Transcript: Katrina and Public-Service Law

Equal Justice Works — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 01:45:22 GMT

Aug. 29, 2007 - Bill Quigley is a law professor as well as director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans. Quigley has been an active public-interest lawyer for over 25 years, serving as counsel with a wide range of public-interest organizations on issues including public housing, voting rights, death penalty, living wage, civil liberties, educational reform, constitutional rights and civil disobedience. Since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Quigley has been a leading voice in the quest for a just and equitable recovery.

NEWSWEEK hosted a Live Talk with Quigley on the second anniversary of Katrina, Wednesday, Aug. 29

Bill Quigley: This is Bill Quigley at Loyola University New Orleans. Thanks to Newsweek and Equal Justice Works (see www.equaljusticeworks.org) for setting this forum up. Thanks also to the thousands of law students and lawyers who have come to the Gulf Coast to help us out. More than 100 Law Schools have sent students, faculty and administrators to volunteer in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas - most organized by the Student Hurricane Network (see www.studenthurricanenetwork.org).

Now to the questions!

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Arlington, Virginia: I've heard reports of the criminal justice system in New Orleans being a mess. Shortly after the Hurricanes hit there were reports of people remaining in jail long after their sentence was completed, or being held awaiting trial with no possibility of bail because their records were lost -- even for non-violent offenses. What's the status now?

Bill Quigley: It is true that our criminal justice system was a complete mess for a long time after Katrina. The jails flooded, the clerk's office was under water, hundreds of police officers left, victims of crime and witnesses were scattered across the country. Records were destroyed. We did not hold a jury trial for almost a year.
But much has improved - thanks to help from people across the country. Law students from across the country came down with the Student Hurricane Network to help out the public defender and interviewed every single person in jail to find out what their situation was - and ended up releasing many who had become lost in the system. Other law students worked with the District Attorney's office.
We are still a long way from being fixxed, but the public defender system has been overhauled, the police and the prosecutors are working better together than in the past, and all the courts are up and running.
We still have police officers doing reports in their cars because the station is too hot. We have public defenders and prosecutors operating several to a room. We need a lot of help, but we are getting better.

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Los Angeles, California: Do Louisiana and Mississippi still need law students to come down on spring and semester breaks or on an externship program, and if so, what kind of work would they do?

Bill Quigley: YES! The Gulf Coast still has tremendous unmet legal needs. Just a few examples. Thousands of families still need help clearing up titles to their property so they can get assistance. There are over 4500 tax appeals awaiting hearings just in New Orleans - most of low and moderate income homeowners who are struggling to rebuild. There is a lot of contractor fraud investigation and work needed.
Best bet is to go through the Student Hurricane Network - a law student created association that helps place law students with legal services providers along the Gulf Coast. See http://www.studenthurricanenetwork.org/orgs2.html

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Washington, DC: I know there are still a lot of injustices in New Orleans, but the sheer volume makes it hard to grasp. Can you tell a story of an injustice that will rekindle the outrage I felt right after the hurricanes?

Bill Quigley: Let me tell you about a woman I met for the first time just a few days ago.
She owned her own home in New Orleans for 37 years before Katrina destroyed it. She has received no money from the state or federal government to rebuild. She gets no rental assistance but she and her husband live in an apartment with two other families nearly 50 miles away from her house. They pay $1350 a month rent. She does not know where her neighbors who lived across the street live. She arranges to have the grass cut on her empty lot to try to keep it up for when she can rebuild.
This woman is 79. Her husband is 84.
There are tens of thousands of stories like hers across the gulf.

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Washington, DC: How hard has it been to build coalitions between law schools (Loyola, Tulane, Southern and LSU), local and national law firms, non-profits (like the Pro Bono Project, Legal Aid) and the LA Bar in order to make progress in one area such as housing or health care? Do they work together; and, if not, what are the barriers?

Bill Quigley: Building coalitions is always hard, especially when the local partners are busy trying to fix their buildings and teachers and staff and students are trying to repair or replace their homes.

But there have been great success stories. The coalitions that have worked have usually created a working group on a specific topic - like opening probate (successions in LA) to help. Law students interview people locally, a wonderful lawfirm Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, a law firm headquartered in North Carolina, sent lawyers to the gulf coast to interview and work on cases - and hundreds of families have been helped.
Jenner and Block and the Advancement Project in DC are helping thousands of low income families in public housing try to get home. Many other lawfirms like Shulte Roth & Zabel combined with national public interest groups like the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU, Appleseed, and others to provide tremendous assistance.

