BLANCO'S FEMA PAYBACK

Hmm...I see we already had a little political battle on our hands before the hurricane:

Louisiana officials are stumped. Do officials in our Office of Homeland Security owe the federal government more than 30 million dollars? The feds sent the bill Wednesday for money paid out in the form of grants for a federal flood buyout program. Three former Louisiana Homeland Security employees who oversaw the program are currently under federal indictment.

The state says we don't owe the money back. But they say if we do, the individual parishes the grants went to will have to pay back the money.

Mark Smith, Dept. of Homeland Security said, "Would I call it a public relations nightmare? Yes."

It was just a matter of time before the bill was sent to the state following its handling of federal FEMA flood buyout monies. The government says more than 30 million was misspent by the state through the Office of Emergency Preparedness between 1997 and 2002. Three former high level employees of the office are under federal indictment for charges related to the handling of those FEMA funds.

"Really its not that the money was misspent here or the money was misspent there," says Smith. "It's going to be, in a lot of the cases, a matter of improper paperwork."

What did Gov. Blanco have to say about that missing money? She tried to play the children and the sick card to get them off her back:

Governor Kathleen Blanco says if the state is forced to pay back the federal government more than 30 million dollars, the state's children and sick will suffer. This week, FEMA officials sent a letter demanding back 30.4 million dollars back in misspent flood buyout money.

Governor Blanco is very concerned about that FEMA demand letter. She says the state simply does not have that kind of money just laying around. Blanco says a 30 million dollar hit to the state budget would be devastating.

"The regretful thing is if we have to come up with 30 million dollars, it takes away from children, it takes away from the sick... you know, very, very important initiatives."

Oh. like the evacuation of the children and sick from New Orleans before a hurricane? By all means keep it then. We know you care.

Suffice it to say she's going to have a lot more money to manage now and she's going to have unlimited sympathy cards to play. This helps understand just a little more about the attitude of the remaining Louisiana Homeland Security officials that weren't indicted, the political and legal posturing of Gov Blanco and her hiring of ex-FEMA James Lee Witt to help work with (undercut the authority of) FEMA and DHS. You had to wonder what all the political gamesmanship was about when most thought they would simply welcome FEMA with kisses and flowers.

(via Freeper Ellesu)

MORE: After seeing that "It takes a village" excuse for the $30M, I don't think this is as harsh an opener as I once did:

Put a public school teacher in the governor's mansion and you'll have a pedagogue as the chief executive every time. ...

From the moment Katrina blew ashore—hours before the 17th Street levee broke—New Orleans mayor Raymond Nagin declared martial law over his city and ordered it evacuated. He tried, in vain, to get Gov. Blanco to turn control of available National Guard troops over to him. She refused.

Blanco's advisers told her that the remaining 7,000 National Guard troops left in Louisiana were not enough to secure the city of New Orleans, and that it was not in her best political interest to use them until they could be reinforced since they might get hurt, or worse, hurt or kill a civilian they were charged with protecting. Instead, she let Nagin's 1,500 New Orleans cops fend for themselves in a city that had been tacitly surrendered to looters and thugs.

Blanco, who apparently was not in constant or at least direct contact with the mayor of New Orleans as a leader would be expected to be, appeared to be preoccupied with media photo ops which made it appear to the voters that she was aware of the plight that was enveloping her State—and that she was implementing corrective measures to ward off disaster. Like a school teacher passing out unimportant assignments, she outlined the measures that would take place to secure the city of New Orleans and rescue its people. But nothing happened. Why? Because Blanco never took control of the emergency apparatus of Louisiana—and apparently did not want anyone doing so, either, until she was ready to act. ...

But Blanco refused to act for a long time.

I think when the facts come out, we'll find that most information being used to make the biggest decisions were being laundered through a black hole spin machine in the governor's office and confused everyone involved in the rescue effort. I know Mike Brown at FEMA looks pretty bad and may deserve some heat, but it's likely they he and others were being fed a huge amount of misinformation by Blanco's office in order to keep them from taking over or otherwise getting involved in "her business."

And here's more about her business:

Not only does the governor have a black mold problem in the Mansion, causing her to live in a rented house for the summer, but her offices in the State Capitol appear to have a plumbing problem, following the embarrassing leak of a confidential memo on how to deal with partisan opposition.

The memo was sent to the governor's communications director Bob Mann by his friend and former journalist John Copes, who refers to their conversations about "the most serious problem Democrats in Louisiana now face." According to the memo, that would be a "right-wing destruction machine" consisting of a Republican Party "that becomes more organized, more belligerent and more nakedly partisan by the day" coupled with "daily message-peddling by GOP surrogates" in the mainstream media, talk radio and Internet web sites. ...

But then the memo heads for the deep end by exploring how to conceal the web site's source, including "to masquerade as some sort of anonymous non-partisan do-gooder group." Though the writer doubts such a ploy would "pass the smell test," he sees the need "to come up with some kind of story about who's doing the site and why" without identifying the state's top Democrats behind it.

While state officials wrote none of the above words, the memo refers to frequent if not-so-recent discussions with the governor's communications director about how to deal with the administration's critics.

Some of those critics on talk radio and the Internet blasted the administration's consideration of the web site project, however nascent, as deceitful and chilling. How much the administration even entertained the idea is unknown, though you can be sure that any discussion of it on the Fourth Floor now is strictly verboten.

UPDATE: Looks like more getting reported here now:

Nine months before the Hurricane Katrina disaster, three Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness officials were indicted for obstructing an audit into flood prevention expenditures.

In a November 2004 press release, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Louisiana announced:

"A federal grand jury has returned two separate indictments charging three members of the State Military Department with offenses related to the obstruction of an audit of the use of federal funds for flood mitigation activities throughout Louisiana.

"The two emergency management officials were senior employees of the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. Both were charged with conspiracy to obstruct a federal audit."

Gov. Kathleen Blanco told Louisiana's News-Star at the time that she was disturbed by the indictments. She said the National Guard is cooperating with the investigation "as I expect them to do."

Reports of rampant corruption among Louisiana's state and local agencies have been cited in recent days to explain why officials were so ill-prepared to deal with the Katrina disaster.

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