Federal officials who answered questions about flood damage and recovery efforts. Senator cassidy also discussed the Health Care Law replaced and bill. The town hall ran one hour. [applause] we are going to talk about many things. One thing i want to make sure we address our concerns people have about recovery from the great floods of 2016. That said, we have folks here that have resources, or at least explanations. I want to ask them to speak first. Then i will ask different people to comment. We are going to go around. If at any point you feel like you would be better off talking to fema than listening to this conversation, i will consider it more appropriate that you stand up and walk over and speak to fema because we need to have your needs addressed. Also, before i go forward, is my staff around . Or are they still circulating . I have three beautiful woman back there. I have michael, who specializes in casework for flood victims. Dale, are you here . He does casework. He may come in later. Who am i seeing . Catherine stewart back there. If theres an issue in particular that you think one of our staff can help you with, i need to go seek them out. I will tell you that scripture says the greatest among you shall be your servants. Our office desires to be the greatest service. They desire the greatest servant. So give them the opportunity. That said, and a particular order, do we want to come speak . Kathy is not here. You are speaking for her. Good afternoon. My name is casey. I work for the Governors Office of Homeland Security and emergency preparedness. Really quickly this afternoon, i wanted to update you a little bit on Hazard Mitigation funding that will be coming to the state from fema. We manage that program on behalf of the state. We are going to be working with the parishes, and in particular east baton rouge parish, on utilizing that funding to address drainage improvement and flood protection type objects type projects that better protect you and our citizens in the years to come. That funding is not really Recovery Funding in terms of fixing what happened. You will hear more about programs relative to that. But those mitigation dollars are in place to help better protect us moving forward. To reduce the risk of the type of flooding we had last year and so many of you are familiar with. If you have got specific questions on that, i will be hanging around after the event and happy to address any of those engines you might have or to speak with you what i want those questions you might have or to speak with you oneonone about grant assistance programs you may have questions about. Thank you. Hi. I am bill, a native louisianan louisianan. Ive been working with the state to help prepare for disasters, as well as working the recovery issues from the flood. I have a lot of folks here in the back come out in the lobby that will be able to entertain individual questions or issues you might have with fema, including National Flood insurance, as well as individual assistance programs that we have. We will have those folks in the back during that time. I want to take the opportunity to make sure you are ready for hurricane season. We have a website called ready. Gov that you can use to get yourself ready for hurricane season. We already had Tropical Storm cindy. We weathered that storm. Hurricane season isnt over until november, so just make sure you are prepared. If you have issues that we can discuss with fema, i have folks in the back that are experts in each of those programs that can help you through that. I will turn it back over. Hello, my name is pat forbes. Im the executive director of the Louisiana Office of community development. Our job is to help distribute funds that hud and Congress Send to us for recovery from disasters. The governor, senator cassidy, the rest of the delegation have worked very hard to get some 1. 7 billion allocated to the state of louisiana for recovery from the floods in march and august. Our job now is to distribute that and get it to the people who need it. The biggest piece of that is our Homeowner Program. We have a program. If you are a homeowner and your primary residence was at home, and you flooded, with very potentially have funds to help you, even if you rebuilt. Even if you make 1 million a year. Even if you have not started. Because of the last appropriation we just got, we have up until that point not accept it you were ineligible if you had structural Flood Insurance. Now we are able to start opening the gate for even people who had Flood Insurance, but still have unmet needs. So my main message here today is, we have a survey, an Online Survey that is the first step in applying for assistance through this program. You have to fill out the survey. You can do that online at restore. La. Gov. You can call 8667352001 if you have not filled out the survey. We have folks out in the hall right now with computers, and they can fill it out for you, as we need today. Even if you are not eligible right now, you may very well be eligible in the future as more funds are available. Senator cassidy, the governor, and the rest of the delegation need the information we are gathering through this survey to go back to congress and explain why we need more money for this recovery. So the big message is here, please fill out the survey. They can help you. You can help your neighbors. It can help you. It can help your neighbors. It can help your state. It takes about three or four minutes to fill out. It is easy. If you need if you have your fema id number, thats great. You dont need it. Go online and fill out the survey. At that point, we invite people in to applications. We are doing this in phases so it doesnt impact your recovery and we can continue quickly once we invite you into application. We have already sent out some 9000 invitations to get in the program. We will be sending more out. [indiscernible] thank you, sir. If we dont understand where you are in your recovery, we dont have the full picture and we cant still we cant tell