Endlessly Stuck On Stupid.

(Big FEMA rant follows. You have been warned.)

My regular readers will recall my being in an utter funk the other day due to yet another FEMA eruption over a project we are designing. And any FEMA eruption in my business means that we must endure yet another FEMA meeting, to "resolve" the issues in question. Well, today we had the requisite meeting with yet another bunch of FEMA folks (they change frequently), and it ended as every other FEMA meeting I've been in has ever ended - with nothing finally resolved.

Nothing can ever be resolved at a FEMA meeting because no FEMA person present seems able to make a decision. All they ever say is they will "look at it," "pass it up the chain," etc.

The new FEMA people at the meeting today said that the understandings our client has obtained from the old FEMA people over the past two years (verbally, of course, as FEMA will never put anything in writing) are now out the window. Their earlier assurances that we would be approved are now "premature" (we were informed the FEMA person who told us we would be approved has been disciplined for it), and what we all understood is allowed - and what is not allowed - by FEMA regulations is "not correct." Why? Because the new FEMA people said there are some "clarifications" to the FEMA regulations no one bothered to let us, or our clients, in on. (They didn't apparently let the old FEMA folks - who were recommending our project - in on them, either.)

And the issues they are spending of tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars and years of time to grouse about, are piddling. A few inches here, a few dozen square feet there. What they want us to do will indeed make the project physically smaller, but will likely, in the end, make it more expensive overall. It will definitely reduce the function and capacity that existed before the levees broke. Though, FEMA doesn't appear to care about cost, or effectiveness, or good design practice, so long as it complies with this week's interpretation of their beloved regulations. (They said as much again today.) Effective use of taxpayer dollars doesn't seem real high on the FEMA to-do list.

So once again, more than three years since the flooding following Katrina, more than two years since we were awarded the project, and two months after the project was originally scheduled to be finished and open to the public, we seem to be back to square one,. My client now has to decide if they want to re-design a less effective project (for the third time, and hope that this FEMA interpretation of FEMA regulations will be there when we finish), or fight for this scheme (with yet another "justification" and 18 months or so delay for appeals). Either way, it will be years before New Orleans sees this project built. And that delay is solely because of FEMA, who appears more interested in our compliance with the minutiae of their ever-changing regulations than in helping us recover.