals. I am pleased that Mr. Duany is here today because when I 

think of someone who should have been on this panel, I think of experts like him 

who can really ‘‘think outside the box’’ and bring a wealth of expertise to the table. 

Not to sell FEMA or DHS staff short, but when I think of new and innovative housing, I do not picture FEMA as being at the cutting edge of new housing alternatives. 

However, on this panel in Denver, FEMA and DHS comprised seven of the eight 

Federal panelists, with only three outside experts. To be fair, the outside experts 

were a State government housing official and experts in architecture and construction from the private industry but the panel was clearly weighted towards Federal 

officials. This begs the inevitable question—‘‘If you are looking for ways to move beyond FEMA trailers, why in the world would you have most of the people who create and use FEMA trailers score proposals?’’ 

Lastly, as I have indicated this panel, compromised of mostly Federal officials, 

ranked and scored the 29 proposals. In the final rankings of these new and different 

proposals, it just so happens that the panel ranked a proposal No. 2, a proposal 

which by FEMA’s own documents is described as:

‘‘Similar to FEMA’s travel trailers with enhancements such as an air conditioned attic for additional storage, Energy Star HVAC system, no roof penetrations, rot/mold/moisture resistant materials, and a front porch. . . . 

Similar to travel trailers the Park Model will remain on wheels permanently.’’

I would like to submit this document for the Record. We have a very popular 

Southern saying that ‘‘You can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig.’’ Well, this 

‘‘pig’’ just happened to request $400 million—the entire allocation for AHPP! So you 

have a panel comprised mostly of Federal officials and few outside experts, it is not 

surprising they liked a proposal to put air conditioners or porches on FEMA trailers! 

However, I believe that does not meet the intent of Congress for this program and, 

in the end, the decision to fund five of the top six competitive proposals, including 

$275 million for this one project, limited the ability to fully explore more competitive 

proposals. This decision, made by one official alone, led to over 70 percent of the 

funds going mostly to two proposals when another option on the table would have 

funded 10 total proposals. It effectively sucked up all the funds which could have 

gone to an additional five proposals in the competitive range. 

So from the start, this program was flawed and I believe that the end result, the 

final allocations of funding is in itself flawed. There was not enough time to truly 

come up with innovative proposals, FEMA did not have enough outside expertise 

on the panel to critically judge the new alternatives on the table, and one person 

was allowed to make a critical $275 million decision. I am hopeful that, out of the 

five ‘‘winning’’ proposals, some great new alternative housing models will come out. 

The residents of the Gulf Coast, as well as those impacted by future disasters, deserve nothing less. 

With that, I turn to my colleagues for their opening statements.

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR STEVENS 

Senator STEVENS. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. I 

would ask to put my opening statement in the record, and I have 

two questions I would like to submit for the record. But I have a 

conflict at 10 o’clock in the Commerce Committee. That was set before this one. I will have to leave soon. I appreciate it. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Correct. 

Senator STEVENS. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Senator Stevens follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR STEVENS 

Hurricane Katrina is the largest natural disaster the United States has ever 

faced. Given both the extensive and intensive nature of the damage, our ability to 

provide emergency housing, among other services, was pushed to its limit. 

When a system is put under this kind of stress, one of the most useful things we 

as a Nation can do is to critically examine our response and to determine how we 

6

can better address our needs in the future. It is one of the things we do best. I hope 

we can begin that self-examination process here today by looking at our response 

to the Hurricane Katrina created housing needs throughout the Gulf Coast region 

and by beginning to identify where we need to change our response methodology. 

In particular, I want to hear more about the possible replacements to traditional 

FEMA trailers that are supposed to be developed through the Alternative Housing 

Pilot Program. I do not need to tell you that those trailers would not work in Alaska 

or any number of places in the lower 48 that experience severe winter conditions. 

Furthermore, we all know that trailers are useless where there are no roads, whether that location is bush Alaska where the nearest road may be hundreds of miles 

away, or a barrier island on the East Coast cut off by the destructive force of a hurricane. I want to know if these needs are being addressed. 

This Alternative Housing Pilot Program is our first attempt at making our overall 

disaster housing program more responsive to the actual needs of our fellow Americans and, even though the program has just started, we need to examine whether 

we are going to get a true alternative to trailers for our $400 million. 

I look forward to hearing from the Federal officials who administer both the current housing program and the new alternative program, but more importantly we 

need to hear from the beneficiaries of these programs as to what kind of real benefit 

they are actually receiving. 

In conclusion, I look forward to learning more about the problems we faced and 

are still facing after Hurricane Katrina and how we are changing our response system to ensure that FEMA will better provide for our housing needs both for this 

disaster and future ones.

Senator Pryor. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PRYOR 

Senator PRYOR. Thank you, Madam Chairman. It is an honor to 

serve on this Subcommittee with you. Like Senator Stevens, I have 

a conflict, and will not be able to stay for the duration of the hearing. But I do want to thank you and Senator Stevens for your leadership on this issue. I know that you have given me some flexibility 

here to make the opening statement, and I appreciate that. 

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina revealed gaps in disaster response planning at all levels of government. I think this hearing 

is an important step in analyzing a way forward. Creating a more 

flexible emergency housing program will increase our ability to respond to catastrophic events in a timely and constructive manner. 

As you know, concerns have surfaced regarding FEMA’s purchase of over 10,000 mobile homes and travel trailers in the wake 

of Hurricane Katrina. These homes were purchased at higher-thanmarket prices in a haphazard competitive bidding process. Since 

that time, they have been used inefficiently. Almost 8,000 of them 

are still sitting at the airport in Hope, Arkansas, nearly 2 years 

after the storm. Miscalculation on this scale must not be repeated. 

I believe we should closely examine the way the Federal Government surplus travel trailers and mobile homes are being used 

today. On February 24, an F3 tornado in Arkansas destroyed a 

large part of the city of Dumas in Desha County. In this small 

town of only 5,300 people, the level of damage was immense. Arkansans affected by the storm have already begun the process of 

rebuilding their community. The Federal, State, and local government have some responsibility to assist them to the extent necessary. 

However, on March 8, FEMA declined to declare a tornado-ravaged area in Arkansas a Federal disaster area despite multiple 

phone calls and letters from myself, Governor Beebe, and the entire 

Arkansas delegation. This decision took FEMA 12 days, and it reVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:56 Mar 06, 2008 Jkt 037358 PO 00000 Frm 00010 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 P:\DOCS\35527.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
7

vealed a troubling aspect of the organization’s decisionmaking process. The fact is that FEMA does not have standardized criteria in 

place to determine when a region meets the requisite level of damage for an emergency declaration. 

When pressed by the Arkansas congressional delegation, FEMA 

released 30 mobile homes and travel trailers for use by residents 

in Dumas. This was a good first step, but it did not go far enough. 

Senator Lincoln, Congressman Ross, and I also called on the Small 

Business Administration to make a disaster declaration for the 

purpose of making long-term low-interest loans available to small 

businesses that sustained physical and economic losses from the 

tornadoes. The SBA met our request, and I commend the SBA for 

their support and their rapid response. 

Finally, excess travel trailers and mobile homes pose a serious 

risk to the mobile home market nationwide. My office has been 

given several different explanations as to what will happen to these 

trailers and mobile homes. I hope that the process of disposing of 

these homes can be explained. Any action that would, in effect, collapse the mobile home market and travel trailer market in any region is of concern. 

Now, unfortunately, I cannot stay today, but I am going to submit a number of questions for the record. More or less they focus 

on two broad areas: One is the disposal of surplus property and 

what our policy currently is and what the best public policy should 

be; and second is contracting problems. We saw a lot of contracting 

issues in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and other 

natural disasters, and I have some questions I will submit for the 

record that relate to those. 

Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. I thank both of my colleagues for joining us 

this morning, and they will stay as long as they can. They both 

have conflicting meetings, which sometimes happens here, but they 

have both been excellent in their contributions thus far to this Subcommittee, which just started 2 weeks ago. 

Our first panel is comprised of four expert witnesses. David 

Garratt is responsible for the Federal Government’s Major Disaster 

Assistance Program and Policies, including the Public and Individual Assistance Program. Mr. Garratt, you are the one that runs 

this program that has come under such questioning by this Subcommittee and many others. 

Robert Hebert is the Director of Hurricane Recovery and Community Initiatives for Charlotte County, Florida. After being impacted by several of the 2004 hurricanes that swept across Florida, 

which sometimes gets left out in our discussions—which should not 

because Florida was extremely hard hit in the last several years—

Charlotte County became home to thousands of FEMA trailers 

which housed victims of the disaster. A remote site near the airport 

became known as ‘‘FEMA-ville.’’ It revealed many problems that 

can occur, but Mr. Hebert utilized his diverse background in disaster recovery and business development to help fill some critical 

gaps. He is here to tell his story. 

Sheila Crowley is a Ph.D., President and Executive Officer of the 

National Low Income Housing Coalition. Welcome. She is a trained 

social worker and adjunct faculty member, Virginia Commonwealth 

8

1The joint prepared statement of Mr. Garratt and Mr. Jamieson appears in the Appendix on 

page 41. 

University. She teaches social policy and social justice. Currently, 

she is President of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, 

where she has helped lead the advocacy effort for people with low 

income who were displaced by the hurricane. 

And, finally, William Croft, Director of Response and Recovery 

for the Shaw Group, which is one of our largest contractors, served 

as Director of Hurricane Katrina Housing Task Force following actually for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Prior to that role, he 

served for decades in the U.S. Army and went on to become Assistant Director for the Louisiana Office of Emergency Preparedness. 

He is going to share his perspective from the Shaw Group. 

So why don’t we begin with you, Mr. Garratt. We have asked you 

to keep your statement to about 3 to 5 minutes, if you would. 

TESTIMONY OF DAVID E. GARRATT,1 ACTING ASSISTANT ADMINISTRATOR, DISASTER ASSISTANCE DIRECTORATE, FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY 

Mr. GARRATT. Thank you. Good morning, Madam Chairman, 

Senator Stevens, and Senator Pryor. It is a pleasure to be here 

with you today to discuss the elements and responsibilities of 

FEMA’s temporary housing mission, our progress in addressing the 

temporary housing challenges facing the Gulf Coast, and the status 

of some key housing initiatives. 

First, a brief overview of our housing authorities. Under Section 

408 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, FEMA is authorized to provide individual and household 

assistance to the eligible victims and families of Presidentially declared emergencies and disasters. Broadly speaking, this assistance 

falls into two general categories: Housing assistance and other 

needs assistance. Housing assistance authorized under the Stafford 

Act includes financial rental assistance, home repair assistance, 

home replacement assistance, and direct housing assistance, the 

last usually provided in the form of transportable, manufactured 

housing. Direct housing is only provided as a last resort, when 

other forms of alternative housing are either unavailable or practically unworkable. Other Needs Assistance authorized under the 

Stafford Act includes financial assistance to address disaster-related medical and funeral expenses, replace eligible personal property items, provide transportation, help with moving and storage 

expenses, and meet other serious needs faced by eligible disaster 

victims. 

The Stafford Act as currently written caps the amount of financial assistance, but it allows that amount to be adjusted annually 

for inflation. Financial assistance for disasters declared during fiscal year 2007 is capped at $28,200; however, for victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which were declared in fiscal year 2005, 

that cap is $26,200. This is the maximum amount of non-direct assistance any eligible disaster victim, or household, can receive in a 

given disaster. 

9

In response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, FEMA has provided over $7.5 billion in financial assistance to over 1 million households 

through its Individual Assistance programs. This includes over $5.3 

billion in housing assistance and $1.7 billion in other needs assistance. These numbers include: $2.3 billion of rental assistance, distributed to over 870,000 households. As of March 25, 2007, 32,885 

households continue to receive some form of rental assistance payment. 

Provided over $436 million in home repair payments, helping 

make more than 185,000 Hurricane Katrina- or Hurricane Ritadamaged homes habitable across the Gulf Region. Provided more than $339 million to over 33,000 households to assist them with the purchase of replacement housing. In Louisiana alone, approximately $5.5 billion has been provided 

to individuals and families under our Individual Assistance programs, with more than $270 million distributed since the 1-year 

anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. 