Barriers remain. Mostly because there are so few public interest lawyers on the Gulf Coast who can partner with out of state firms and organizations which want to help. Much remains to be done. We need a lot more examples like that.

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Bar Harbor, Maine: I have relatives in New Orleans and they tell me that housing rental rates have skyrocketed, and that few people of modest means can afford to live there. Who is paying those high rents? And why doesn't that create incentives to rebuild affordable housing quickly?

Bill Quigley: Rents have doubled in most cases. Why? Over 200,000 homes were severely damaged - 80,000 rental units - tens of thousands have not yet been repaired. Many people are living several families to an apartment.
There are a lot of projects in the works to build affordable housing, but few have actually come on line yet.

Most describe this as a circular problem. We need more workers to help rebuild, but we have a shortage of housing for workers to live in. Right now, along the gulf coast it is tough to be a homeowner, but it is much tougher to be a renter.

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Memphis, Tennessee: How are the dynamics of class and race impacting advocacy and recovery efforts in your view?

Bill Quigley: Race is a part of every single decision made along the Gulf Coast - we either deal with it up front (which is uncomfortable for everyone) or we don't deal with it directly (and hope it does not come back up with more energy later - which it usually does).

Class is most often shown now in terms of the division between homeowners and renters.
For example, less than 25% of the homeowners in LA who have applied have received any federal rebuilding money from the Road Home. So homeowners are hurting. But renters are in even deeper trouble because the state rebuilding programs in LA and MS do nothing directly for renters at all. Since most low income people are renters, they have fewer resources to begin with and now have less and are in real trouble.

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Baton Rouge, Louisiana: How can volunteers help when New Orleans legal providers are not equipped to deal with the volume of aid they are being offered? Would a pro bono coordinator ease this bottlenecking situation? And if so, who would pay for this?

Bill Quigley: Great question. You are right that sometimes we on the gulf coast cannot respond to offers of help as effectively as we want. We are overwhelmed with people in need at the door. As a result, I know there are people and organizations which have reached out to help but have not been met halfway by us. This is part of the problem after a disaster - those impacted cannot always figure out how to use the help that is offered.

It would be great if State or City Bar Associations in major population centers recruited their own pro bono coordinators and put them on the ground on the gulf coast to help identify and organize appropriate opportunities to link the help offered and those in need.
Who would pay? Realistically, those people would have to be funded by the group who wants to help. Wish it could be different, but that is the reality.

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Washington, DC: I heard horror stories of FEMA going after victims to recoup money that had been paid in the immediate aftermath of the hurricanes -- in several cases where family members had been separated from one another and each applied for benefits in good faith. Meanwhile, there have been stories written about contractors getting huge sums of money and not performing promised work or being awarded supplemental contracts to cover cost-overruns.What's your take? What is FEMA's role in this?

Bill Quigley: It is true that the disaster of Katrina is one that keeps on giving.
Mistakes and red tape on the local, state and national level have penalized tens of thousands of people.

FEMA is trying to recoup money from people who have none now. Contractors have received hundreds of millions of dollars for work that they turned around and subcontracted out to others and pocketed big big bucks. Truthfully, disasters are great financial opportunities for the unscrupulous individuals and corporations. That should not stop us from being generous, but much more oversight and accountability is needed.

FEMA itself is a tragic story. It was an understaffed and underorganized organization when Katrina hit. It grew rapidly to try to respond and made tens of thousands of mistakes. We were not ready as a country for such a disaster. Are we ready now? I hope we have learned some lessons. I am sure some things are better, but I am also certain that if another comparable disaster hit today, we would see many of the same problems.

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Grand Rapids, Michigan: Do you feel that the recovery effort has been evenly divided between Mississippi and Louisiana?

Bill Quigley: Not really. See the editorial in today's local paper, the Times-Picayune for details.
But let me assure you that low and moderate income people in Mississippi have not received anywhere near enough assistance to bring them back to where they were the day before Katrina. So, while Mississippi received proportionately more than Louisiana - neither has received enough help to help out the elderly, the sick, the working moms, kids and the rest of the everyday families.

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Baltimore, Maryland: As a law professor, I've been struck by how quickly and expansively the student hurricane network formed in response to Katrina. Since so many students are engaged in the legal lessons of Katrina recovery, I'd like to integrate some of them into my classroom discussions. Do you have suggestions about how these issues fit into classroom coverage of doctrinal and theoretical materials? (I teach Contracts and Commercial Law, but it could be other topics of course.) How can professors and students get involved in discrete legal projects to help the recovery process either long-distance or by going to the Gulf?

