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Politics

Judge demands answers on Katrina housing program

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published December 14, 2006

WASHINGTON - A federal judge called the Bush administration's handling of a Hurricane Katrina housing program "a legal disaster" Wednesday and ordered officials to explain a computer system that can neither precisely count evacuees nor provide reasons why they were denied aid.

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon, who ruled last month that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had violated evacuees' constitutional rights by eliminating their housing payments without notice, admonished the government for not moving fast enough to restart the program.

Leon ruled that FEMA mishandled the transition from a short-term housing program to a longer-term program this spring and summer. Instead of explaining why funding was being cut, FEMA provided only computer-generated and sometimes conflicting program codes, Leon said.

The judge ordered FEMA to explain those decisions so thousands of evacuees can understand the reasoning and decide whether to appeal.

Government attorney Michael Sitcov said that FEMA's computer system cannot do what the judge wants. The 8-year-old system is set up only to produce program codes, he said. The program also cannot say for certain how many evacuees in Texas were covered by Leon's order, Sitcov said. He said the best estimate of evacuees covered by the order was 5,479. FEMA has appealed Leon's order.

Leon said he didn't understand why the letters couldn't be written by hand.

[Last modified December 14, 2006, 01:48:01]