Under the authorities granted to us by the Stafford Act, FEMA 

can provide direct housing support to eligible victims and households either through the lease of existing housing resources, such 

as apartment buildings, or through the provision of manufactured 

housing units, such as travel trailers and mobile homes. Following 

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, both options were employed. Direct 

leases were secured to provide housing to eligible evacuees outside 

the impacted area, and manufactured housing was provided within 

the most heavily damaged areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas. While manufactured housing, particularly travel 

trailers, do not offer all the amenities of a fixed housing resource, 

they nevertheless allow disaster victims who lack alternative options to remain in their communities and close to their jobs, families, and schools, while they pursue a permanent housing solution. 

Over the course of the last 20 months, FEMA has housed more 

than 120,000 households in travel trailers and mobile homes. As of 

April 12, the total number of households currently living in temporary housing has decreased to 83,463, including 54,986 in Louisiana and 26,181 in Mississippi. Eighty-one percent of our temporary housing units are on private sites where individuals are rebuilding their homes. 

However, while we have made and continue to make progress, 

we are not there yet. Recognizing that many Hurricane Katrina 

and Rita victims and households have still not obtained permanent 

housing or achieved self-sufficiency, the President has directed 

FEMA to continue providing housing assistance to all eligible applicants until August 31, 2007. FEMA’s financial and direct housing 

assistance must, by statute, end 18 months after a disaster declaration unless the President grants an extension. The President 

has recognized the need for an extension, and this extension gives 

both disaster victims and assistance providers, at every level of 

government and within the voluntary agency community, additional time to methodically and compassionately help challenged 

victims reach a state of enduring self-sufficiency. 

President Bush, Secretary Chertoff, Administrator Paulison, and 

the men and women of FEMA are dedicated to the mission of disaster and victim recovery and staunchly committed to improving 

10

1The prepared statement of Mr. Hebert appears in the Appendix on page 50. 

the speed, efficiency, and accountability with which we perform 

that mission. That commitment is not only to the victims and communities of those disasters that we expect to face in the future, but 

to those victims and communities still struggling with the personal, 

professional, and social consequences and challenges of past disasters. Together, with our outstanding partners throughout the Federal, State, local, private, and voluntary agency communities, we 

will continue to advance ideas and pursue assistance solutions that 

will effectively, and compassionately, help individuals and communities recover, re-establish, and reclaim their neighborhoods and 

communities. 

Thank you. I look forward to discussing our recovery efforts with 

the Subcommittee. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Thank you. Mr. Hebert. 

TESTIMONY OF ROBERT P. HEBERT,1 DIRECTOR OF 

HURRICANE RECOVERY, CHARLOTTE COUNTY, FLORIDA 

Mr. HEBERT. Good morning, Madam Chairman, Senator Stevens. 

On behalf of Charlotte County, we would like to express our gratitude for the invitation to speak to you today. It is indeed a high 

honor and privilege to share our experiences and offer our input 

into the process, and we are hopeful that this will serve to improve 

the emergency response system that we have. 

To put it in perspective, Charlotte County has about 174,000 

population residents. During the winter season, it expands significantly because of tourists, but at the time that the hurricanes hit, 

that was our base population. So when we talk about this, the magnitude of our problem is proportionally equally or maybe worse 

than some of the other cases that we have had. As you spoke in 

your opening remarks about Florida is kind of left out of some of 

the discussions at this point because Hurricane Katrina caused significantly higher levels of devastation, and I think in the future 

some issues that are going to come up that we do not have a clue 

are going to hit until they actually occur. But we have experienced 

some of that in Charlotte County, so I will just give you a brief 

summary of what we went through. 

Charlotte County with the temporary housing started out with 

2,252 families in FEMA housing. That equated to about 9,000 individuals that lived in trailers of different types. We had 551 mobile 

homes or manufactured homes in one county-owned site near the 

airport that was controlled by FEMA; 75 mobile homes and manufactured homes that were on two commercial mobile home parks in 

the county, in the community; 1,042 travel trailers on private 

sites—and on private sites, they were installed there so that the 

people that lived on those sites could rebuild or rehab their house 

after the hurricane damage that we had in 2004; and we had 584 

travel trailers in commercial travel trailer parks that the families 

did not have a house to go back to. 

That was our beginning problem, but I think the importance of 

the program to us is absolutely critical to start up the recovery 

process in our community. As I said, our population is about 

174,000. We had two neighboring counties that were much smaller 

11

than ours that were much more heavily devastated. Very low to 

moderate-income individuals to begin with, a lot of the rural migrant population lived in De Soto and Hardee County, which are 

our neighbors. So they are still recovering. At this point, we would 

estimate that in Charlotte County we are probably about 70, 75 

complete, and now we are approaching 3 years after Hurricane 

Charley, so it is a long-time process. 

Without the FEMA program or with the Temporary Housing Program as administered by FEMA, there would have been thousands 

more individuals that were homeless and had significant threats to 

life and limb and property damage because they just basically had 

nowhere to go after the storm. Most of them were mobile home 

population that lived in mobile homes in the community. 

I need to preface this by saying the partnership we have with 

FEMA was excellent. We had a lot different experience in the beginning. FEMA brought to bear, as well as our State Emergency 

Response Team through the Governor’s office, brought resources to 

bear in the community we could have never brought here in any 

kind of a time frame. What we had to do is basically ask for it and 

it arrived, and it was helpful that way. 

The overall issues that we had—and I think some have been addressed already—there is significant lack of some of the controls in 

the trailer parks that we had. We had a high crime rate, and that 

we kind of attributed to there was no social structure within the 

trailer park, that there was no human services, there was no vent 

or release for the children, there were no playgrounds, no recreational activities, no community center. It basically was a parking lot with trailers about 10 feet apart that housed all these folks. 

That became problematic because the people then had nowhere 

to go, and because of the size of it, in our community it was a rural 

installation. It was 10 miles away from the nearest store or anything else. That caused significant problems for the people that 

lived there in that in the middle of the night if they ran out of diapers for their child, for example, they would have to travel 10 miles 

to find them. So there was no retail operation that was available 

close enough for them to take care of it, and at some of the peak 

periods when we were paying $2.50 to $3 a gallon of gas and people 

were not able to feed their family, they were not going to get in 

the car to drive to go get diapers in the middle of the night. So that 

just added to the frustration. 

The park was justifiably closed by FEMA for confidentiality 

issues, and that became one of the problems. Social service agencies did not have access to these people to help them get housing 

until about 8 months before the lease was up. If we had been able 

to start that sooner and quicker, we probably could have placed 

people a lot quicker, because one of the things we found, once we 

started to have those folks in those communities, our social service 

agencies, faith-based groups, we placed over 450 families within 60 

days. So our feeling was that if we had been earlier involved, we 

could have probably taken care of the problem sooner and been 

able to remove people quicker and put them into permanent housing solutions. 

One thing we have to remember in all of this process is that 

these are human beings. They are not just cattle that we are trying 

12

1The prepared statement of Ms. Crowley with attachments appears in the Appendix on page 

56. 

to herd. We are trying to find them some kind of a stable, secure 

housing environment, of which we had no inventory of rentals 

within the community. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. If you can wrap up in the next 30 seconds. 

Mr. HEBERT. OK. Very good. I will do kind of a summary thing. 

If the need arises again—and we truly hope and pray that we do 

not have this problem again in Charlotte County with another hurricane, coming into the new season—we would have the following 

recommendations. One is that the trailer complexes should be 

much smaller, 50 or less units, which is probably not possible in 

the bigger devastated areas. But the issue is because of our county 

and the way it is made up, if it is any bigger than that, it has to 

be remote. It has to be away from town because we do not have 

any sites with that kind of a land mass within a community, being 

a coastal community type area. 

We would also feel if we could put them closer to the neighborhoods where the people lived before the hurricane hit, they would 

then have some pride and some ownership in rebuilding that community instead of basically becoming what a lot of people called 

‘‘squatters.’’ They just basically were in the trailers and were not 

going to move until they had to be moved out. 

We would look for stricter criteria for housing eligibility and continuance once the immediate concerns about the disaster have 

passed to do a real evaluation process and look at people and see 

where they are from. We had at one time about 30 percent of the 

occupants of our travel trailers were not from the county or in a 

close community. They just basically came, established a residency 

in the county, and became housing—and most of those were homeless folks before or people that were just looking for free housing 

and got it for 2 years. That is an issue. 

There needs to be a stronger partnership earlier, as I said, with 

the local community and the faith-based groups and the people 

that can help train people into new jobs, train them into being able 

to go to work for somebody if they have not been employed before, 

or work out their legal issues, their financial issues, and help them 

find permanent housing someplace that is adequate to suit them. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. OK. Can you wrap up? 

Mr. HEBERT. Yes, ma’am. I will. 

Our final opinion and point is that FEMA in our opinion is an 

excellent response agency for emergency response. They are not a 

housing corporation, not a financing corporation. That becomes the 

problem as we get further away from the disaster. Thank you. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Thank you very much. Dr. Crowley. 

TESTIMONY OF SHEILA CROWLEY, PH.D.,1 PRESIDENT AND 

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, NATIONAL LOW INCOME HOUSING COALITION 

Ms. CROWLEY. Good morning, Senator Landrieu. Thank you very 

much for the invitation to testify today. 

I would like to open by urging the Senate, urging you and your 

fellow Senators, to take up H.R. 1227, the Gulf Coast Hurricane 

13

Housing Recovery Act of 2007, as quickly as possible. As you know, 

this bill passed the House on March 21. We think it is quite a good 

bill, and many of the provisions in this bill will address some of the 

concerns that I raise today. 

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged nearly a million homes; 

one-third of them were destroyed or severely damaged. And NLIHC 

estimates that over 70 percent of the most severely damaged homes 

were affordable to low-income families prior to the disaster. Given 

the slow pace of rebuilding, the vociferous opposition to development of affordable rental housing in many Gulf Coast communities, 

and the failure of the States to set aside adequate funds for replenishing the lost rental housing stock, we think there is little chance 

that the majority of the homes that once were affordable to low-income families will ever be replaced to pre-storm levels. 

Thus, it is important to understand that unlike less catastrophic 

disasters, when displacement from one’s home is temporary, a large 

number of the people displaced by Hurricane Katrina will never return to their homes. Indeed, a significant percentage of people who 

were displaced now do not intend to return home. A February 2007 

Zogby poll of all evacuees still in the Houston area found that 73 

percent intend to make Houston their home, 14 percent do not, and 

13 percent are unsure. 

It is past time for these people to be in permanent homes. But 

the loss of affordable housing stock caused by Hurricane Katrina 

added to an already acute shortage of housing in the United States 

that the lowest-income people can afford. Nationwide, there are 9 

million extremely low-income renter households and only 6.2 million homes renting at prices that these households can afford, paying the standard of 30 percent of their income for their housing. 

Extremely low-income households are those with incomes at or 

below 30 percent of the area median. In Baton Rouge, that is income of $16,740 a year or less. These are elderly and disabled people on fixed incomes or people in the low-wage workforce. Whatever 

ways low-income families on the Gulf Coast coped in this housing 

market before the disaster are no longer available to them. 

In order to fully comprehend the complexity of what faces us, we 

must both distinguish between the temporary housing response 

and the housing rebuilding response and understand how they are 

interrelated. My written testimony goes into a great deal of detail 

on both, but I am just going to focus my few moments here on temporary housing. 