Bill Quigley: Katrina is a terrific educational opportunity. That is one of the few bright spots from the disaster.

We held a Katrina seminar at Loyola in our first semester back - the class looked at contracts, insurance, environmental issues, criminal law, family law, civil rights, and community development. We asked various professsors in the school to explain how Katrina had impacted their areas of expertise. We got a great response from faculty and students.

The University of the District of Columbia and Golden Gate Law School offered a Katrina and the Law seminar, Professors Jim Chen of Minnesota and Dan Farber of Boalt co-wrote a textbook and teach a class on Disasters and the Law, and the legal clinics at Boston College, Yale, and Stanford took FEMA and insurance cases from the Mississippi Center for Justice.
The most successful volunteer research projects have been overseen by committed faculty members who work with students. At this point, almost every institution and system on the Gulf Coast remains in deep trouble - so there should be no shortage of topics.

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Annapolis, Maryland: Given the poor state of the public school system in New Orleans prior to Katrina and the subsequent emergence of charter schools there, what direction, in your view, is optimal for the educational system as it stands today? What can be done to strengthen the Recovery School District program in order to improve access to a quality education for all New Orleans youth?

Bill Quigley: Public education was a big problem along the gulf coast before Katrina, especially in New Orleans.

As public school systems rebuild, New Orleans has embarked on a massive experiment in charter schools. We have more charter schools and a higher percentage of our kids in public charter schools than any city in the US. The charters compete for the kids with the best test scores and the most committed parents.

Combined with the more exclusive well-performing public schools, the charters are getting about half the kids. The other half of the schools are for the average New Orleans kid who has average scores and probably parents who are in deep financial trouble trying to make ends meet right now. The average student is in what we call the RSD (officially the Recovery School District - often called the Rest of the Schools District). Kids in RSD schools are in trouble. RSD schools are in not in good physical condition and have trouble recruiting certified teachers.

The RSD cannot improve without significant community assistance. We need corporations and communities to adopt these schools in the way that the charter schools have been supported.
The health of the RSD non-charter schools are also really tied into the overall health of the community. If we have an affordable housing crisis, a mental health crisis, a healthcare crisis, inadequate public education and crumbling infrastructure - our schools will reflect our city.
There is no realistic hope for a top notch public education system in a city ranked in the bottom for everything else. Thus, as our city and region rebuild, our public school system can and will rebuild. As they falter and drift, we should not expect more from the educational system.

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Washington, DC: Why are so many people still in temporary housing? Is FEMA still trying to cut off benefits, take back trailers, etc., even though people have no where else to go?

Bill Quigley: I do not think anyone thought it would take this long to get people back home. It is a real tragedy. Here are some of the facts from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

“Hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged one million homes in four states; 300,000 homes were destroyed. Nearly three-quarters (71%) of the homes that were destroyed were affordable to low income families before the storm. The shockingly slow pace of rebuilding damaged homes has been well-documented. Replacement of housing that was lost is even slower. Even if all the replacement housing that was planned is actually built, which will not happen, there was never any intention by state and local governments to come close to replacing the affordable rental housing stock that was destroyed.

“Thus, two years later, at least 106,000 mostly low income families remain displaced. Some 31,000 families are still receiving FEMA rent assistance. Another 11,500 families who received HUD housing assistance prior to the storm are still getting disaster housing aid through HUD. And 65,000 families still reside in FEMA issued travel trailers and manufactured homes; 15,000 live in trailer camps with the remainder in trailers on their own property.

“Moreover, as many as 75,000 (maybe more) additional displaced households may have been cut off from FEMA rent assistance by mistake or wrongful action by FEMA. FEMA’s rules for determining continuing eligibility for rent assistance have been incomprehensible and arbitrary and its record keeping abysmal. One judge has called FEMA’s application process ‘Kafkaesque’ and another has labeled FEMA’s attitude toward aid recipients ‘cavalier.’ Any external examination of FEMA’s actions on rent assistance will reveal untold hardships experienced by evacuees at the hands of the federal agency charged with helping them, just as FEMA’s failure to address toxic conditions in their travel trailers is now being exposed.

The truth is we as a region and as a nation were not prepared to help this many people.

Katrina has offered our nation a very costly lesson. I hope we will learn from it. We have paid and will continue to pay an awful price for this lesson whether we learn from it or not.

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Minneapolis, Minnesota: I am neither a lawyer nor a law student. I also do not live in the Gulf Coast region. What is the best thing I can do to help the legal community in New Orleans and across the Gulf address the continued overwhelming legal needs?

