Volunteer Resources in Hancock County

Grant Requests

Six weeks ago both grant programs were touting how much funding they had. What happened in six weeks?

Both Salvation Army and Red Cross programs report that they have inundated with rebuilding grant requests thru the individual Case Managers and Long Term Recovery Committees. The Red Cross process takes six weeks or more (after going thru the tedious Long Term Recovery Process) and the Salvation Army Grants are taking about three weeks according to sources at Salvation Army. But case managers are reporting delays upto six weeks. Salvation Army states they have handed out 1,000 grants. Red Cross, in Hancock County, hands its grants out via the Hancock County Long Term Recovery Committee and the number there is reported to be as little as ten Red Cross grants in two years.

Case Manager Shortage

Both Salvation Army and Red Cross grants were tied to the resident needing a Case Manager. The Case Manager needed to have a building partner in order to apply for a grant for their client. Both requirements were difficult to meet. There is a critical shortage of Case Managers. There is a critical shortage of skilled volunteers and building partners.

 In a normal world a Case Manager has an average load of 35 clients. Here in the Gulf Coast region that load can be as high as 1500. Many residents do not have a Case Manager and many organizations are not taking new clients in order to maintain a manageable client load. This has left a huge portion of the Katrina victims without a Case Manager at all – thus losing any possible access to a Red Cross, Salivation Army Grant, or access to the Long Term Recovery Committee.

Evacuated Residents

Evacuated residents, from the onset, have been very isolated from the information source. Many have missed critical deadlines further impacting their recovery. Failure to file for FEMA paperwork means many have  been denied some benefits. Some of that is a result of isolation, dementia, and most important of all, illiteracy – a very overlooked problem in an area where there is a culture that hides poverty and cultural bankruptcy. And failure to apply for timely Building Permits have left many having to meet stricter and more expensive building solutions. Others are currently being notified, by certified mail, that their property is considered blighted and abandoned as no progress has been made cleaning it up.

The City of Waveland no longer will allow evacuated residents to put a trailer on their property during re-construction – thus leaving the resident to deal with the inflated rental market along with the critical shortage of available units. Rent is running from $600 for a one bedroom apartment upto $1500 for a house – even if you can find one. Many of the evacuated residents are on fixed incomes and can not afford this inflated rent. Along with that, without a resident presence on the property, there is a critical issue of providing security for the building materials. Looting and theft still runs rife in the County. Without the resident on-site – the construction process is complicated by the need for long distance commutes for the resident further compounding the fiscal issues.

Lack of a Volunteer Marketing Plan

Complicating the grant process is the requirement that the Case Manager have a building partner. That can be in the form of a sponsoring church, volunteer work group, or corporation agreeing to complete the repairs on the home using the grant funds. With the ever exponentially spiraling downward supply of volunteers – this was becoming increasingly difficult. Besides Habitat for Humanity – very few of the Disaster Relief Operations were pro-actively recruiting local volunteers. Habitat for Humanity has been advertising on television using with ad cost sponsors such as Mississippi Power and WLOX.

Short of Habitat for Humanity – there never really was an implemented National Marketing Plan for volunteers. Mississippi Commission for Volunteer Service  did support a website for recruiting volunteers – but response was lethargic and promotion was minimal to nil. The website home page leaves one questioning its veracity when some of the comments on there are limited to the “first year”. And, despite this operation here at Katrina Relief   filling out all the required paperwork on their "volunteer" site - we are still not listed on the Volunteer opportunities site for the website itself. The paperwork prison created by Katrina is like no other. No matter how much paperwork you submit, as a relief agency or a victim, you never ever fill it all out for all the right people - this is always one lingering piece of the puzzle.

Considering we are going into the third year this web page for Mississippi Volunteer services has barely changed in that entire time frame.   In going on two years plus – I have only received one email from the site data bank and no volunteer applications that I know of.

Volunteer Match.og   has been a very good source for volunteers – but even that source is starting to dwindle. I can count the hits to my site from their site on a daily basis – and the activity is high. But the follow thru is not as active as it was prior.

Volunteer housing has become, for some, an interesting way to raise funds for re-construction. With volunteer housing costing upto $25 per day per volunteer – it has become payday for some operations. Many are sincere. Some are not.  Some are soliciting volunteers – but do not have the work orders to keep them busy and the volunteers languish in camp returning home to tell that story rather than a story of great need. There is no camp certification required for running a volunteer camp. There is no funding for volunteer camps - it is an operation supported by donations. And yet we do not have enough volunteer housing. More leaving than staying - and there never were enough fully equipped camps to start with.