In the days immediately after the disaster, in response to the 

prospect of tens of thousands of trailers and trailer camps across 

the South, numerous voices from across the political spectrum 

called for housing assistance for displaced people to be in the form 

of Section 8 housing vouchers issued by HUD and managed by local 

public housing agencies. The Senate passed legislation to that effect on September 15, 2005, but the measure was rejected by the 

House and the Administration. Instead, on September 23, 2005, the 

Secretaries of DHS and HUD announced a bifurcated temporary 

rent assistance approach with approximately 32,000 previously assisted HUD households the responsibility of HUD and FEMA having responsibility for everybody else. Attached is a time line that 

describes the ups and downs of the temporary housing programs, 

14

1The timeline list submitted by Ms. Crowley appears in the Appendix on page 66. 

and I have an updated version I would like to submit for the 

record.1

Let me just say that in my 30 years as a social worker, I have 

seen my share of poorly conceived and poorly executed human service programs. Nothing comes close to the horrors of the FEMA rent 

assistance program. The very best description of the program is 

from U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon who ordered FEMA 

to ‘‘free these evacuees from the ‘Kafkaesque’ application they have 

had to endure.’’ Another lawsuit, Ridgely v. FEMA, was filed just 

last Thursday. The complaint includes equally vivid descriptions of 

what people have been put through by FEMA. 

It is impossible for me to know precisely how many low-income 

households remain displaced because FEMA continues to withhold 

detailed and up-to-date information from the public. But my written testimony offers an analysis that gets us to what might be a 

rough estimate. 

We conclude that minimally 55,000 households—and these are 

households, not people, so it is a multiple of 2.5 to almost 3 to get 

to the number of people—to potentially as many as 132,000 total 

households remain displaced and in need of assistance. And we 

know that most of them are quite poor. The February 2007 Zogby 

poll found that 86 percent had household incomes of less than 

$25,000 a year, 69 percent with incomes less than $15,000 a year. 

Prior to their evacuation, 72 percent of these folks were employed. 

Now only 38 percent are employed. 

The disconnect between the reality of being poor and permanently displaced and the fiction that one’s displacement is temporary dictating the terms of housing assistance creates considerable stress and anxiety. 

We offer several recommendations on temporary housing. I will 

close by highlighting three. 

First, transfer all income-eligible households still receiving 

FEMA rental assistance into the Section 8 housing voucher program. Congress must appropriate sufficient funds for these vouchers. We know that this will be less expensive than the FEMA rent 

assistance program. 

Further, offer all low-income households currently living in trailer camps the option of receiving a Section 8 housing voucher instead of the trailer. This will at least allow them the choice of moving elsewhere. H.R. 1227 takes care of both of these provisions. 

Second, require GAO to undertake a comprehensive review of all 

households whose temporary housing assistance from FEMA was 

terminated. This is also provided for in H.R. 1227. For all households who were wrongfully terminated, FEMA should reinstate 

them if they can demonstrate continuing eligibility and financial 

need, and these households should be moved into the Section 8 

housing voucher program. 

And, third, develop and enact legislation that will make HUD responsible for all disaster housing aid needed for 30 days or more 

in future disasters. Thank you. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Thank you, Doctor, and I am looking forward to the next testimony, but I am struck at the completely opVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:56 Mar 06, 2008 Jkt 037358 PO 00000 Frm 00018 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 P:\DOCS\35527.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
15

1The prepared statement of Mr. Croft appears in the Appendix on page 88. 

posite testimony from both of you—you claiming that the program 

is the worst you have seen, and, Mr. Hebert, you are claiming that 

FEMA did an excellent program. So I am going to be interested in 

some questions to see if we can ferret out what might be the accurate view. 

Go ahead, Mr. Croft. 

TESTIMONY OF WILLIAM J. CROFT,1 DIRECTOR OF RESPONSE 

AND RECOVERY, THE SHAW GROUP, INC 

Mr. CROFT. Thank you, Senator. Thanks for the invitation to be 

here today. I would like to set the record straight that I am not 

representing Shaw today. I am representing the Governor’s Hurricane Housing Task Force and some of the processes we went 

through. 

I joined the Governor’s Housing Task Force shortly after Hurricane Katrina made landfall to assist with the Temporary Housing 

Program and served as the Director of the Governor’s Housing 

Task Force from September 2005 to June 2006. 

The task force was formed to facilitate the delivery and management of shelter and transitional housing programs necessary to 

support the displaced disaster victims of Hurricane Katrina, and 

later Hurricane Rita, in Louisiana. There were a number of challenges but the priority was to provide temporary housing for those 

disaster victims who had no housing solution and for those who 

were living in shelters throughout the Nation. 

The primary goal was to provide temporary housing in or as close 

as we could to the evacuated family’s pre-storm neighborhood. For 

the most part, this was an impossible task due to the magnitude 

of the devastation and the duration of effects of the storm on the 

infrastructure. The concept was to bring the disaster area back to 

life in a coordinated effort. Housing of the general population was 

not the only focus. We had to restart business and industry, government, health care, education as well as public safety. 

The task force devised a process flow chart which outlined the 

procedures FEMA contractors should follow for each site in order 

to ensure the local and State governments were included in the decisionmaking process as to size and site selection. We established 

the sites to be Private Sites, Commercial Sites, Group Sites, which 

included Emergency Group Sites and Exclusive Use Sites, and Industry Sites. 

Private Sites are defined as the placement of a travel trailer on 

the property of a homeowner or renter whose dwelling is uninhabitable which allows the family to expedite repairs and rebuilding. 

A Commercial Site is an existing RV or mobile home park with 

available pads that FEMA leases. This was an expedient way to 

move units, primarily mobile homes, with minimal site preparation. 

A Group Site is developed to temporarily house eligible FEMA 

registrants when there is a lack of feasible private sites and commercial sites. Group sites generally consist of 50 to 200 trailers or 

mobile homes in a pre-planned location where the surrounding infrastructure can support such a development. There are three 

16

types: General population sites, emergency group sites, and exclusive use sites. 

An industry site program was intended to provide travel trailers 

to house displaced workers who were essential to the operation of 

business and industry. The State Department of Economic Development identified critical industrial operations such as petrochemical 

plants, distribution centers, and ports which FEMA provided trailers for. The industry was required to install the units and house 

disaster victims only. This restriction slowed the restart process by 

not allowing more flexibility for industry to house other critical 

workers. I applaud FEMA’s ‘‘out of the box’’ approach to this industry program, but the program should be better designed for future 

disasters. 

Realizing the need for a large number of temporary housing 

units outside the disaster area, we began working with FEMA to 

identify sites throughout Louisiana and working with all of the 

host States for help. One of the major challenges in providing housing outside of the disaster area was the impact on the community 

where the temporary housing was to be located. Prior to Hurricane 

Katrina, major cites and rural communities were struggling to 

meet the infrastructure demands of their existing residents. It was 

not prudent to now overburden a community of 1,000 families with 

another 200 or 300 families for which they were unprepared. Louisiana proposed that impact fees be provided by FEMA to assist 

local governments with the capacity to help, as is the usual case 

when a developer proposes new development in a community. This 

was considered, but never approved. 

Another important topic to consider is support of the residents of 

shelters and temporary housing. We continually focused on the 

need for wrap-around services, such as laundries, community facilities, playgrounds, postal facilities, and others, at each location 

where our citizens were located. To merely place hundreds of families in a group site and consider the mission accomplished is wrong 

and shortsighted. We made some progress, but it was not adequate. 

In some cases the hosting area provided services from existing 

strained resources. The FEMA program, through the Stafford Act 

changes or through policy changes, should address this inadequate 

approach. 

It is my opinion that we have an opportunity to create a more 

flexible, efficient, and cost-effective Federal disaster housing program by making a paradigm shift in the definition and execution 

of the mission. We should depart from the current concepts and 

move to a more definable and logical approach. The future program 

should be structured to provide emergency shelters which will provide immediate needs during the emergency phase and for 30 to 60 

days. The extended shelters phase should include large congregate 

care facilities which can support sustained operations, which will 

include travel trailers and hotel/motel rooms, as well as large shelters. The transitional housing program should include mobile 

homes, apartments, prefabricated housing, USDA facilities, HUD 

facilities, and other types which would support a much longer-term, 

even permanent housing. The final and ultimate program is permanent housing. The Federal Government role in all of this is paraVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:56 Mar 06, 2008 Jkt 037358 PO 00000 Frm 00020 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 P:\DOCS\35527.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
17

mount to the success of providing direct housing to disaster victims. 

Thank you for your time and attention to this very important 

topic. I look forward to answering your questions. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Thank you very much, and I thank all of 

you for your testimony. It was well within the time and very specific and appropriate. 

Mr. Hebert, let me ask you this, if I could. Having lived through 

many hurricanes myself, remind me again when Hurricane Charley 

struck. What year was it? 

Mr. HEBERT. It was in August 2004. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. And what category storm was it? 

Mr. HEBERT. I think at its highest point it was a Category 4 or 

5. But I think the issue was more that we had 170 tornadoes that 

spawned off the hurricane that did most of the damage. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. And one of the counties that it hit primarily were yours, Charlotte County? 

Mr. HEBERT. Charlotte, De Soto, Hardee, some of Lee, and the 

tip of Sarasota. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. And how many people do you say are still 

in trailers after these 3 years? 

Mr. HEBERT. At this point in our county we just have five units 

that are occupied in temporary trailers. The rest have been put 

into permanent housing, or we had a program where we purchased 

some of the trailers from FEMA and sold them immediately to the 

occupants and put them into permanent trailer parks and so forth. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Do you know what percentage of your 

housing is in trailers in the county? Is it 10 percent or 15 percent 

or less than that? 

Mr. HEBERT. I do not have an exact number, Madam Chairman, 

but I think by nature of the community, we are probably about 40 

percent mobile homes. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Forty percent mobile homes in the country? 

Mr. HEBERT. Of the total population. Yes, we have a lot of retired 

folks in retirement villages that are mobile homes. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Now, what is the evacuation plan if you 

face another Category 3, 4, or 5 where you have to evacuate? Because I do not think those trailers can sustain the new building 

codes for the coastal area. Do they? 

Mr. HEBERT. The new trailers now have to meet post-Hurricane 

Andrew specifications, which are 120-mile-an-hour, I think, or better impact. Certainly the county is about 70 percent rebuilt on all 

the other structures, which are also built to new code, so we are 

hoping that they will sustain a higher level of wind and we will not 

have the problem we had with the initial Hurricane Charley hit. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. But you are testifying that you think that 

the trailers that are now built in your county—which is maybe 30 

to 40 percent of the population, can sustain the 120- to 130-milean-hour wind? 

Mr. HEBERT. Not all of them, but the ones that were replaced in 

recent years after Hurricane Andrew hit down in the Miami area. 

And the reason I say that is that we had trailer parks where we 

had some mobile homes that were completely wiped out right next 

to another one that withstood the storm. They might have lost 

18

their carport or storage shed, but the trailer withheld, and it was 

anchored properly and was strong enough to withhold the winds. 

So, yes, I think we will be in better shape after that. 

If I could offer one other comment to discuss the difference between Dr. Crowley’s testimony and myself. In the testimony I submitted, about 80 to 85 percent of the original people that were in 

their trailers rotated out within 12 months because they either had 

the means to move into permanent housing or had insurance or 

had the ability to rebuild their houses. What ended up after that 

point was basically a housing project, and you ended up with lowto moderate-income people that do not have the means to rebuild, 

and they become much more troublesome. We had a higher crime 

rate. We had people that we were not able to place because they 

simply could not afford to be placed anywhere. 

My comments about the program was good, it was excellent in 

the first phases of it because it was absolutely essential to our recovery process. As we got further from the event date itself in August 2004, it got more and more onerous and more troublesome because we just had a much tougher population to then place and get 

into housing, and at that point we had no access because it was 

still being protected through the confidentiality issues. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Has that confidentiality issue been addressed fully, in your view? Was it fixed? 

Mr. HEBERT. No, ma’am. I do not think there has been any 

change. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. So what you are testifying for is the program that you have testified is excellent is actually excellent only 

relative to trailers being an option for families with financial 

means to stay there temporarily and move themselves out. 

Mr. HEBERT. I think as an immediate solution——

Chairman LANDRIEU. Would you testify that it is excellent for the 

other category of people who have limited financial means? 

Mr. HEBERT. No, because then it just becomes a housing project. 

I think we need to look for some more permanent type of solution 

for that. And you need to understand that in our county, all of our 

public housing buildings were destroyed. It was almost 300 units, 

which we are just now starting to rebuild. So all those folks had 

to have housing in the meantime. 