Bill Quigley: You are good to ask. Most people's legal needs are centered around not being home after 2 years. So, I think if you could help people get home, that would really be a big help.

For example, I think people should contact their US Senators and ask them to support S. 1668, also called the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act of 2007. It needs some improvements, but it is a good start to help more people get home.

It has been sitting in the Senate since June 20. The US House passed a better version - H.R. 1227, the Gulf Coast Hurricane Housing Recovery Act of 2007, on March 21 by a vote of 302-125. That was led by Reps Maxine Waters and Barney Frank - two true friends of the Gulf Coast. Helping people get the resources to help themselves will be the best help anyone can offer.

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Los Angeles, California: I heard that HUD recently approved (Mississippi) Governor Barbour's Small Rental Assistance Plan. What are your thoughts on this plan and the general lack of affordable rental housing in Mississippi?

Bill Quigley: MISSISSIPPI! Thank you for reminding everyone of the big problems that remain for affordable housing in Mississippi. The media focus on New Orleans and Katrina overlooks the fact that Mississippi took the direct hit from the storm and is still in serious trouble. \

Mississippi recently announced a small rental housing program for owners of rental property. This is part of a much needed strategy to help create affordable housing - but no people have yet qualified. Nationally people seem to think Mississippi is zipping along on the road to recovery. True if you're a casino or hotel owner.

Not true if you're a renter, live in public housing, or you lost your home to wind rather than water. Not a single dollar of the $5.4 billion awarded to Mississippi as CDBG funds, money that is supposed to benefit low- and moderate-income people, will go to a renter, even though 28,000 units were severely damaged or destroyed; none of the CDBG money has been spent on replacing rental housing.

Although the MS coast is down almost 1000 units of public housing not a dollar of the $100 million allocated for public housing has been spent. The only government plan for getting people out of the formaldehyde filled FEMA trailers is a lottery for some of the 4-6,000 Katrina cottages -- but with 18,000 households still in trailers that gives people only about a 1 in 4 chance. And of course, if you don't own a piece of property to put it on, you're out of luck.
To cap it off, most local governments along the coast (in LA and MS) are shutting down the FEMA trailer parks. All roads out of the FEMA trailer parks are blocked, in one way or another.
For more contact the Mississippi Center for Legal Services 601.948.6752 or Coastal Women for Change - 228.297.4849.

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Los Angeles, California: We've been hearing about formaldehyde in trailers for a while now. Is it safe to assume that most of the trailers contain formaldehyde? Have you heard anything regarding FEMA's plans, if any, to move trailer residents out of the trailers and into safer housing?

Bill Quigley: This is an example of how our problems are inter-related. Housing and health in this instance. Over 70,000 families still live in FEMA trailers across the gulf coast.

The Sierra Club first reported formaldehyde problems in FEMA trailers over a year ago. On August 1, 2007, FEMA, after congressional pressure, decided to stop selling trailers to the people in them until they could find out how serious the formaldehyde problems are.

I know of no effort by FEMA to move people into safer housing. Even people with respiratory problems are not leaving their FEMA trailers because there is no other place to go. Our region is short tens of thousands of affordable rental units and there is just no realistic alternative at the moment.

To read the FEMA August 1 announcement, go to www.FEMA.gov. To read the full record of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee July 19 hearing, go to http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1419.

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Atlanta, Georgia: What are the city's plans for rebuilding the 9th ward? Is there any validity to claims that the 9th ward and other low-income communities will be replaced by high-income developments?

Bill Quigley: The government has not released any concrete detailed plans for rebuilding the 9th ward. I was in the lower 9th ward a few days ago and it looks like a graveyard - some stone blocks and steps poking up through the weeds - and deathly quiet.

Many people see the complete lack of progress in the lower 9th as an intentional land grab - you hear plans for condos and industrial development. But nothing concrete.

I am not a conspiracy type of person. But when: the neighborhood was kept closed for months and homeowners were not even allowed to look at their homes; once opened people were not allowed to stay in their homes; electricity is still not on everywhere; and it took more than a year for drinkable water to be working - you can understand how people might connect the dots in such a way that they think the neglect of this overwhelmingly African-American neighborhood borders on intentional. In other areas of the lower 9th, like Holy Cross neighborhood, there is some progress and some investment.

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Centreville, Virginia: Have there been any improvements at all in New Orleans over the past two years?

Bill Quigley: The Saints are doing much better than before Katrina!

Really though, a lot of New Orleans has been repaired and improved since the early days of the destruction - but the city as a whole is still no where near where it was before Katrina.
We have benefitted from some amazing new people who have settled in New Orleans since Katrina and we have benefitted from the tens of thousands of volunteers who have done everything from cook food to gut and repair houses. Without the kindness of strangers we would be much worse off.

