A harder look at Haley Barbour's post-Katrina miracle

Mississippi's GOP governor did a good job getting cash out of Republicans in Washington, but is he really doing a good job cleaning up after Katrina?

By Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis

Read more: Louisiana, Politics, Mississippi, News

Photo: AP/Alex Brandon

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour speaks at a ceremony to open the Bay St. Louis Bridge in Bay St. Louis, Miss., May 17, 2007.

May 25, 2007 | As president of the supervisory board in Hancock County, Miss., Roderick "Rocky" Pullman faces more problems than he sometimes cares to think about. In August 2005, his coastal county became "ground zero" for Hurricane Katrina, when the eye of the most destructive storm in the nation's history made landfall just south of Pearlington, the small town on the Louisiana border 40 minutes from New Orleans that he calls home.

Katrina's 170-mph winds and 35-foot waves literally reduced Pearlington to rubble. Every last vehicle and building in town was destroyed. In Hancock County as a whole, 50 residents were killed, and half the businesses and homes were wiped out. When relief teams arrived 10 days later, they found 600 people living under tents and tarps, linked to the outside world only by ham radio.

Today, Hancock County and the rest of coastal Mississippi are 21 months into a recovery that has garnered Gov. Haley Barbour lavish praise. Governing magazine named Barbour its 2006 Public Official of the Year largely due to his supposed post-Katrina leadership and savvy, including his skill in convincing federal lawmakers to channel billions of relief dollars to the Magnolia State. As Billy Hewes III, a Republican official from Gulfport, said: "He is to Katrina what Rudy Giuliani was to 9/11." Outsiders might be surprised to learn then, that despite the plaudits, and despite the fact that Barbour's GOP connections seem to have won him a disproportionate share of relief money from Washington, post-Katrina recovery in some of the hardest-hit areas of the Mississippi coast is moving as fast as molasses in winter.

In Hancock County, Rocky Pullman paints a bleak picture. The recovery is proceeding so slowly that, almost two years after the storm, most of his neighbors still can't get mail. Before Katrina, the majority of Pearlington residents used post-office boxes; but since no post offices -- or any other major city, county or school buildings in Hancock County -- have been rebuilt, they have to drive an hour round-trip to Bay St. Louis to pick up a letter.

"We've been asking for three post offices to be erected in Hancock County for well over a year now and have got no response whatsoever," Pullman says. "Those are the kind of things that really bother you. It's hard to get people to feel good when they have to spend the amount of money they do with the price of gasoline just to get their mail."

Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee with close ties to the Bush administration, has definitely proved more successful than his maligned Louisiana counterpart, Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco, in one respect: lobbying Washington for cash. In fact, Barbour's ability to steer a lopsided share of Katrina money to Mississippi has touched off a firestorm of outrage in Louisiana, which suffered considerably more destruction from the storm.

Consider the Gulf Coast housing crisis, one of the key issues that has kept nearly half the population of New Orleans from returning to the city since Katrina. More than 75 percent of the housing damage from the storm was in Louisiana, but Mississippi has received 70 percent of the funds through FEMA's Alternative Housing Pilot Program. Of the $388 million available, FEMA gave a Mississippi program offering upgraded trailers more than $275 million. Meanwhile, the agency awarded Louisiana's "Katrina Cottage" program, which features more permanent modular homes for storm victims, a mere $75 million.

It's not just housing. Mississippi is also slated to get 38 percent of federal hospital recovery funds, even though it lost just 79 beds compared to 2,600 lost in southern Louisiana, which will get 45 percent of the funds. Mississippi and Louisiana both received $95 million to offset losses in higher education, even though Louisiana was home to 75 percent of displaced students. The states also received $100 million each for K-12 students affected by the storms, despite the fact that 69 percent resided in Louisiana.

The disparity between the states' needs and the funding they received from Washington has been so glaring that even disgraced former FEMA director Michael Brown recently charged that politics played a role. "Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking we had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor and we have a chance to rub her nose in it," Brown told students at Metropolitan College of New York in January.

The White House denies any favoritism. But as Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., has pointed out, much of the power in allocating Katrina recovery funds before this year fell to a Republican-controlled Congress -- and, more specifically, to a Senate committee chaired by Sen. Thad Cochran, who just happens to be a Mississippi Republican.

"Sen. Cochran certainly felt very fortunate to be in the position he was in when the hurricane hit because he was able to make sure both Mississippi and Louisiana got the help they needed," press spokeswoman Margaret McPhillips told Salon.

As for Gov. Haley Barbour, his office declined to comment on the funding disparity for this story. But when the issue came to a head this spring, Barbour downplayed the role of his political connections, instead insisting that his state was putting federal money to better use; as he told the Associated Press, "Congress is getting their money's worth in Mississippi."

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