I think to me there are absolute definite phases of recovery, and 

I think at some point you need to get on with the HUD and the 

Department of Labor and Department of Agriculture, the other Departments that have more expertise in these areas, because it is 

not an emergency response now 3 years after the storm. It is a stabilization issue. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Well, I think you have hit on one of the important aspects that this Subcommittee is going to try to hone in 

on and force the Homeland Security Department to, either by statute or by Administration, to divide the emergency temporary housing, whether it is the 30- to 60-day sheltering and the transitional 

housing, which FEMA should coordinate as the premier emergency 

Federal response agency, to then shift it to the other agencies, 

whether it is HUD, Labor, Agriculture, depending on whether it is 

urban or rural, that could have a tremendous impact on getting 

adequate, more permanent shelter and housing for individuals, 

19

hopefully promoting homeownership and, of course, decent and affordable rental housing. 

Mr. Garratt, you are Acting Director, correct? 

Mr. GARRATT. Actually, Acting Assistant Administrator. Would 

you just restate for the record your one or two most frustrating aspects of your job, what you would like to see changed that you just 

cannot seem to get either Congress or others to understand for you 

to accomplish your mission? 

Mr. GARRATT. In terms of frustrations, I would have to say that 

it is the continuing situation that we face in the Gulf Coast. And 

it is not necessarily one or two areas; it is the comprehensive nature of what is a compelling social situation that we face and that 

we recognize that, unlike most of the disasters that we deal with, 

where the disaster victims can see the light at the end of the tunnel, 12 months away or 18 months away, most of the victims or 

many of the victims that we are still dealing with in this disaster 

cannot yet see that light at the end of the tunnel. And we are not 

able to shine that light in a way that they are able to see that. 

So we recognize and are, I think, institutionally frustrated by the 

fact that it is going to be a long time before we are able to help 

everyone who needs to be helped achieve self-sufficiency, and it is 

going to be a long time before the sorts of services and assistance 

that we are providing, that we are going to see the end of that. And 

I just mean that is frustrating not in the sense that we are not prepared to continue to provide that assistance. It is frustrating that 

we have to continue providing that assistance, that these folks are 

going to continue to be living in a less than perfect living environment—travel trailers, mobile homes—for an extended period of 

time. 

So just institutionally I would say those of us in the disaster assistance business, that is our biggest frustration. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Well, let me ask you this. Do you think 

that providing a Section 8 voucher to give people a choice to move 

out of a trailer that is too cramped into something that might be—

would give them some light at the end of the tunnel? And if so, is 

there some reason you cannot make that recommendation? 

Mr. GARRATT. Well, first off, the Section 8 program is a HUD 

program, so in terms of answering if that is effective, I would have 

to leave that to HUD. In terms of a vouchering program, I am prepared to address that. Incidentally, we are working very closely 

with HUD to see what our options are for dealing with the existing 

population of individuals receiving both financial—or principally financial assistance and looking at what our options are for 

partnering with HUD to move in potentially a vouchering direction. 

However, handing someone a voucher who is in a travel trailer 

is only worthwhile if that individual has some place to take that 

voucher to. If there is no public housing, if there are no other forms 

of housing available at or near the fair market rent, then having 

a voucher in your hand is not worth a lot. What we need is the 

ability—what we need is housing—housing for these individuals, 

public housing and more commercially developed housing to support the population that is still living in those group sites. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Well, I know that you understand that part 

of the problem with New Orleans and South Louisiana is not just 

20

the lack of labor to build housing and the lack of resources to build 

it, but it is difficult to start building housing when you do not have 

flood elevations to know how high the houses have to be built off 

the ground or if the levees that protect the houses are going to 

hold. 

So instead of saying we cannot do anything because we need 

more housing, and the housing people saying we have to do something until we get housing, we might want to think about the 

uniqueness of this challenge that is before us and come up with 

some additional options. 

When we can try to get families back into the region or to give 

them options other than staying in a trailer for the next 5 years 

or struggling to rebuild a house over the next 10 years. Is there a 

formal conversation that happens between FEMA and HUD on a 

regular basis? And if so, who chairs that? Is it the Secretary of 

HUD, or is it Director Paulison? 

Mr. GARRATT. Formal conversations take place between FEMA 

and HUD at all levels of the organization, both here at the national 

level between the leadership of the agencies and of the departments, as well as at the senior manager level. I talk with senior 

HUD officials on a weekly basis to discuss partnering and moving 

forward and addressing the issues, as well as at the field level, Gil 

Jamieson, the Director of our Gulf Coast Recovery Office, and his 

team deal with HUD representatives at their level on a regular 

basis. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Have you all submitted to this Subcommittee or any committee any formal document of shared recommendations between HUD and FEMA? Or do you just do it in 

such an informal way that we would not see such a document like 

that? 

Mr. GARRATT. We have not presented any formal documents that 

I am aware of to the Subcommittee yet, Senator, but I am reasonably certain that the current discussions taking place between 

FEMA and HUD will bear some fruit and that we will be submitting some documentation to this Subcommittee in the very near future. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. OK. Dr. Crowley, do you want to add anything? 

Ms. CROWLEY. A couple of things. One is that the issue of whether or not a voucher would do you any good if you are in a trailer 

is a really important issue because there is a lack of stock in the 

area for people to rent. It does give people the option of potentially 

taking the voucher and going someplace else, and so that is a 

choice. It is not the perfect answer. 

But the people who are receiving FEMA rental assistance, the 

20,000 households that are still in Texas and then the other 15,000 

or 17,000 households or so, moving them onto a Section 8 voucher 

right now makes absolute sense because it would be a seamless 

transition, and the voucher would continue as long as they were income eligible for that. And it would be administered locally by local 

housing authorities who know what is going on as opposed to—I 

mean, the descriptions that we have heard from people about their 

dealings with FEMA are absolutely bizarre. But most of the time, 

what happens is that you call an 800 number and you talk to a difVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:56 Mar 06, 2008 Jkt 037358 PO 00000 Frm 00024 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 P:\DOCS\35527.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
21

ferent person every single time. One of the advantages of using the 

Section 8 voucher program is that you go to a local agency with 

human beings that you can talk to across the table, who can follow 

your case and have a much greater understanding about what is 

going on. So I think that there is a lot of advantages to moving to 

that program. 

I understand that there has been lots of discussions about what 

role HUD should play in this disaster and future disasters, and 

there certainly have been many recommendations that HUD should 

be the primary agency to deal with housing after the initial sheltering requirements are over. And, in fact, the President’s own Lessons Learned report that came out in February 2006 recommended 

that. 

I think there is some kind of ambivalence about that, however, 

because this Administration has not been particularly friendly to 

the housing programs. And so one of the reasons that we think 

that the Section 8 voucher program was not used initially, as it had 

been successfully used in other disasters, most particularly the 

Northridge earthquake disaster, was because the voucher program 

had been under serious attack by the Bush Administration trying 

to ratchet it down, trying to change the rules, trying to block grant 

it. And so part of it is are we ready to acknowledge that HUD is 

an agency that is valued and that we can depend on housing programs for the kind of response that is needed in this kind of disaster? I think we can if we strengthen them, but I do not think 

that there has been a sense that HUD is the agency that is valued. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Are you aware that there was a new aspect 

to the Section 8 program that—you are correct—has not been funded adequately by the Administration, but it has some broad-based 

support in Congress to turn Section 8 vouchers into potential mortgage payments to increase homeownership as sort of a ladder up 

for low-income and moderate-income families to actually move from 

renters to homeowners? Are you at all familiar with that program? 

Ms. CROWLEY. Sure. There is a program now where a very small 

number of people who are receiving Section 8 vouchers have been 

able to turn those into—use them to obtain a mortgage and then 

they can use that to make their payments for a relatively short period of time. 

We think that is a reasonable thing to do. It is not an answer 

for the vast majority of people who are on Section 8 housing, receiving Section 8 housing vouchers, because their circumstances 

are such that homeownership is not the right answer at this point. 

Given what we see about the numbers of people who have been 

thrust prematurely into homeownership and under all of these exotic loans that have been made in the last couple of years and now 

the high foreclosure rate, we do think that it is—the pendulum is 

going to swing back to a more reasonable sense about what a good 

housing system is, both homeownership and rental housing. 

The key to why it is that housing assistance is so vital for people 

who are low income is that it provides for housing stability. It 

means that they can stay in the same place for a period of time. 

They can afford—they pay a certain percentage, 30 percent of their 

income, for their housing. They are not subject to sort of constant 

pressures to keep moving because they are getting evicted. They 

22

can create a stable housing record. And that is necessary in order 

to move into being able to save enough money to move into homeownership in a more conventional fashion. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Well, I am not going to disagree with you 

that not everyone that rents is a candidate to be a homeowner. But 

I will testify, as the Senator that represents the State and community, that many people aspire to homeownership. 

Ms. CROWLEY. Well, absolutely. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. And that homeowners usually do not pay 

30 percent of their income for housing. If you have equity in your 

house and you are moving up on the economic ladder, you can 

sometimes pay 20 percent or 25 percent or, depending on your income, some extremely wealthy people pay less than 1 percent of 

their income to housing because their income is so high. But the 

poor, under the rules that we have, end up paying sometimes 30 

percent, 40 percent of their income for housing, which makes it 

very difficult, particularly if you are not building any equity. So 

one of the goals of the Gulf Coast, at least for the State that I represent—I cannot speak for Mississippi—is to try through this transition to increase homeownership where possible. 

The other concern—and I am going to ask Mr. Croft to make a 

statement, and then call our next panel—is while I believe Section 

8 is a real option here—and I think we need to pursue it—it should 

be a question as to what percentage of Section 8 housing is natural 

or normal to a community that we would maintain that balance between non-subsidized and subsidized for the overall health of the 

community. So if Section 8 represents 10 or 15 percent of normal 

rentals, it cannot then in a disaster area become 80 percent of the 

recovery. It needs to maintain its balance with regular, unsubsidized rental or housing. And that is a question that we have to 

really, as we pursue additional Section 8, think about doing it in 

balance with non-subsidized housing as well so that the community 

recovers in a balanced way. 

So be thinking through that issue and trying to resolve the feelings about HUD. I mean, we have got to choose. You are testifying 

that FEMA is not necessarily doing what it needs to do; HUD may 

not either. And do we need to create another agency——

Ms. CROWLEY. No. 

Chairman LANDRIEU [continuing]. Or do we need to make HUD 

be better? Do we need to make FEMA be better? 

Mr. Croft. 

Mr. CROFT. Well, I would like to just restate the fact that vouchers and money really do not provide housing, and we ran into that 

in New Orleans and throughout Louisiana, as well as Atlanta, New 

York, Houston, all the places our citizens were evacuated to. Just 

to say we are going to give you $2,000 and later more money, now 

go find a place to stay, it did not happen because there were no 

places to stay. A voucher does not create a house. And, I think the 

approach to FEMA being the housing coordinator is good. I think 

HUD should play a major role, and as I said in my testimony, I 

think it is time to bring all of those agencies together and develop 

a better strategy for future disasters. 

23

Chairman LANDRIEU. OK. Thank you all very much. Our second 

panel will consist of Matthew Jadacki, Gil Jamieson, General Jack 

D’Araujo, Andre ́s Duany, and John Badman. 

Matthew Jadacki oversees the Department of Homeland Security 

Disaster Assistance Program on behalf of the Inspector General’s 

office. In his role, he is responsible for ensuring that these disaster 

funds are wisely spent. He is a certified public accountant. His office conducted a review of the Alternative Housing Pilot Program, 

which I requested, and he will be giving us some information about 

that. I am particularly interested in one of your findings that you 

stated, ‘‘As a consequence of FEMA decisions, the communities 

hardest hit by the 2005 hurricanes did not receive proportionate 

shares of the $400 million appropriated for the program. . . . The 

award amounts that were decided upon and the decision to award 

71 percent of the available funds to one project . . . were solely the 

decision of [one] Primary Selecting Official.’’ And we will go more 

into that report as this panel goes on. 