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Biloxi, Mississippi: If you could push the rewind button, from whom do you think the right words might have been said to produce a better recovery in the Gulf Region? And what would those words be?

Bill Quigley: Our nation should have said:

"Every single person harmed has equal value. We will not rest until every single person has been made whole. We do not care if you are homeowner or renter, black or white or asian or latino, elderly or child, rich or poor, we are going to reach out to you as sisters and brothers and we will not rest until justice is done."

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Chevy Chase, Marlyand: I have a question about people on death row and people who are serving lengthy sentences who have credible claims of innocence. I heard that many of the records and evidence were destroyed by the hurricanes and the flooding. Based on your experience, has the damage irreparably harmed their cases?

Bill Quigley: The evidence room of the criminal clerk in New Orleans sat in chest deep water for weeks.

Anyone whose claims to innocence rested on documents or evidence held in that office is damaged irreparably.

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Grand Rapids, Michigan: Has the racial tension in New Orleans and Mississippi worsened since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita? Or, has it turned into more of an economic tension between the ones who have received SBA and/or FEMA aid and those who are still waiting to get out of the trailers 2 years later?

Bill Quigley: If you take away peoples' homes, jobs, neighborhoods, healthcare providers, churches, pharmacies, playgrounds, and neighbors - there are going to be serious problems.
Many churches, neighborhood and community organizations are working hard to try to rebuild our physical communities.

We need to also rebuild our social communities and our churches and voluntary organizations are trying to do that as well. Unfortunately, when people get desperate or they think there is only going to be limited help and not enough for everyone, they start to panic. The lifeboat syndrome takes over - there is only room in this boat for a certain number of people and if we allow others in they will sink the boat.

Some of us are in the lifeboat syndrome and we are so afraid we will not survive that we want to exclude others. As I said earlier, race and ownership v renters are parts of every decision on the gulf coast - so yes there are tensions.

At the same time, I was in Mississippi two nights ago at a hundred person dinner with men women and childre of all races - african american, white, vietnamese and latino - working together as Coastal Women for Change. They were assisted by the Mississippi Center for Justice and volunteers from law schools and churches across the world. They even had some visitors from India who had survived the tsunami and who shared their stories of the need to build and rebuild community after a disaster.

We have lots of tension - race and class. But we also have some inspirational people who, despite odds that might seem overwhelming to others in the US, continue to work day by day to rebuild their communities - often in the face of government opposition.
So there is both tragedy and hope. Both are real. We need to have our eyes open to the injustices - but we also need to have our hearts open to the inspirational hope demonstrated by people.

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Niagra Falls, New York: I appreciate the sheer scale of problems created by Katrina and their complexity; however, I can't shake my sense of disappointment over the nation's inability to make our response more of a defining and unifying moment in our collective lives. Has the notion that we have missed an opportunity to redefine our social contract through this disaster been publicly discussed?

Bill Quigley: Katrina offered our nation a glimpse of the reality that is usually kept out of sight.
There was hope among many that this was an opportunity to re-engaged our national community in a meaningful dialogue about how we could rebuild in a more just way.
Some are engaged in that dialogue. Hundreds of thousands have come to the gulf coast to lend a hand. Millions more have contributed money and supplies.

Many continue to examine what has and has not happened in order to learn and grow and connect in new ways. As a nation have we engaged in this process? I think I am too close to the problem to tell. But I do know that when I post a story about Katrina, I usually get more supportive comments than negative ones. (Though I do get emails like one last night that called all of us "idiots" for living along the gulf coast).

I hope we as a nation have not missed the opportunity. I know hundreds of thousands of people who have not - perhaps they can continue to tell their stories in such a way that the learning will continue.

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Bill Quigley: Thanks to Newsweek and Equal Justice works for this. And thanks to the hundreds of thousands who have helped us out, particularly to the thousands of law students and lawyers who have made so much possible. Peace, Bill Quigley

Again for those who want more, I suggest you look at the following:

The best source of information about public interest and hands-on learning at law schools is The E-Guide to Public Service at America's Law Schools.

Student Hurricane Network
For free legal aid in New Orleans contact the New Orleans Legal Assistance Corporation: (504) 529-1000
For free legal aid in Mississippi call the Mississippi Center for Legal Services at: 601-948-6752
For free legal aid in Alabama it's: (334) 832-457
For free legal aid in Texas at Lone Star Legal Aid call: (800) 354-1889

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