Hurricane Recovery Jobs Remain in Louisiana as Funding Drops

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Louisiana is winding down its hurricane recovery programs, but Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration hasn’t cut much of the staff assigned to the work, even as other agencies across state government have faced layoffs and employee reductions.

The Disaster Recovery Unit had 155 employees assigned to it in the 2009-10 budget year, as the policy-making board for recovery, the Louisiana Recovery Authority, shut down because its work was largely complete. The DRU has 150 workers now.

Meanwhile, only about one-fifth of the $14.4 billion in block grant money given to the state by federal officials for recovery programs, about $3 billion, remains to be spent. Nearly all of the remaining dollars are locked into programs.

The governor’s top budget adviser, Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater, defended the staffing levels, saying the latest storms — hurricanes Gustav and Ike — struck only three years ago.

He said the reporting work for those storms and for hurricanes Katrina and Rita from 2005 will last for decades, and he said programs are ongoing to rehabilitate rental property, elevate vulnerable homes and repair local infrastructure damaged by storms.

“These are fairly complicated programs. Some of the programs that the state originally signed up for in 2005 and 2006, some of those monitoring requirements stretch out for about 35 years,” Rainwater said.

He added, “As the programs wind down, the positions will go away.”

Rainwater said the positions are funded with federal dollars, so they don’t affect state spending. That, however, has never been listed as criteria for whether jobs should stay or go as Jindal has pushed to shrink the size of state government.

The Disaster Recovery Unit has escaped the deep reductions that other agencies have seen in jobs since the governor took office in 2008. The DRU, which was created by former Gov. Kathleen Blanco, had 167 workers at its peak three years ago.

By comparison, after cuts this budget year, the state health department will have lost about 32 percent of its workers since Jindal took office, down by nearly 4,000 employees to about 8,400 people.

A timeline released by Rainwater spokeswoman Christina Stephens showed projections that the number of disaster recovery employees is projected to drop to under 100 by 2013-14 and down to 10 people in 2017-18 — more than a dozen years after Katrina devastated the New Orleans area.

Rainwater said while DRU employee numbers have largely held steady, the numbers of contractors hired by the state for recovery initiatives have dropped substantially as programs wrapped up and the dollars were spent.