Gil Jamieson is the Deputy Director of Gulf Coast Recovery for 

FEMA. He has testified many times before a variety of different 

committees. He is the principal point of contact for the Federal Coordinator for Gulf Coast Rebuilding, Don Powell, and directly reports to Dave Paulison. 

General Jack D’Araujo served as Primary Selecting Officer for 

the program, so we will be talking with you specifically about that. 

Andre ́s Duany is a renowned architect and urban planner who 

has pioneered the movement to end suburban sprawl and urban 

disinvestment, known as ‘‘new urbanism.’’ I have seen some of your 

work, and I am extremely impressed with your work, and I thank 

you for the focus that you have been spending on not just New Orleans and the region but the entire South Louisiana and the entire 

Gulf Coast, and I thank you for the new thought you are bringing 

to what we are attempting. 

Jack Badman is CEO of RE: Formed Systems, a structural engineering firm that has developed an innovative approach to disaster 

housing. It involves the construction of Force 5 hurricane-proof accommodations for endurable-effective, cost-effective concrete materials. He will be talking to us about alternative housing outside of 

trailers that may or may not stand up under hurricane force winds. 

Let’s start with the Inspector General, if we could. Mr. Jadacki, 

I requested this report on alternative housing. Given the testimony 

of the first panel, I just want to stage this: That it became clear 

to many of us trying to oversee the recovery that what we were 

doing was not really working in a major disaster. So we scheduled 

some additional funding to come up with some alternatives. It was 

then designated in such a way that was really disappointing to 

those of us that had thought we were trying to pilot some new 

ideas. I have asked the Attorney General for a study, and it is prepared. I think it will be released today. 

If you will go ahead and begin with your testimony, Mr. Jadacki. 

24

1The prepared statement of Mr. Jadacki appears in the Appendix on page 92. 

TESTIMONY OF MATTHEW A. JADACKI,1 DEPUTY INSPECTOR 

GENERAL FOR DISASTER ASSISTANCE OVERSIGHT, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY 

Mr. JADACKI. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Good morning. My 

name is Matt Jadacki. I am the Deputy Inspector General for Disaster Assistance Oversight in the Office of Inspector General at the 

Department of Homeland Security. Thank you for the opportunity 

to discuss the Alternative Housing Pilot Program. In 2006, $6 billion supplemental appropriations were designated for disaster relief, of which $400 million was made available to 

FEMA for an Alternative Housing Pilot Program in the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina and other hurricanes of the 2005 season. In response, FEMA officials developed and implemented a 

grant competition to identify, develop, and evaluate alternatives to 

and alternative forms of disaster housing. The competition was limited to the State-designated agencies of the Gulf Coast States, including Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. By 

awarding competitive grants, FEMA officials sought to identify the 

best alternatives for housing disaster victims. By restricting the 

competition to the five Gulf Coast States, FEMA officials sought to 

comply with the congressional intent that the areas hardest hit by 

Hurricane Katrina and the 2005 hurricanes receive the housing developed under these grants. 

When the Alternative Housing Pilot Program Guidance and Application Kit was issued by FEMA in September 2006, the designated agencies of the five Gulf Coast States were given 35 days 

to develop as many project proposals as they wished to submit by 

an October 20, 2006, deadline. A total of 29 project proposals were 

received, consisting of several from each of the eligible States. 

Some of the proposals envisioned developing more than one type of 

innovative housing, but most were focused on a single proposed 

type of unit. 

Based on the results of the evaluation panel, three options were 

proposed for selecting and funding projects: 

First, fully fund the highest scoring projects, until money is exhausted. This would have funded two projects. 

Second option, optimize the number of housing alternatives funded within the competitive range. This would have funded 10 

projects. 

The third option, maximize the number of competitive States 

that receive funds. This would have funded five projects. 

The FEMA selecting official chose option three. Today I will address five issues regarding the Alternative Housing Pilot Program: 

Whether the $400 million appropriated by Congress was proportionately allocated to the hurricane-affected communities, the decisions of the awards panel and the FEMA officials that led to the 

funding of innovative and creative emergency housing solutions; 

whether the panel reached fair and balanced decisions; whether the 

panel review process meet the basic requirements of openness and 

transparency required of all Federal advisory committees; and 

whether there were any violations of law in the manner in which 

the grant selections and awards were conducted. 

25

The communities hardest hit by the 2005 hurricanes did not re- ceive proportionate shares of the $400 million appropriated for the 

program. The State of Mississippi’s proposals were awarded a $281 

million share or 73 percent of the available $388 million—a share 

greater than its proportion of the damages from the 2005 hurricanes. Consequently, the other Gulf States, which have to make do 

with the remaining 27 percent of funds among them, did not receive funds proportionate to the damages their communities sustained. 

A number of innovative and creative disaster housing solutions 

were not funded because the vast majority of the available funds—

71 percent—was awarded to one project. Had option two been selected, 10 project proposals would have been funded and the grant 

funds would have been much more effective in exploring and testing innovative and creative alternative solutions to disaster housing. Doing so would have resulted in the State of Mississippi receiving about 40 percent of the available funds, Louisiana receiving 

37 percent, Alabama 13 percent, Texas 11 percent, and Florida 0 

percent. Instead, only five project proposals received funding, half 

as many that could have been funded, and the majority of funds 

went to one State. 

We did not note any evidence of lack of fairness or balance in the 

panel deliberations or conclusions. Although the majority of the 

panel members were FEMA employees, there was no obvious bias 

in how they conducted their reviews. The reviews were possibly unbalanced in that every rating factor was given the same weight as 

all of the other factors rather than being weighted, as is often the 

case. It is unusual when some factors are not considered to be more 

important than other factors. But FEMA officials made the decision 

for each factor to have the same weight, not the panel members. 

FEMA officials concluded that the requirements of the Federal 

Advisory Committee Act (FACA), for openness, public access to 

records, and fairness did not apply to this awards panel review 

process. We concluded that FEMA’s position was justified, given 

the facts of the situation. In addition, the panel process was not the 

key process that determined how many projects would be funded, 

what projects would be funded, or how much funding each of the 

selected projects would receive. Those decisions were the sole purview of the selecting official. More openness and transparency in 

the panel process would not necessarily have had any noticeable effect on the FEMA decisionmaking process. 

We did not find any violations of law in the grant process, although the grant awards could have been made to fund and assess 

a greater variety of alternative disaster housing options, and while 

doing so would have resulted in a more proportionate distribution 

of the funds to the States. Moreover, the projects that have now 

been funded should expand the alternatives available for disaster 

housing in the future and should provide improved interim housing 

for many residents of the hurricane-stricken areas of the Gulf 

Coast. FEMA officials said they intend to closely monitor the funded projects to ensure that these projects are carried out in compliance with applicable laws and the terms of the grant program. 

Madam Chairman, this concludes my prepared statement. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Thank you. Mr. Jamieson. 

26

1The joint prepared statement of Mr. Jamieson and Mr. Garratt appears in the Appendix on 

page 41. 

TESTIMONY OF GIL H. JAMIESON,1 ASSOCIATE DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR, GULF COAST RECOVERY, FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF 

HOMELAND SECURITY 

Mr. JAMIESON. Good morning, Chairman Landrieu. My name is 

Gil Jamieson, and I am the Associate Deputy Administrator for 

Gulf Coast Recovery in the Federal Emergency Management Agency and within the Department of Homeland Security. It is my 

pleasure to be here with you today to update you on the background and status of the Alternative Housing Pilot Program. 

Senator if I may, I know Junior Rodriguez, President of St. Bernard Parish, was due to testify in the first panel, and his wife fell 

ill. I wish for the record to state that the FEMA team wishes his 

wife, Evelyn, a speedy recovery. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Thank you. 

Mr. JAMIESON. In the 2006 emergency supplemental, Congress 

appropriated $400 million out of the Disaster Relief Fund for the 

pilot program that could identify and evaluate new alternatives for 

housing disaster victims. The appropriations language required 

that the pilot be conducted in those areas hardest hit by the hurricanes of 2005, which FEMA subsequently determined to be the 

States of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. 

The Alternative Housing Pilot Program Grant Guidance was released on September 15, 2006, and applications from the five eligible Gulf Coast States were requested by October 20, 2006. All of 

the five eligible States submitted applications that collectively contained 29 separate project proposals totaling almost $1.2 billion in 

requested grant funding. 

A Technical Review team composed of FEMA experts assessed 

the soundness of each project from a building science, engineering, 

historic preservation, logistics, and mitigation perspective. Subsequently, a National Evaluation Panel composed of experts from the 

Office of the Federal Coordinator for Gulf Coast Rebuilding, HUD, 

American Institute for Architects, FEMA, DHS Preparedness, and 

the National Emergency Management Association, as well as a representative from the private sector—these folks met in seclusion for 

one week to review each proposal. After a period of review, discussion, and assessment, each panelist on the National Evaluation 

Panel individually and independently rated each submission, based 

on pre-established grant guidance criteria. Panelists were prohibited from sharing these final scores with one other. Panelists were 

also invited to provide written comments on each project. All of this 

information was provided to the Primary Selecting Official. 

The following projects were selected for Alternative Housing Pilot 

Project grants: Mississippi Green Mobile project, the Mississippi 

Park Model, and Mississippi Cottage projects; Louisiana Cypress 

Cottage Partners; Texas Heston Group; and Alabama City of Bayou 

La Batre. These successful projects were announced on December 

22, 2006. Since then, the FEMA Grants Office and Gulf Coast Recovery Office have been working with the States to clarify and resolve issues prior to the actual award. Upon award of the grant, 

27

1The prepared statement of General D’Araujo appears in the Appendix on page 99. 

the grantees may access up to 50 percent of the grant funds. The 

remainder of the grant funds will be accessible when the grantee 

successfully completes all pre-construction activities. 

On April 11, FEMA awarded the State of Mississippi approxi- mately $275 million for the Park Model and Mississippi Cottage 

Project. We expect the other States with successful projects will receive funding in the very near future. 

The evaluation of pilot projects will be led and managed by HUD 

and supported by FEMA. We are very encouraged and optimistic 

about the outcome of this process and believe there are real opportunities to improve the housing alternatives that FEMA can draw 

upon in future disasters. 

Thank you, and I look forward to your questions and discussing 

FEMA’s Alternative Housing Pilot Program with the Subcommittee. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. General D’Araujo. 

TESTIMONY OF MAJOR GENERAL JOHN R. D’ARAUJO, JR.,1

(U.S. ARMY-RETIRED), FORMER PRIMARY SELECTING OFFICIAL, ALTERNATIVE HOUSING PILOT PROGRAM, FEDERAL 

EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF 

HOMELAND SECURITY 

General D’ARAUJO. Good morning, Chairman Landrieu. I am 

John R. D’Araujo, Jr., and it is an honor to appear before this Committee to discuss my role as the Primary Selecting Official for the 

Alternative Housing Program. 

From July 2006 until January 2007, I was the Director of the Recovery Division within the Department of Homeland Security’s 

Federal Emergency Management Agency. Additionally, from July 

2002 to March 2003, I served as the Assistant Director of what was 

then known as the Readiness, Response, and Recovery Directorate 

of FEMA. In that capacity, I coordinated the Federal response for 

all-hazard disasters, directing the activities of more than 22 Federal agencies under the previous Federal Response Plan. I recently 

retired and am testifying today as a private citizen. 

During my time with FEMA, I had the privilege to serve as the 

Primary Selecting Official for the Alternative Housing Pilot Program, authorized by Congress in the 2006 Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act. Though I served as the Primary Selecting Official, it is important to note that I was not responsible for 

the decisions creating the program or the general course that it 

took. As a result, I would defer questions on that issue to my colleagues from FEMA. 

