Saturday, June 24, 2006

Now this contract should be reviewed very carefully.

WWLTV.com | News for New Orleans, Louisiana | Louisiana State News:
"Louisiana likely will pass the August anniversary of Hurricane Katrina before the private company that will run the state's $7.5 billion hurricane housing aid program starts handing out assistance checks, according to the bid the company submitted to manage the program.

ICF International said it plans to begin the 'Road Home' program for homeowners in August to accept applications and it intends to have 'full scale implementation' within two months. The Virginia-based consulting firm proposed having all the awards and buyouts doled out by December 2008 and closing out the program completely by 2010.

And none of this can begin until Gov. Kathleen Blanco's administration completes contract negotiations with ICF, which administration officials said Friday were still ongoing."
Sure would like to know who is in charge of ICF -- they're going to be handling a LOT of money. Hope they're not like the other contractors we've seen involved in Katrina recovery or the war in Iraq.

Here's the ICFI website.

I've been looking at some websites about ICFI and their most recent disaster recovery project, Hurricane Charley. Googling The news stories I have found no mention of ICFI but there are indications that progress on recovery is lagging, two years later. Here's one, another, another.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

ICFI can't hire the people it needs, and when it does find some people who are perfect, they all leave. I am one who left, and now in the company I escaped to are three other former ICFI or ICFI subcontractor staff, all with emergency management experience. We are more respected, treated better, and have less shit heaped upon us than when we were at ICFI. So look for this contract to flail and fail. As for who's in charge, the head of the company is Sudhakar Kesavan, but he has no friggin' clue what goes on inside the company. He spends his days kissing his equity partners' asses, looking for loser companies to buy, and generally doing business the way he's always done it, which is poorly. They had more than $200 millon in income last year, but made only $2 million? Geeze, I'm not gonna rush out and buy their stock any time soon!