the story in washington about how our recovery is short. We have to hear from you. If you have neighbors, friends, family who were flooded and were homeowners, please ask them if they have filled out the survey. We need to this. We need everyone we can we need this. We did everyone who can fill out the survey. We have other programs that i will talk about before taking questions. We have programs for rental housing. If you were the owner of a rental housing unit from one to seven units when the flood it, and you flooded, we can give you money to take out your construction loan that you have got to get your apartment back in service. You we want to do that. The second part of that is, what we require for the money is that you rent to people of low to moderate income at affordable rates. You are going to reduce your rent for a while for the purpose of getting our funds and getting those units back in place. We have got a multifamily unit rental program. We have got a Small Business program. All of these are on restored. La. Gov, and you can get information about where to go. Sen. Cassidy here is sharing robinson sharon robinson, and helping people to sign up. Ive been helping coordinate members. I did not personally flood, but not of people but a lot of it people not being computer literate, helping them with that. It takes six to seven minutes. A 10 minutes or less and you are done. Sen. Cassidy any questions for pat . Yes maam. [inaudible] sen. Cassidy thank you. The question is about people who took out sba loans. We have tried and tried to get relief thank you. The question is about people who took out sba loans. We have tried to get relief for those people. If you had 50,000 worth of damage in your home of the flood damage and got a 25,000 sba loan, we cant replace whatever portion of that loan was for structural repair. We can replace anything that was for contents or other aspects of the house. We can also cover the unmet need above 25,000 that you borrowed. But we cannot replace the sba loan. Federal law considers that a duplication of federal benefits. Im sorry, we have not been able to get a different answer. Weve intended to address that in washington. That is federal law. Yes maam . [indiscernible] i spoke to the loan officer who made my loan, and he referred me to el paso, texas. Both of those people told me that sba does not consider those loans as duplicate benefits as long as the money for reimbursement follows item seven of your loan document. I have copies of that. I have given it to your office and to several legislatures already. Basically, what it says is that the reimbursement needs to be assigned to the sba for the loan to be paid down. Thats what two different sba officers told me this week. All i can say im sorry, all i can say is that it is exactly the opposite of what hud, sba, multiple im sorry. I cant [indiscernible] i sen. Cassidy michael, hold up your hand. Dale is back there. Those are two caseworkers. Maam, if you could connect with michael or dale, let them get your information, and we will try to get to the bottom of it for you. Theres a gentleman back here that had a question. Just a second, maam. Im 71 years old. In i lost four pieces of property and to businesses. I pay plenty of taxes. Ii pay plenty of taxes. It was not raining when my house flooded. My house is for fleet is four feet higher than where it should have been. Sba wants me to borrow money for contractors that rip me off. And i have to fix my other houses. You sba already told me that i was approved. My credit score was 825. They told me already i could get almost any amount of money i need. They sent me some money, but i sent it back. They would give me food stamps. They wouldnt do nothing. Fema gave me 12,000. I havent heard anything. I all my neighbors got the max. I got 12,000, and im 71. [indiscernible] i wasnt supposed to flood. Im for the higher then supposed to be im four feet higher than im supposed to be. Sen. Cassidy our neighborhood landlord rental program, you would be eligible for that. Go to restore. La. Gov or go to the Housing Association and talk to them about the landlord program. We can give you money to take out on whatever loan you did to do construction. Sen. Cassidy one more time, neighborhood landlord program. Thank you. Sen. Cassidy the pastor was saying people are not moving back to the rental properties, so obviously we needed program to get folks back into their rental properties, which is good for this area. And weve got it. 36 million available for people. [inaudible] [no audio] [inaudible] knows her note or no sir. If you provide the of four for a certain period of time, you dont have to pay anything back the Affordable Housing for a certain period of time, you dont have to pay anything back. As long as you can demonstrate it flooded and that you got it back in shape. You all we really care about is are you providing the Affordable Rentals for certain period of time. Sen. Cassidy jennifer is passing out information. If you need more info, you can [inaudible] sen. Cassidy pause for a it willsen. Cassidy pause for a second. We will take some more questions. Louisiana resource told me if i borrow any money from sba, they were going to take all that out of what it cost me to fix my own house. Thats right. Thats the same answer i had before. Im sorry its not different. Weve asked and asked, but an sba loan we cant replace that with the grant. Sen. Cassidy we are going to take some more questions. Let me do what i should have done off the back and say thank you. I want to thank the pastor and his church for hosting. I should pass out the plate for a love offering. [laughter] he said, dont tempt him. For a love offering. [applause] he said, dont tempt him. [laughter] cynthia, wherever you are, my staff says you are fantastic. I see miss helen answering the phones plus a thank you as well. I want to thank Law Enforcement. We saw steve scullys gunned down Steve Scalise gunned down. Those there to attend were also injured. I think Law Enforcement. When i