As the Primary Selecting Official, my role in the process was to 

take the results and recommendations from the Evaluation Panel 

and make the final decision about the award of funding under this 

competitive grant. I was not involved in any way in their deliberations or scoring of the projects, though I did receive periodic updates as to their progress but not the substance of their deliberations. To the best of my ability, I carried out my responsibility in 

accordance with established grantmaking procedures. In accordance with those competitive grant procedures, as the Primary SeVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:56 Mar 06, 2008 Jkt 037358 PO 00000 Frm 00031 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 P:\DOCS\35527.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
28

lecting Official, I considered the ranking, comments, and recommendations from the independent reviewers, as well as my own 

thoughts on the projects, before deciding which applications to approve and their order of approval. I made my selection based on the 

projects deemed most meritorious. Also, in accordance with established competitive grant procedures, as the Primary Selecting Official, I put in writing my reasons for each deviation from the ranking determined by the National Evaluation Panel, as well as my 

reasons for disapproval of a recommendation. I indicated in writing 

why I did not choose the third Mississippi project, Modular townhouse, which fell within the top-scored projects. My disapproval of 

projects was based on their ranking, and thus required no special 

explanation. 

In early December 2006, Gil Jamieson, the Deputy Director for 

Gulf Coast Recovery, sent me a memorandum that summarized the 

comments of the National Evaluation Panel for each project and 

presented the overall ranking of each project. Three funding options were outlined in this memorandum: First, fully fund the eligible projects in the order that they were ranked by the panel; second, provide a minimal amount of funding to all eligible projects, 

dividing the funds between as many as 10 projects; or, third, provide significant funding to the top project from each eligible State, 

and then use the remainder of the funding to fund projects based 

on their relative rankings. 

Under a funding scheme that stuck to traditional competitive 

grant processes and fully funded projects based solely on their 

ranking, the second highest-ranked project would have consumed 

the entire amount of funding. However, because I considered it important that there be a diversity of competitive projects funded, I 

selected and recommended partial—85 percent—funding for the top 

project from each competitive State. With the remainder of the 

funding, the second project—ranked second overall—was funded at 

66 percent of this request. 

By funding the top project from each State, FEMA is able to test 

emergency, interim, and permanent housing solutions. While I am 

aware that the Inspector General does not agree with this decision, 

it was my opinion that providing a minimal amount of funding to 

many projects would not have been consistent with the competitive 

grant process and could jeopardize the overall program by not allowing a full and fair evaluation of the highest-ranked proposals. 

Based on my selections, the projects previously described by both 

Mr. Jamieson and the Inspector General were the top five projects 

that were funded. 

Madam Chairman, I thank you for the opportunity to appear before you, and I would be pleased to answer any questions you have 

regarding my role as the Primary Selecting Official for the Alternative Housing Pilot Program. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Thank you. We will have a great deal of 

questions about this. Go ahead, Mr. Duany. 

29

1The prepared statement of Mr. Duany appears in the Appendix on page 102. 

TESTIMONY OF ANDRE ́ S DUANY,1 FOUNDING PRINCIPAL, 

DUANY PLATER-ZYBERK AND COMPANY 

Mr. DUANY. Madam Chairman, thank you. A little bit of history. 

Myself and our firm, we have been involved for most of the time 

since Hurricane Katrina, beginning by preparing the 11 charrettes 

that were done for the cities of Mississippi for Governor Barbour. 

We were also the firm selected to do all the charrettes in Louisiana, from east to west, as you know. And then we did three of 

the neighborhoods in New Orleans. 

We have in some ways seen it all and done it all, and we find 

that there is nothing nearly as important, of all the things we have 

done—infrastructure, schools—as the provision of houses. The 

amount of human suffering that is being undergone in these States 

is truly astounding, and the people that I knew 3 months into the 

hurricane are not the people that you find now. There was a resilience, there was an anger to the people of Louisiana and Mississippi, a can-do attitude that is absolutely gone. The people have 

been destroyed, and the source is the absence of housing. There is 

nothing as important as the housing and nothing as important as 

doing it speedily. Time is of the essence, whatever happens. 

Now, about this issue and this process, which is magnificent. I 

was involved actually in the design of the original Hurricane 

Katrina cottages before Governor Barbour’s charrettes. We knew 

that this would be necessary. What drove us was, when we first realized that the cost of the trailers was between $60,000 and 

$90,000 for these temporary and uncomfortable structures, when 

the average cost of the housing, at least in Mississippi, including 

a lot, was $70,000. These lousy little trailers were actually costing 

more than the average house in Mississippi, and possibly Louisiana 

and the coast. 

There was a fantastic opportunity to actually deliver housing better than the housing that was destroyed, which, after all, is the 

hope of these charrettes. 

The competition has been actually a brilliant idea, and we must 

bear in mind that at the heart of it is design. There is a lot of scrutiny about process and about numbers, but this is about design. 

This is how we will do it better now as the trailers collapse and 

delaminate and fall apart, but also how we will do it better next 

time. So I am going to confine my statements to design. 

First of all, cost and permanence. As I have said, for the up to $90,000 that is being provided by FEMA, both for provision and 

maintenance and removal, this magnificent sum is literally thrown 

away in disposable quarters. It is not the best use of our taxes. 

This magnitude of investment can and should create very good 

housing of a permanent or quasi-permanent type. The Louisiana 

proposal, our competition proposal, does that. The housing can stay 

there essentially for good. 

Liveability and resilience. Hurricane Andrew—and I was involved in Hurricane Andrew 15 years ago; we did the charrettes for 

Hurricane Andrew—has shown that some FEMA trailers are still 

in place 15 years later. It is astounding after the event. And despite the smaller scale of devastation and the ability of Florida to 

30

have a construction industry which neither Louisiana nor—particularly Louisiana does not have a construction industry to speak us, 

South Florida does, and we still have FEMA trailers from Hurricane Andrew up. This means that a child could have been born and 

completed junior high school while inhabiting one of these trailers. 

Effectively for that individual, the FEMA house is his or her childhood home. Our Louisiana proposal is for real houses where such 

a child can grow up with pride and without unnecessary dysfunction. 

The contextual aesthetics. As you might know, the provision of 

the FEMA trailers has been made unnecessarily difficult because 

many neighborhoods did not want them. They were rejected everywhere. The public process charrettes actually led very often to people saying, ‘‘We do not want them,’’ regardless of how necessary. 

They are associated with ‘‘trailer parks’’ of the kind that decrease 

real estate value. A very well-designed and permanent unit similar 

in appearance to permanent housing can and will go a long way toward mitigating this political problem. Our proposal looks as good 

as most houses in the Gulf. And I hesitate to say they look better, 

but they do. And, furthermore, it can be adjusted to match any 

local vernacular in the future. Remember, this test is for problems 

of the future, for catastrophes of the future. Sometime in the future 

a hurricane will hit Virginia, will hit North Carolina, will hit, for 

example, the New England States. One of the things we would like 

to explore is the possibility of this FEMA housing being adjustable 

to the vernacular of these other places so they will be accepted by 

the neighbors. And we would like to do that as part of the experiment. 

Flexibility. FEMA housing should be transitional in one specific 

sense, and only one, which is that their earliest use would be as 

dormitories housing first responders. Our proposal, at least half the 

units we intend to build include those that would house between 

6 and 12 first responders comfortably, and they would be transformable. This housing would actually then transition—because 

what we need are the workers. The first responders come first. 

They must be the ones in housing first because they are the labor 

that will build the subsequent housing. Our units will house up to 

12 of these workers, and then, with nothing other than a coat of 

paint, I suppose, they are transitional to full-time housing. And 

that is an extraordinary need. 

Production in quantity. One of the problems in providing housing 

for large-scale catastrophes is the reality of production bottlenecks. 

When you have a single system, it can easily bottleneck. The Louisiana proposal mitigates that in the most efficient way with technology supplied by multiple construction systems, some of which 

are ‘‘open shelf’’ systems. Ours is keyed to Lowe’s. Any Lowe’s can 

actually provide the materials for some of our Hurricane Katrina 

cottages, which means they are available in containers ready to go. 

And as you know, Lowe’s has a distribution system that is second 

to none. You may know that Wal-Mart and Lowe’s were the first 

people in after the hurricane right behind the National Guard, and 

they provided the water and the supplies. It is a fantastic system, 

built in, it requires no public subsidies to actually have this ready 

to go. That is only one of the open shelf systems we have. The LouVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:56 Mar 06, 2008 Jkt 037358 PO 00000 Frm 00034 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 P:\DOCS\35527.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
31

isiana proposal, if permitted, will explore this aspect of emergency 

housing, the fact that it can be supplied, and we are now considering up to five different technologies so that the bottlenecks are 

virtually impossible. Also, this failure, technical failure of a type, 

and some of the FEMA trailers by the very few manufacturers that 

were used, the current ones, if they fail technically, the failure is 

cataclysmic because you do not lose one, you lose tens of thousands. 

This is impossible in a system that actually uses many technologies. 

Last, I would like to say that the community aspect is important. 

If these are essentially—and, by the way, we have submitted up to 

six different designs. The designs are for in-fill for individual lots 

but also for the creation of new communities. These new communities are relatively dense, but they look single-family, up to 35 

units to the acre while looking like single-story, single-family 

houses. 

One of the things we would like to further explore with the 

FEMA funds available is to provide the services that are necessary. 

Anything from barbershops, banks, post offices, daycare centers, 

small markets, FEMA offices, and so forth must be simultaneously 

provided in a dignified way. These sort of concentration camps that 

FEMA trailer parks have turned into fulfill the worst, absolutely 

the worst fears of the neighbors who think that they are going to 

turn into slums, which indeed they have. The Louisiana housing 

proposals are of quality that you can achieve a mix of poor people, 

lower-middle-class, and upper-middle-class. People of different 

classes can live comfortably in these communities because of the 

nature of our design. 

Now, to speak a little bit about Mississippi and——

Chairman LANDRIEU. If you could wrap up in about one minute. 

Mr. DUANY. Right. To speak a little bit about Mississippi and 

Louisiana and the nature of their—the Mississippi trailers are different from the Louisiana ones. The Mississippi ones, they can 

come faster; they can be the absolute first responder. They can be 

stocked somewhere, and they can be in within weeks. Ours will 

take a little longer. But gradually those, which essentially are mobile homes, very good-looking mobile homes but mobile homes, nevertheless, could gradually evolve into the next ones, which is to say 

they are both necessary. I think the selection was brilliantly done. 

The only thing we do not understand is why there are 9,000 of 

those, essentially, of a certain type which are vulnerable to 

monocultures. You know, 9,000 of anything is a problem right 

there. It is not that they are inferior. They are excellent and necessary. But I do not understand why there are 9,000 of those and 

only 400 to 500 of ours, when actually we have greater diversity 

and ours are the ones that provide actually the more permanent solution to the problem. 

So I would say what is necessary is a rebalancing, not so much 

opening it up to more types, which would be a tremendous delay, 

because the array that is available is very substantial, but there 

may be a rebalancing in types. I do not think that the 400 that we 

have and the funding that we have would allow suitable experimenting in terms of providing the stylistic differences and the technical differences that are necessary to break the problem of the 

32

1The prepared statement of Mr. Badman with an attachment appears in the Appendix on 

page 103. 

monoculture. Nor have we been funded to do the neighborhood centers which are necessary, the ones that contain the banks and the 

administration buildings, post offices, and so forth, that we could 

certainly use some additional funding for that. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Thank you. Mr. Badman. 

TESTIMONY OF JOHN BADMAN III,1 FOUNDER AND CHIEF 

EXECUTIVE OFFICER, RE: FORMED SYSTEMS, INC 

Mr. BADMAN. Thank you, Senator Landrieu. I am Jack Badman, 

CEO of RE: Formed Systems. First, let me say that better and 

cheaper approaches to providing disaster planning, response, and 

recovery do exist. They exist now and are available to FEMA, to 

the Federal Government, and to the American taxpayer. 

Five years ago I founded our firm to find a way to build Force 

5 hurricane-proof houses for the price of wood housing, hence prevent having to rebuild every time a hurricane hits. This was expanded into our comprehensive Emergency Planning, Response, 

and Recovery System, which we submitted to Alabama for consideration in the Alternative Housing Pilot Program. Alabama and Mobile County ranked our system No. 1 and featured it in their proposal—Mobile County Alternate Housing Pilot Program. We had 

discussed doing a demonstration of our emergency housing, and 

how quickly a lot of it could be assembled by unemployed workers, 

then show how it all transitions into temporary housing, then how 

all these materials could be incorporated into truly permanent 

housing. We had hoped to do a large emergency response development, but Mobile County said FEMA controlled how much money 

we would get. FEMA did not select us, and we have not received 

a debriefing. We are unaware of a selected concept that better met 

their RFP’s criteria. We also hope to better understand their rationale in a debriefing. 