The need for skilled volunteers is critical – we have far to go in this recovery process. We are barely started with thousands of homes left to go. This response to Katrina was the largest privatization of disaster relief ever embarked upon. Sadly the individual churches thrived while the national media drove the donation engine. That engine no longer even runs with a dull roar – it is barely a whisper and the individual platforms are finding funding dwindling rapidly. They had depended, prior, on Red Cross and Salvation Army – that end is on the horizon. This situation is now critical.

The consensus on a census

 The newly grown foliage and the vines are covering a multitude of sins since the storm. You can barely see the ground or empty pads anymore. In most cases the vegetation has overrun the previous stark terrain and now the problem is the absentee landlords who are not mowing their property. It has been left to natural re-growth. So driving down the roads, short of the occasional abandoned Katrina damaged home and lost rusted white refrigerator hanging in a tree - there is nothing to see. It appears normal to the outsider. Just a street with one or two houses, a house under construction here and there, and the driveway leading to re-growth. The vines of summer cover all that miscellaneous debris left behind by the skid loaders that cleared the lot. It is all underneath the foliage. An innocent mat of green.

There is no census for some towns here in the aftermath of the storm – and that is true for Hancock County. Those responsible for gathering the data said there was no accurate way to estimate the current populations of Waveland and Bay St Louis along with some other towns affected by Katrina. It would seem to me that the water utility billing system for both towns would supply some accurate assessment of who has water usage, how much usage, and the location of that address. The gallons used (considering there are very few gardens and yards under cultivation) would give you some degree of insight into the number of people using that water based on national statistical averages. The electric companies also would be able to supply some sort of input into the census bases on their billing and wattage consumption per household. Both utility systems have separate commercial accounts that separating residential from commercial.  Those address sources matched up with the type of building permit and percentage complete – should give a pretty accurate assessment of the real population at this time.

Thus, we are left guessing, to some degree on what the actual population here currently is. The population is inflated with construction crews, government relief workers, relief workers, highway crews, bridge crews, voli-tourists, tourists, evacuated residents making their weekly, monthly and six monthly visits, and volunteers. Also there is a need by the local governments to inflate the numbers to bolster the premise that we are “coming back”. 

But driving down the roads and back roads – it is not hard to see that a huge proportion of the population has not come home, has not made plans to come home as there are no signs of re-construction, and some have not bothered to come back since the storm thus necessitating abandonment procedures by both towns and counties on what is now called blighted properties.

How many are not coming home - no one really knows. Perhaps someone needs to add up the myriad of "For Sale" and "Sold" signs and do some quick calculations?

What is left for funding sources?

Funding is still being approved for Phase I and Phase II grants from Mississippi Development Authority.   Although from what I have seen – the Phase II grants are small and I have yet to see one that will actually replace the original home let alone built a home at all in some cases. That leaves the homeowner searching for solutions – including volunteers. And, they are short very short on supply of skilled volunteer crews -  making any construction process very slow.

The Hancock Long Term Recovery Committee has access to the Mississippi Hurricane Recovery Fund  that was funded by the Governor with thirty million dollars. The other counties being served by those funds have used up the majority of their funds. Hancock County has not and run the risk of   losing those funds, a couple of million, if it is allocated somewhere else at the end of the year because of lack of action on the part of the Hancock Long Term Recovery Committee. There is some funding from a Home Deport Grant of $3,000 also available for the Hancock Long Term Recovery Committee. How much? No one will say.

The Hancock County Long Term Recovery Committee mission statement leaves them serving, primarily, the elderly, disabled and single parent families. Others do not qualify despite attempts, on occasion, by Case Managers who plead hardship cases. The process is also very slow and very few grants have been handed out from that platform. Hancock Long Term Recovery has taken on about 92 cases in going on two years. Forty, approximately, are recent new cases. Completion rate for those already in the system, prior to those recent forty new cases,   is about 50%. They have few volunteers and no active marketing program for volunteers. They have 14 people on the Case Managers email list if they do send out information - which is rarely. They use the email list as a bargaining tool if you dare to criticize the committee - you will find yourself not included on the "list". Shunning is their only official public relations policy. No official website comes up while searching with Google for Hancock Long Term Recovery .

Others, not qualifying for these grants, are left to explore options with S.B.A., and individual church groups who are able to complete small projects. . Church World Services re-ups their grants every three months. No notification yet if there is to be another phase of that $10,000 funding source.

The home owners are thus going from relief organization to relief organization trying to explore what is available and signing up on every available list hoping for a miracle, hoping for a Case Manager, and, at the very least,  the hope for a group of skilled volunteers who really do know how to build a house.

