Governor Blanco says it's blatantly political. Me, I don't know. But it's damn peculiar that, as Friday's T-P makes abundantly clear, the Feds are following a post-Katrina policy that radically differs from federal policy after other, lesser, major disasters. The point at issue: Federal law (the Stafford Act) normally requires a state match--from 10 to 25 percent--of the federal money used in infrastructure repair. But, as the story points out, after 9/11, after Hurricane Andrew, after at least 25 other disasters over the last two decades, the Feds have waived the matching requirement. Now, with local government in New Orleans still straining for revenue (the State has a surplus), the Feds are refusing to waive the match. Result: vital infrastructure repair can't get started, because the city doesn't have the revenue to match the federal grant. Worse, the city's own laws require the municipality to have the cash on hand before the project is even begun, so the match can't be found later.
Nut graf:
Even though John Connolly, FEMA's chief for public assistance projects on the Gulf Coast, says he has "never seen a disaster that so compromised the continuity of local government," the agency also has refused to provide any explanation for deviating from past practice when it came to one of the worst disasters in recent U.S. history -- especially one the federal government and its poorly built levees caused, many critics say.