[FoCHAT] 2/3/07 CHAT progress

[Melanie Ehrlich]

CHAT and FoCHAT Members,
   
  Core CHAT members continue to work tirelessly on smoothing the Road Home for homeowners. First, the Executive Board, which consists of Frank Silvestri, Shawn Antee, Laura LeBon, and myself, has been expanded with the important addition of Karen Fontana. She, like Frank, is a cracker-jack, smart lawyer with a wonderful civic conscience and dedication to rebuilding New Orleans.  These two CHAT members have an important meeting with many key RHP officials about the closing documents on Monday. 
   
  Ray Brousssard and Alan Gutierrez deserve our thanks for recently sharpening our communication tools via the thinknola network set up by Alan (see http://chat.thinknola.com for our website). Thank you for your patience as we continue to go through "growing pains." These email network changes are necessary because of our increasing membership, which prevented sending emails by yahoo. We have so many members that yahoo "thought" we were spamming when we wrote to all of you, even if we divided the emails into two batches with half of the email addresses for each. We want to grow yet much bigger, and we continue to improve our email network and website with the help of Becky Houtman.
   
  Frank and I were very busy communicating with state and LRA officials the last few days. We know that they are trying to remove some RHP stumbling blocks, but we also know that they need our advice on some major issues. Sam Jones told me he and the Gov., as well as CHAT, are demanding ICF to get those rules for the RHP quickly posted on the RHP web site. RHP & state officials are still listening to CHAT, but we are not simply patient. Rather we are moving ahead on new fronts. Once we are assured of results, we will post them.
   
  Lastly, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer taped a little of our last CHAT meeting and then an interview with Frank and me as well as with several CHAT/FoCHAT members with major RHP problems. I am sure that one of these interviews, with KC King, a key CHAT member who is helping us with our legislative issues, will be part of this program. KC was interviewed for 2 hours in his FEMA trailer by BettyAnn Bowser from Lehrer. She told me that she was delighted with talking to him. For example she was amazed as he turned pages of his award letter and said, uh, uh, this value is not correct and then this value is not correct. 
   
  The Lehrer report on the RHP is suppposed to be shown some time next week, and I will tell you when I am informed of the time and day of the program. I expect only a little of CHAT will be included in the program, which will cover the whole topic of the RHP. The good news is that BettyAnn was so nice and truly concerned about post-storm recovery in our state. She routinely comes back to LA to film for Lehrer.
   
  Best wishes,
   
  Melanie
   
  Melanie Ehrlich
  Co-Chairman, CHAT
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

 
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