Judge lets FEMA drop hotel funds
NEW ORLEANS -- The clock ran out yesterday for about 12,000 families left homeless by last year's hurricanes when a judge let the government cut them from a program that has paid for housing at hotels across the United States.
Officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency said that those who evacuated after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita will continue to receive financial aid that can be used toward paying for lodging or for repairing their houses.
After granting several extensions and spending more than $542 million on lodging since September, FEMA announced that it would not pay for hotel rooms past March 1.
''People kind of get into a routine living in these hotels, and it's not necessarily a good routine," a FEMA spokesman, Butch Kinerney, said yesterday. ''You're living in a hotel, so you don't have a washer or dryer, it's harder to get your kids registered in school."
Lawyers for the evacuees appealed over the weekend to US District Judge Stanwood Duval, in hopes of having him grant a temporary restraining order to stop the evictions.
The motion said that -- among other things -- the financial assistance from FEMA wasn't enough to pay for reasonable housing. It also said that bureaucratic mistakes at the agency had prevented thousands of families from obtaining the trailers they had been promised and that the evictions would force thousands of hurricane victims to live on the streets.
Duval ruled against the temporary restraining order yesterday. 