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

For the residents of Hancock County, Barbour and Mississippi's ability to capture the lion's share of Katrina relief dollars makes the slow progress in their area all the more demoralizing. The county's 911 system still operates out of a trailer. Damaged wastewater and drainage systems frustrate hopes of a return to normalcy; earlier this month in Waveland, 16 miles east of Pearlington, a 9-and-a-half-foot alligator was found swimming in a drainage ditch next to a bus stop at 8 o'clock in the morning. Mayor Tommy Longo says the creatures freely roam throughout devastated residential areas.

Indeed, Hancock County was one of three Gulf Coast areas recently singled out as having "severe problems" by the Rockefeller Institute on Government and the Louisiana Public Affairs Council, with the towns of Waveland and Bay St. Louis flat-out "struggling to survive."

Most important, Hancock leaders say, Mississippi leaders and their federal allies have failed to use their clout to tackle some of the most obvious barriers to rebuilding.

For example, the Robert T. Stafford Act, a federal law governing recovery efforts, requires affected communities to pay a 25 percent match upfront before they can receive federal disaster funds. After Katrina, the White House reduced the match requirement to 10 percent -- a still-hefty sum for devastated areas. Rocky Pullman estimates Hancock County will need to come up with up to $8 million to get federal funds for basic services. "I don't know where they expect us to get that money from," Pullman says.

President Bush waived the match requirements entirely for New York following the 9/11 attacks, but he has said he opposes any further waiver for Katrina funds. The Iraq/Katrina supplemental appropriations bill passed by Congress last month would have completely waived the match, but the president vetoed it. The new House bill approved last week also waives the match, but the president has not signaled his willingness to compromise on the issue.

"If ever they've waived that match requirement, they should do it now," says Pullman. "If they don't do it for Katrina, then shame on them, because that's almost as bad as the storm hitting us again."

Parts of Mississippi are doing much better than Hancock County. The Rockefeller Institute report found that recovery "is well underway" in Biloxi, Gulfport and Pascagoula, and that there's actually been a post-Katrina economic boom in Jackson, Hattiesburg and Laurel.

And thanks to the economic boost in certain areas, Mississippi is now looking at a windfall in tax revenues. For the first six months of the 2007 budget year, general fund revenues were up 12.7 percent, and the Mississippi Legislative Budget Committee and the governor recently increased the estimate for the 2007 budget from $4.5 billion to nearly $4.7 billion, which means the state has an extra $192.7 million thanks to higher-than-expected tax collections largely from Katrina spending.

But under Barbour's leadership, the state has been unwilling to use its good fortune to help debt-ridden towns -- and some are at risk of going under.

In Hancock County, towns racked up massive debt when federal officials promised to make disaster loans but failed to move quickly enough. The Mississippi Development Bank stepped in and loaned $5.3 million to Hancock County and $4.5 million to the town of Waveland to keep basic operations running. State officials hoped FEMA would reimburse some of the money, but that hasn't materialized.

Now those loans -- about $79 million across the Mississippi coast -- come due in October, and small towns hardest hit by Katrina have no idea how they'll meet the obligation. "We literally had no choice" but to take out those loans, says Waveland's Mayor Longo. "And in the ground zero area of Hancock County and Waveland, we're not in really much better shape economically than we were then. We're certainly not in any shape to pay back those loans right now."

Mayor Longo thinks at least part of Mississippi's post-Katrina tax windfall could go to help his and other storm-crippled communities deal with their debt, but Gov. Barbour has rebuffed the idea. And that has Longo and other local officials in Hancock contemplating the heretofore unimaginable.

"One thing you continually hear from officials from FEMA to the state level is that -- and they love this phrase -- they've 'never seen a city go under because of a natural disaster,'" Longo says. "But there have been so many firsts in Katrina."

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