The Renters - socially ostracized

There is no solution on the horizon for renters what-so-ever. A few programs  are touted and claim they are about to serve a minimal token number. But, overall, there is nothing here in the Gulf Coast for them.

Where are the elderly residents on fixed incomes who rented prior going to live? What is that immediate plan? There really is not one? There is little construction of rental properties that are affordable. Those taking the FEMA plan and moving into subsidized rental housing for the next two years are taking a great gamble that there will be affordable housing when their contract ends.

Reality is that a huge portion of this rental population will have to relocate. With what money? And who is going to facilitate this? How will this affect the job market? No real answers to that question at all.

The changing horizon

 There are spec homes going up left and right. You can not help notice them. They are not tied to funding grants or tight budgets of Katrina affected residents rebuilding. Who is buying them? I can not find an article that has identified that market.

And what some Katrina residents are building are bigger and better than the homes prior to Katrina – insurance and grants have allowed that in some cases. Others, after refurbishing after the storm with their own money and church money – are now adding on fancy additions with their Phase I and Phase II grants that just arrived. There was no agreement to pay back any funds received prior.

But what is being built for many it is a much much smaller home – that is all the funding available. And that, in itself, is creating problems as the building departments are balking at approving cottages. And in some neighborhoods it is creating strife as the cottage is sitting next to that big fancy spec home a contractor built. Hard to market a fancy spec home now sitting between two cute cottages.

The Waveland building department was quite overt in their comments regarding a volunteer who has multiple Elkview  576 sf cottages to build. The building official is quoted as saying “They are too small” while the volunteer is standing there trying to facilitate a building permit. The department proceeded to dilly dally over the next three weeks on issuing the permit. Since the buildings  meet code – the only requirement they do not meet is the comparison to the former larger southern beach cottage common to the area. In other words – it a social prestige issue not a housing issue. It is about maintaining property values based on what is built next door.

As for trailers – there was a cleansing of  that social class. Trailers can not be placed in Waveland what-so-ever. And according to the building department in Waveland – the trailers in the annexed properties were not grandfathered in as earlier promised. So those that had, earlier, got building permits from Bay St Louis are now being told the trailer has to go as “they are in Waveland now”. With the funds for Hill family, out in the 603 annexed triangle, now all tied up in a trailer he can not keep – he is probably now going to have too seek legal assistance in order to move forward. With the end of the Salvation Army and Red Cross Grants process on the horizon – they will try to meet that deadline but it’s an iffy outcome.

Other towns and counties have developed harsh requirements when it comes to permitting trailers. Trailers did not fair well in the storm – but prior they were the affordable housing for that economic base in the community. Currently there is no affordable housing plan for any part of the Gulf Coast that is moving forward quickly. It is fast becoming critical as FEMA trailer parks are closing left, right, and center. Where are the Wal-Mart, Kmart, gas station employees going to live who prior lived in a trailer that was wiped away with the storm?

The business district

 If you take the sales tax base as a thermometer for how well the business district is doing - it is doing well. If you add up the number of business entities that are coming and going in a constant flux - you have to wonder what the real picture is. If you take the comments of the non construction type business entities seriously - then business is very slow. My favorite restaurant struggles to compete with the Casino. Both Casino entities in Bay St Louis say that business is slow. That’s what their waitress staff says also. The Real Estate sales people tell the story that very little property is changing hands at the current inflated prices. Come September when the moratorium on foreclosures ends - the prediction is that it will be a blood bath in foreclosed properties and even more "for sale" signs will appear on the front lawns of those newly refurbished and rebuilt homes.

But the business district looks as if it is thriving when you drive down 90. You just have to look at it as a Hollywood facade right now - from the back it is being propped up with a lot of faith that it will grow with time.

The third August is coming up fast

 The anniversary for Katrina is coming up fast. Its going on the third year since Katrina.  I can tell from the number of calls I am receiving from press agencies looking for a good story. You know the one – the little blonde two year old waif at the end of the driveway holding her rag doll that is finally back in her grandiose home supplied by a generous church group.

There are success stories – many of them. That is true. Some of them picture perfect moments that have been splashed all over the news media.

But the big picture here is that I have 1500 clients who are not going to meet the Salvation Army or the Red Cross deadline for multiple reasons and there are no church groups on the horizon who are volunteering to come down and build them a home. Wayland to Waveland is coming to build seven homes in one block - and they researched those to make sure there was a story for advertising and fund raising purposes.  The cold hard facts of marketing for fund raising are becoming so real here.

The 1500 remaining on my case load will not be the only ones scrambling for a solution. Every Case Manager in the region is looking at the same pot of gold and the same deadline with no funding solutions in sight.

So, now what? Where do we go from here? Does anyone truly have a Master plan?