first came to this church at Montrell Jackson ceremony, all of us should thank our Law Enforcement and others. Give them a big round of applause. [applause] pamela johnson, are you still here . Thank you. Wonderful to see you. And then, state representative edmond jordan looking as long as young as i once did. Kent james is back here ted james is back here. He is usually giving me heck on twitter. I should say giving me have. Thats giving me heaven giving me heaven. [laughter] i also want to thank a woman i dont know her name. I was having a townhall and someone submitted a question. She said, as i recall, we flooded in North Baton Rouge and theres not been a federal official who has come to North Baton Rouge. I told my staff, we are going to North Baton Rouge. This is during work hours. There are some folks working now. If youre getting off of work, you can go to one. If you are at work, you can go to the other. But i mean it. We are here to serve yall. [applause] thank you. I can promise you, we may disagree on issues, but we probably dont disagree as much as you might think we do. What we can agree upon is that folks in this neighborhood who flooded need to have the assistance that allows them to restore their life in a way which restores the community. As one example, because this topic will come up later, i think all of you know or many of you may know i work at a hospital for many years, taking care of the uninsured. We also have a common goal of how we provide health care to all americans in a way which meets their needs . [applause] [indiscernible] [applause] an sen. Cassidy bill, do you want to come up . Excuse me. We will talk health care, but this was originally for those folks who are trying to put their lives back together who have not yet been able to. I will do the first part of this for those such folks. By the way, is there a woman here, Virginia Johnson . Virginia johnson is the friend of a close family friend of ours. Let me give this question to whomever. It rained. Had a leak and a roof leak in a roof. It ruin her ceiling. She got not hundred dollars to fix resealing, but nothing got 900 to fix her ceiling, but nothing to fix the roof. So the damage to the ceiling continues. This seems a crazy sort of program. I know theres an explanation. I am only transmitting a question that was put through miss johnson to our friend, to me, to yall. Is there a way to address that . Depends on if that was preexisting damage. N a k3 have preexisting damage that wasnt caused by the storm, that is not eligible if you have a case where you have preexisting damage that wasnt caused by the storm, that is not eligible. Fema does not provide everything. Fema is there to get you safe and secure so you can recover. We dont provide the full recovery. If somebody does have a question regarding that, we have our individual assistant folks out at the tables in the back. They are right behind the doors out there outside in the lobby. If you have your fema number, they can look up your case. They can look up your individual situation and address it oneonone with you to make sure you understand what the program is and if there is an issue. It is always a peelable it is always appealable. There may be other way through voluntary agencies. I just want to say that under the Homeowner Program, it doesnt matter. If you flooded in one of the two floods and you access assistance from our program, it doesnt matter whether damage was caused by the flood or not. When our program leaves, we have a little more flexibility than fema. When we leave, your house will be safe and sanitary. It doesnt matter in the Homeowner Program whether the damage occurred from the storm are not, as long as you did have damage from the storm and meet the other criteria. Sen. Cassidy but a point on it. For jimmy johnson, Virginia Johnson, if it is leaking through the roof even if it was preexisting and can and it continues to be ruined, can get assistance through the program. My staff tells me we just put the survey on our facebook page. You may have to wade through a lot of comments from people who dont particularly like me. Or you can come down here and speak to sharon. The point is and theres also folks out there but you need to register. Just sign up. You dont even have to do the survey. Velma, where are you . Talk to us. Im a widow. I had heart surgery and live by myself. It was raining inside. I have to put bucket i need a whole new roof and i dont have any income to fix it. I need help. Sen. Cassidy same answer . She can go register . Her roof is just totally messed up. Assuming that you are eligible for the program, which means you had one foot of water or more [inaudible] so the storm not the shingles off the roof knocked the singles the shingles off the roof. Is it not the roofing off, that would be fema individual assistance issue if it knocked the roofing off, that would be a fema individual assistance issue. It sounds like you may not be eligible for the Homeowner Program if you did not have one foot of water. Sen. Cassidy get michaels card over there. If you feel like you could appeal the fema rolling, he is the gentleman, or dale the fema ruling, he is the gentleman, or dale, who could address that. Yes maam . Is the investigation as far as the flooding because my home never flooded before how do we prevent future problems . What are we doing to prevent future flooding in our areas . Every time it rains, people are paranoid. What are we doing with the drainage systems . Is this in any way associated with the flood mapping that was done in 2008, where a lot of properties that werent in the flood area are now considered in the flood area even though they may not have let it have flooded . Is that associated . Sen. Cassidy this was considered a 1000 year flood. We are told it will not impact our future flood maps. It is really considered a one off. Again, i grew up in baton rouge. Used to play on the jet and howell park when i was a boy. The i told pastor i had never seen this area with standing water. It