We offer a ‘‘pay one time’’ and ‘‘ship one time’’ approach that results with virtually indestructible housing suitable for any location 

that Hurricane Katrina struck. Our emergency housing, which 

competes with tents, hotel rooms, and cruise ships, is highly flexible and far more cost-effective. It can be a studio or a 1- to 5-bedroom shelter. Each family is allocated what they need, in a private, 

secure facility. They do not have to cohabitate in a tent with other 

families. Thousands of various sized shelters can be erected at various sites within 12 hours of a storm’s passing. We anticipate being 

able to construct and furnish shelters faster than emergency workers can sort out who will be assigned which shelter. Lots of 

preplanning is involved, but it is highly cost-effective and very responsive to evacuees’ needs in a time of crisis. 

While families inhabit our shelters, without disturbing them except for 2 hours, their shelters can be expanded quickly into temporary housing by adding our toilet and kitchen modules and a 

long list of amenities and wrap-around services. This replaces 

FEMA trailers with a long list of benefits. When no longer needed, 

the materials for our emergency to temporary housing is disassembled and locally reassembled into our permanent Force 5 hurriVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:56 Mar 06, 2008 Jkt 037358 PO 00000 Frm 00036 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 P:\DOCS\35527.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
33

cane-proof, submergible housing. All material is shipped one way 

and is consumed locally. Money spent for emergency to temporary 

housing materials is not wasted since all the materials are incorporated into our permanent housing. Nothing becomes surplus or 

obsolete, nor needs to be shipped to storage yards, stored or refurbished. There are no disposal problems. 

During the next emergency response everybody gets fresh, new, 

next-generation materials. In future storms no one will feel they 

are getting used trailers or less-than-the-latest. In summary, instead of paying first for emergency housing via tents, then paying 

for temporary housing via FEMA trailers, then paying for permanent housing—which really may be destroyed again—our system 

has all the materials in our emergency housing included in our 

temporary housing, and all that is included in our permanent housing, which will never have to be replaced. Each phase just adds 

more materials to the previously used materials. Our permanent 

housing conceals all materials behind new finishes, so nothing 

looks used. This approach was honored as the ‘‘Disaster Response’’ 

cover story of CM magazine, the official magazine of ACMA, the 

American Composite Manufacturers Association, and the world’s 

largest trade organization for polymers. It’s on our website, 

ReFormedSystems.Com. A photo from the first of my four trips to 

New Orleans is on the cover. What it does not show is right behind 

the teddy bear is its owner’s body. 

Saving money has not been our only objective. We feel FEMA 

failed to recognize some of the benefits we bring. Our system is 

one-third the cost of their current system. It is far faster and prevents having to spend money for future damage; hence, it has an 

extremely low life-cycle cost. In the future, we suggest FEMA address what should be their most important goals, make these goals 

their primary focus and ensure that they select the new, vitally 

needed innovative approaches that work toward meeting these 

goals. 

The greatest problem is in pre-hurricane planning. FEMA should 

be seeking new innovative approaches that can provide permanent 

units that can be sited anywhere, including on the coast and under 

sea level. This requires a variable wall system to develop the flexibility needed. We are unaware of any of the selected systems that 

can do any of the above or the following: FEMA should look for systems which do not use wood, gypsum, SIP panels, or other materials prone to flood or mold damage. Seek structures designed to 

be submergible, which can have the muck and mold cleaned. Evacuees will lose the use of their houses until cleaned out, but no 

structural damage should be likely. In floodable areas, FEMA 

should not use materials such as wood and SIP panels that float 

and add buoyancy forces if underwater. Seek materials that are 

very compact and only ship one way via high-speed common carrier, so the highways and commuters are not affected by slow traffic, trucks pulling trailers, etc.—hence, with shipping costs and aggravation that are far lower. 

Ideally, nothing has to be eventually returned to storage yards, 

refurbished, or disposed. A great advantage would be in systems 

that require very few skilled workers to assemble it, and do not 

compete for scarce carpenters. Hence, unemployed persons seeking 

34

hard but rewarding work can earn money while taking pride in 

helping their communities respond or rebuild. 

Systems should not have a fixed sized, not be design specific or 

copyrighted like a Hurricane Katrina cottage. This allows communities to determine how their units will look and aids community 

buy-in. Key is taxpayers should not be asked to keep paying for 

disaster recovery over and over again. The criteria should be fix it 

once and never have to have it fixed again. This is in the Gulf’s 

best interest. By rebuilding with what will not be destroyed, taxpayers will back it. More money will gladly flow into the Gulf. 

Mortgages and insurance with be available. Tax incentives should 

pass to back this new approach. Find systems which are ideal for 

the areas that now cannot get mortgages or insurance. 

Because FEMA did not recognize the need for all the above, 

which we offered, we are concerned that FEMA is not asking the 

right questions. As CM magazine explained in more detail, there 

are approaches such as ours that can be of great benefit to FEMA, 

the evacuees, the communities, the States, and the taxpayers. As 

such, we feel Congress should now add an additional pilot project 

that encourages the development of additional projects in order to 

test the additional diverse ideas available. We suggest this new 

pilot project be viewed a venture capital and suggest FEMA draw 

on the technical community to help rank and select those projects 

with the greatest potential return on investment and long-term 

payback. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Can you wrap in just a minute? 

Mr. BADMAN. Yes. With such an enhanced selection process, taxpayers should see new hope that there will be improvements, new 

approaches, new effective planning, real progress. By investing additional pilot program funds effectively now, trillions can be saved 

over time, making it of outstanding help to the community, not just 

taxpayers. We hope Congress and FEMA will give us an opportunity to work together for the common good. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Thank you all very much. 

Let me just begin by saying the time is going to be so short this 

morning that I anticipate we are going to have to do a second hearing on this subject sometime shortly because we have really just 

scratched the surface with the problems and challenges for housing. And I recognize that we are not the only Subcommittee focusing on this, and you all have testified before other committees. But 

while I have heard a lot of problems, I have not heard many solutions this morning, and we are going to have to get to some better 

solutions. 

But for the purposes of this panel, as one of the key architects 

of the $400 million pilot program that was supposed to be to seek 

alternatives from the trailer situation that was described not just 

by Louisiana officials or Mississippi officials but by Florida officials, who said people had been in trailers not for 3 years, not for 

5 years, but for 15 years, with no way out and no good options. We 

put this $400 million in to explore alternatives, only to find out recently that of the $400 million, $275 million was awarded to one 

State for the Park Model project, which was Mississippi; $74 million to Louisiana, which had three times the housing loss of Mississippi, but we got one-third or less of this particular funding pool; 

35

and then projects like Mr. Badman has suggested did not get any 

consideration and still to this date, since the award, has not received any information about why their project did not get awarded. 

So I guess, Mr. Jamieson, this is for you and General D’Araujo 

to try to explain to the public at large how this was done. I know 

that you all say it was done competitively, but I am holding in my 

hand the competitive grant document. Unless my information is incorrect, there is no competitive process, this is still in draft form? 

Or is there one that has been finalized? Because I cannot find it. 

Mr. JAMIESON. Senator, in relation to your specific question, I am 

not aware of any final document. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. So there is no final competitive process 

that everybody keeps saying was used. There is no final competitive process. 

Mr. JAMIESON. Well, there was a process——

Chairman LANDRIEU. There was one made up for the purposes 

of this program, but there is not a standard one, because this is 

the draft. 

Mr. JAMIESON. Actually, Senator, we engaged in competitive 

grant processes after September 11, 2001, for communication interoperability and a variety of different supplemental funding——

Chairman LANDRIEU. So you used that process for this process 

because we do not have a standard one. 

Mr. JAMIESON. Yes, we did. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Is it also true that you gave the States only 

30 days to respond? 

Mr. JAMIESON. I believe it was in the neighborhood of 30 days, 

35 days. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. And was there some reason that could not 

be extended? 

Mr. JAMIESON. Just the urgency in terms of trying to run this 

process as quickly as we could to get different alternatives in advance of the upcoming hurricane season. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. So you must have assumed the next hurricane was going to hit Mississippi and not Louisiana or Alabama or 

Florida or North or South Carolina since $275 million went to Mississippi. So how did we know that the next hurricane would hit 

Mississippi? Because we would be happy to pass that information 

on. 

Mr. JAMIESON. Senator, we do not presuppose that the next hurricane is going to hit——

Chairman LANDRIEU. But you sent the majority of the money to 

Mississippi in case a hurricane did? 

Mr. JAMIESON. What we attempted to do through the pilot program and through using the Gulf Coast States as a laboratory is 

explore different alternatives that could be used nationally, any 

hurricane, any natural disaster——

Chairman LANDRIEU. So how many Gulf Coast States do we 

have? 

Mr. JAMIESON. We have five that were involved in the pilot program. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. And do you disagree that the end result of 

a competitive process that was never fully established, that 75 perVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:56 Mar 06, 2008 Jkt 037358 PO 00000 Frm 00039 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 P:\DOCS\35527.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
36

cent of the money basically went to one of the Gulf Coast States? 

Was their project so superior—I see the ranking here, and I just 

will submit it to the record, that was a score of 182. The Cypress 

Cottage was next at 156; Texas Heston was 159; Modular 

Townhome in Mississippi was 157. So there is only a one-point difference between these in the ranking. Mobile County I do not think 

got anything. They were 146. 

Was the Park Model so superior? And if it was superior in its design—which let’s just grant for the sake of this argument. Let’s just 

say we are going to prove through a series of these hearings beyond 

a shadow of a doubt that the one design was so far superior than 

everything else that was submitted. Why do they need—how many 

are we going to provide for them? 

Mr. JAMIESON. Senator, you will see in the documentation that 

I think their proposal came in at something in the neighborhood 

of 7,000 or something like that based on——

Chairman LANDRIEU. So we are going to provide 7,000——

Mr. JAMIESON. No, we are not. As a matter of fact, the panel specifically—there are two housing alternatives——

Chairman LANDRIEU. So how many are we going to provide? 

Mr. JAMIESON. In the neighborhood of 1,800. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. For $275 million? 

Mr. JAMIESON. Well, the other part of their proposal is the Mississippi Cottage, and that is—we thought——

Chairman LANDRIEU. OK. So let’s just get for the record: How 

many cottages and how many trailers on wheels? 

Mr. JAMIESON. There will be 1,858 mobile park units that will be 

awarded to Mississippi with the funding that they received. Mississippi Cottages, there will be: Two-bedroom, 1,397; three-bedroom, 1,396; for a total of 4,651 units. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. So my point is, based on being one of the 

key authors of this total amount of funding, that the idea of it was 

to promote alternatives, not to build communities. And if the alternatives worked, then we could expand it fairly across the Gulf 

Coast and, frankly, the Atlantic Coast, that has similar vulnerability here. 

Mr. JAMIESON. Sure. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. But evidently, that thought obviously never 

got communicated to FEMA in the way this grant was put out. You 

just decided that we just needed to get these houses in Mississippi 

in case a hurricane hit them again and too bad for Louisiana, Florida, or anybody else that might have people in harm’s way. Is that 

the thought or the argument, the process that you went through? 

Mr. JAMIESON. No, Senator. It clearly is not the thought or the 

process that we went through. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Then why is it necessary to have 1,800 of 

something to prove it works? 

Mr. JAMIESON. Well, we did not prejudge what States could propose. To overemphasize to make a point, I was prepared to say that 

if no State submitted a competitive proposal, that all of the funding 

could go to one State—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or Texas. 

The intent of this was to let the marketplace speak to us and tell 

us how we could do better than the current manufactured housing, 

travel trailers and mobile homes that we were currently using. And 

37

so what we did is we evaluated what was given to us by the States. 

