Hurricane Cleanup Expands

Now, we're not only talking about cleaning up in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, but South Florida. This hurricane season isn't quite done, but the toll has been devastating. Millions of people have been displaced, more than a thousand people were killed, and the property damage is still being tallied, but will be tens of billions of dollars.

Folks are reticient to rebuild in New Orleans. Whiplash Nagin complains about the slow pace of rebuilding, yet everyone who has a functioning neuron would know that rebuilding the levee system must take precedence before anything else can happen. And to rebuild the levees to protect against a Category 5 storm, let alone a Category 3 will be extremely expensive. Not to mention that it will take years to improve the system. As we're learning, there were problems with the levee system that included structural deficiencies that meant that they wouldn't survive a category 3 storm, which is what Katrina was when it hit New Orleans.

The New Orleans District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently finished the first draft of a Category 5 hurricane protection plan for the New Orleans area. The major goal of the plan, according to officials who have seen it, is to prevent storm surges entering the city through lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne. It would accomplish this with a system of giant levees across exposed and low-lying areas, and sea gates across natural passes, shipping channels and canals.

Corps officials say the project, which would cost up to $3.5 billion, could take between five and 15 years to complete.

And in the time that it takes to build the new levee system, there's no way to guarantee that another strong storm wouldn't hit the region.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the levee protection must take precedence over all other pork projects if the region is to fully recover.

Whiplash Nagin wants to hold weekly town hall meetings. Well, the one thing you can say about Nagin is that he doesn't shy away from the public. Even when he's constantly flip flopping on rebuilding and reconstruction issues. This increases the chances of his flipping.

Preservationists are concerned that communities take the time to rebuild with the history of the region in mind. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (R) is calling for $38 billion over the next 10 years to assist the recovery.

The governor said one thing he'll ask Congress to do is to authorize Mississippi to spend part of that money to help those residents without flood insurance whose homes were either flooded or destroyed during the hurricane. He said these people "to their detriment relied on the federal government to establish flood zones" where flood insurance was required.

Barbour said it's still early in the process and does not know whether Congress will authorize that kind of spending. Barbour estimated that 40,000 to 50,000 homeowners might get some kind of assistance under his proposal. He did not have a dollar figure of how much each homeowner might receive.

Barbour also said that he thinks Mississippi over the next 10 years will need about an additional $18 billion in federal funding for Katrina recovery.

Barbour is proposing Congress appropriate about $8.8 billion of that in the next fiscal year for repairing infrastructure, Medicaid, education and other needs.

On its face, that sounds more reasonable than the boondoggle requests made by Louisiana's Gov. Blanco (D), who padded their request with all kinds of pork.

Florida is picking up the pieces from Wilma. Fort Lauderdale was pretty hard hit, as was the Florida Keys. The damage is pretty widespread and 6 million people were without power today.

UPDATE:
Did you know that most Katrina aid appropriated by Congress remains unspent? If you've been following my blog for a while, you would. In fact, only about 1/4 of the $62 billion appropriated by Congress has been spent.

Six weeks later, the government has spent or signed contracts totaling $16.2 billion, about a quarter of the money. To hurricane victims still awaiting trailers, small businesses needing loans to rebuild or city officials clamoring for debris removal, that amount may seem stunningly low. "When you look at the $62 billion and how much is actually making it to the state, it's such a small percentage that it's really disappointing," says Denise Bottcher, a spokeswoman for Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. She says the governor has asked the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency for details on where the money is being spent in Louisiana, but the agencies haven't provided any.

But to those familiar with Washington budgeting, it's not surprising and is even defensible. "If anything," says Rep. John Spratt of South Carolina, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, officials have "probably been a little too quick on the trigger to sign contracts without competitive bidding." Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the Congressional Budget Office and a former Bush administration economist, says that the disaster spending "has gone a little quicker than people expected" in capital corridors.

FEMA received nearly all the money provided by the spending legislation and doles some out to other federal agencies. FEMA needs to have the legal funding authority that the legislation provides to sign contracts and incur federal financial obligations. Actual payments -- for projects such as rebuilding roads and other major public works -- might be spread over several years.

"It's always better to err on the high side," given the uncertainty of a humanitarian disaster like Katrina, says Robert Reischauer, a former CBO director who now heads the Urban Institute think tank.

Amid widespread dissatisfaction over an initially slow federal response to Katrina, the White House and Congress scrambled to provide funds. On Sept. 2, five days after the hurricane, Mr. Bush signed a $10.5 billion emergency-spending bill for search and rescue operations. Less than a week later, with FEMA burning through the money at a rate of as much as $2 billion a day, the president and Congress added another $51.8 billion.

Technorati: flood aid; hurricane katrina; katrina aid; hurricane rita; slidell; biloxi; gulfport; pascagoula; nagin; blanco; barbour.