The Sun Herald | 10/15/2006 | Grant snags may not be at line's end

The Sun Herald | 10/15/2006 | Grant snags may not be at line's end: "Donna Sanford, grant project director for MDA, said overcoming federal, insurance company, mortgage and credit and other red tape has often been a moving target for the program.

'Every time we get over one obstacle, another one pops up,' Sanford said. 'And this has never been done, so we can't call up another state and ask how they handled things.'

The obstacles have been myriad.

First off, workers have to make sure applicants owned their homes at the time of the storm, that they carried some sort of homeowner insurance, that they received flood damage and that they lived outside the flood zone. This all sounds fairly simple. It isn't.

For instance, more than 600 applicants were delayed because they didn't appear on the state homestead tax exemption rolls, or didn't file until early this year. To overcome this, the program is now taking homeowner affidavits swearing they lived in the homes.

Many of the 200-plus insurance companies involved - some of which are located outside the United States - haven't played ball providing information for the grants, holding up close to 2,000 applications. Homeowners, as of a couple of weeks ago, have been able to swear out insurance affidavits to get things moving.

While only 17,000 households applied for the grants, the program has had to check identities, titles and other information on more than 24,000 people - because often more than one person is on the title or mortgage for one home.

For quite a while, the program was bogged down because the federal Small Business Administration couldn't or wouldn't share information promptly. Congress and HUD stipulated that any grant proceeds first go to pay off Katrina disaster loans from SBA. But problems with SBA were resolved in late August, Sanford said, and computerized information is flowing back and forth.

Even determining whether some homeowners were outside the federal flood zone - and thus told they didn't need federal flood insurance - proves daunting. Federal flood maps, Sanford said, are continually changing, so program workers and homeowners have to figure out in many cases how to determine a home's flood zone status decades ago when it was purchased."