A technical panel looked at it. They told us what they thought were 

the most and the best solutions. 

Now, I think there is an argument that can be made in terms 

of what is the right number of units to constitute a fair evaluation. 

Is it 7,000? Is it 1,500? Is it 10? But what we have to do is react 

to what the States gave us, look at the technical evaluation that 

we received, and make a decision. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. See, I disagree with that. I do not think 

you had to react to what the States gave you. You are the agency 

trying to evaluate different models and projects for the benefit of 

the Nation. You were supposed to look at alternatives to trailers, 

which have been proven to work only in a very certain circumstance. They are expensive, and they can be vulnerable, and 

they might be appropriate in certain circumstances. And the record 

was replete with meeting after meeting, document after document. 

And so we said, OK, since we are spending billions of dollars in a 

system that seems to not be meeting the needs of our constituents—rich, poor, black, white—let’s provide some funding to seek 

alternatives. It wasn’t let’s provide funding to keep one State safe 

or safer from the next disaster. It was to explore. And there was 

no mandate to spend all the money in the first 6 months. I do not 

know where that came from. This was supposed to be money available to explore options. That was turned into, ‘‘Let’s hurry up and 

give 75 percent of the money to one State to build communities.’’

Mr. JAMIESON. Senator——

Chairman LANDRIEU. And that is a violation of the intent of the 

funding. 

Now, I am going to submit the memos to the record, and we are 

going to have another hearing on this because it is a pattern, I 

want to say, a pattern of not allocating money fairly between 

States to not meet the great challenges that we have to find adequate housing and response to disasters. And it is just another evidence in my view to that. 

And I will just say this for the record, and I know I am taking 

the prerogative as the Chairman, but that is what chairmans get. 

It is making it extremely difficult for a person like myself or any 

Senator representing any State to actually do anything about this, 

because every time we specifically direct funding to a State, we are 

told that we cannot do that any longer. There are no more earmarks. There is no more direct funding. So we trust—which will 

probably be the last time I do this—trust administrators with funding, hoping that you all will make appropriate decisions because we 

have some restrictions on earmarks, self-imposed but nonetheless, 

and ones that I do not necessarily agree to for this exact purpose. 

So it makes it even more frustrating in trying to get funding for 

a variety of different alternatives to try out, let us see what would 

happen over the course of the year, and then decide among all 

these what is the best and maybe move our entire Federal program 

closer to that. But that effort has now been thwarted by the awarding of this contract, in my view. 

Now, the time is short. Does anybody want to add anything else 

to this record? And we will probably have another hearing on it. 

Mr. Badman. 

38

Mr. BADMAN. Just one comment to back up Mobile County’s submission. We feel that we offered the only one that actually addressed emergency, temporary, and permanent housing. In fact, all 

the housing that was selected is permanent housing, and I think 

the real need is to find a way to transition through each of the 

phases and not have it be three times the current cost. And that 

is what we propose. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Any closing comments, General D’Araujo? 

General D’ARAUJO. Just a couple, if I could, Senator. Let me add 

from my perspective that, in my view, I thought the structure of 

the competitive guidance that was put together for this particular 

program—and I know you referred to the draft guidance there—but 

there was a specific competitive guidance document that guided me 

in this process. That is what I attempted to follow: The objectives 

for providing alternative solutions for future disasters, the life-cycle 

costs, the applicability across not only the Gulf Coast but across 

the country for future disaster operations. 

I think it would be remiss on all of us if we do not take those 

many lessons learned, some of them extremely painful, and use a 

mechanism like this to adjust for catastrophic events in the future. 

I think this does that. 

It is arguable about how the money was allocated, which projects 

were most meritorious. But keep in mind, I would ask, that we received requirements for $1.2 billion, and taking away administrative costs, we had about $388 million to allocate. Lots of good ideas 

that came out of them, a number that you heard here. 

One of my last comments in the memo that I sent to the Director 

of Management was that we not discard the other solutions that 

were not funded by this program and that FEMA, through its Joint 

Housing Solutions Group, keep those active in their review for 

other possible support. I am led to believe that that is being done. 

Those are the only comments that I would leave you with, Senator. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. I appreciate that, but I will just say that 

the chance to highlight some of the worthy aspects of many of 

these other programs has virtually been lost. FEMA can say what 

it wants to about what it liked to do. Maybe it could buy a billboard and promote how good some of them were. But the money 

that we allocated is gone, and the chances of me going back to an 

Appropriations Committee and saying please give me money for the 

projects that were not identified because they were good is non-existent. 

So whatever chance you all had to take a little bit of money that 

we gave you and highlight across the board some interesting proposals, you chose not to do that. You chose to go to mass production 

of one, and that is either what we are going to be stuck with—let’s 

hope it is really good because that is what you all did. 

Go ahead, Mr. Jamieson. 

Mr. JAMIESON. Senator, thank you, first of all, for the opportunity to be here with you. I would like to say—and the other vendors who proposed, as a matter of fact, I think Mr. Badman’s point 

is a good point, and that is that all of those who proposed have an 

opportunity to review and have a back-brief in terms of the award 

process——

39

Chairman LANDRIEU. Well, when are you going to do that with 

each of them, so I could send them a note and let them know that 

FEMA will talk with them——

Mr. JAMIESON. Senator, I will go back and I will follow up with 

your staff in terms of getting a date when we can do that. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. OK. 

Mr. JAMIESON. I do think there are opportunities—as General 

D’Araujo pointed out, there were a lot of good proposals in there. 

There were a lot of tough decisions that were made by technical experts and architects in terms of those proposals. I do think the Post 

Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act (PKEMRA) in terms 

of the Stafford legislation does offer us the opportunity to explore 

some of those. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Let me just say this one other thing. The 

reason that this is so hard for me to understand is because under 

the general community development block grant funding which 

went to the States in question, the State of Mississippi received 

$5.5 billion for the community development block grant program, 

of which their general housing program only needed $3 billion. So 

they had an additional $2 billion. They could have bought these 

themselves, and they could buy all of them with the $2 billion they 

have extra. 

So I am very puzzled as to how this was a free market or how 

this was based on demand or need. So we are going to visit that 

aspect of it, too. In other words, if the State of Mississippi thought 

that this program was so valuable, it actually has money in its 

bank account, it could have bought 5,000 of these if it wanted to. 

Mr. JAMIESON. As does Louisiana, Senator. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. No. I will say this: Louisiana does not have 

any extra community development block grant because—let me just 

say this for the record, because we are going to have many hearings until the truth comes out. The community development block 

grant funding that came to Louisiana was $10.5 billion. If you multiply three times three—we had three times three more houses destroyed than Mississippi. So if you want to use that as a basis—

you do not have to, but it is one objective criteria—other than the 

political criteria that has been used. If you want to use objective 

criteria, then we should have gotten $15 or $16 billion. We got 

$10.5 billion. So we are either short $6 billion or we are short $17 

billion, depending on what portion you want to use. 

Now, that is a fact. It is not Mary Landrieu’s opinion. It is a fact. 

So we are going to be pressing this fact about how these community development block grant monies were distributed, and I understand that it was Congress itself that put a cap that no State could 

get more, which started this distortion. But that distortion is going 

to be corrected sooner or later. 

Mr. JAMIESON. Senator, if I could make one final point, I think 

that the subject of need keeps coming up in terms of whether or 

not this Alternative Housing Pilot Program was designed to meet 

need. And I think the other statistic that needs to be looked at is 

the assistance that went into Louisiana for individual assistance 

where $5.5 billion went in for individual assistance and $1.2 billion 

went in for Mississippi, and——

40

Chairman LANDRIEU. Well, it is only because there were more 

people displaced in Louisiana. 

Mr. JAMIESON. That is precisely right, but that is my point. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. It is only more people displaced——

Mr. JAMIESON. I think in terms of the housing need, that is an 

adequate barometer in terms of FEMA’s desire to meet the immediate and emergency housing needs in the State. That was my only 

point. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Anything else? 

Mr. JADACKI. Senator, I believe our report speaks for itself, so I 

have no additional comments. Thank you. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. I thank the panel very much, and I appreciate—go ahead, Mr. Duany. 

Mr. DUANY. I would just add one thing, which actually could be 

functionally. The funds that we have are substantial funds, and 

they can be used to greater effect if FEMA would manifest some 

flexibility in the proposals. When we only had 30 days to do it, we 

had thoughts, we had ideas, but not all the thoughts and ideas that 

could possibly be explored. And many have emerged, and the Louisiana program can actually make substantial contributions to the 

intention of the bill if you could—if FEMA would retain a flexible 

mind about additional good ideas that have emerged since. And it 

is not necessarily happening, and I would say that if you would 

urge them to do so, it would be a much better outcome. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Well, I am not sure how much my urging 

is getting FEMA to do anything, but I will continue to try. But if 

you would submit those in writing to me, I will present them to 

this agency. I will do my best. 

Mr. DUANY. Thank you. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Mr. Badman. 

Mr. BADMAN. Senator, may I suggest strong focus be addressed 

to pre-hurricane planning. I think the greatest failure of all has 

been the failure to set up emergency response. With our system, if 

properly set up, we will be there instantly. And I think other systems can do that, too, and that is really where we have to start. 

We cannot have a knee-jerk reaction. We cannot be trying to figure 

out solutions after the disaster. We have to be ready for them 

ahead of time. And I think all the planning that was done after it 

was excellent, but a greater focus has to be on planning ahead of 

time. 

Chairman LANDRIEU. Thank you, Mr. Badman. But you might be 

shocked to know that in another committee that I sit on, most of 

the planning money that goes from the Federal Government block 

grant to the States has been cut out substantially. We have learned 

very little lessons from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, because we 

needed that money to fund interoperability. So instead of finding 

additional funding, we cut the planning money to give it to interoperability. So we have got some interesting work ahead. 

Thank you very much. The hearing is adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 11:32 a.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.] 

(41)

A P P E N D I X 


35527.001
42


35527.002
43


35527.003
44


35527.004
45


35527.005
46


35527.006
47


35527.007
48


35527.008
49


35527.009
50


35527.010
51


35527.011
52


35527.012
53


35527.013
54


35527.014
55


35527.015
56


35527.016
57


35527.017
58


35527.018
59


35527.019
60


35527.020
61


35527.021
62


35527.022
63


35527.023
64


35527.024
65


35527.025
66


35527.026
67


35527.027
68


35527.028
69


35527.029
70


35527.030
71


35527.031
72


35527.032
73


35527.033
74


35527.034
75


35527.035
76


35527.036
77


35527.037
78


35527.038
79


35527.039
80


35527.040
81


35527.041
82


35527.042
83


35527.043
84


35527.044
85


35527.045
86


35527.046
87


35527.047
88


35527.048
89


35527.049
90


35527.050
91


35527.051
92


35527.052
93


35527.053
94


35527.054
95


35527.055
96


35527.056
97


35527.057
98


35527.058
99


35527.059
100


35527.060
101


35527.061
102


35527.062
103


35527.063
104


35527.064
105


35527.065
106


35527.066
107


35527.067
108


35527.068
109


35527.069
110


35527.070
111


35527.071
112


35527.072
113


35527.073
114


35527.074
115


35527.075
116


35527.076
117


35527.077
118


35527.078
119


35527.079
120


35527.080
121


35527.081
122


35527.082
123


35527.083
124


35527.084
125


35527.085
126


35527.086
127


35527.087
128


35527.088
129


35527.089
130


35527.090
131


35527.091
132


35527.092
133


35527.093
134


35527.094
135


35527.095
136


35527.096
137


35527.097
138


35527.098
139


35527.099
140


35527.100
141


35527.101
142


35527.102
143


35527.103
144


35527.104
145


35527.105
146


35527.106
147


35527.107
148


35527.108
149


35527.109
150


35527.110
151


35527.111
152


35527.112
153


35527.113
154


35527.114
155


35527.115
156


35527.116
157


35527.117
158


35527.118
159


35527.119
160


35527.120
161


35527.121
162


35527.122
163


35527.123
164


35527.124
165

Æ


35527.125