Louis Generes III didn't accept the official calculation of his Road Home rebuilding grant, but he was willing to follow the program's rules for mounting a challenge.

Apparently that was a big mistake. Fourteen months after Generes, a Metairie resident, complained about his damage estimate to the Road Home's "dispute resolution" team, not even state officials in charge of the program believe that the once-mandatory informal appeals process has worked. The Louisiana Recovery Authority has scrapped it and is expected to announce a revamped appeals system this month.

But that effort still leaves homeowners like Generes -- whose cases were never classified as formal appeals -- in a sort of recovery purgatory, unsure when, or whether, they will get any relief.

"It's a merry-go-round and I think it's a crying shame," said Generes, 80, a retired former superintendent of the Archdiocese of New Orleans school system who spent a half-century in parochial and public education. "I would never treat a student or parent the way they've treated us."

--- Resolution black hole ---

Scrambling to reach benchmarks for handing out awards, Road Home in the past encouraged disgruntled applicants to take smaller grants and use an informal dispute resolution process to seek additional money they think they qualify for.

New rules, adopted in March, allow all applicants to formally appeal within 60 days of getting their first Road Home payment. But so far, there is nothing protecting those who fell into the resolution black hole and never got to file a formal appeal.

Paul Rainwater, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, said there's no need to fear, that anyone who was in dispute resolution for more than 60 days will go directly to appeals.

"We're going to find their file," he said. "We're committed to it. It's got to be 100 percent -- that's the only thing that would be acceptable."

It's been 373 days since Generes got a $20,000 grant that he believes is way too low. After a dozen face-to-face meetings with Road Home employees and numerous phone calls with no resolution, Generes is convinced the paperwork documenting his challenge has been lost. And he suspects there are many others "who have been given this run-around."

In fact, last July state auditors found at least 1,000 old dispute files that ICF International, the Road Home contractor, never reported to its overseers at the Louisiana Office of Community Development. Given the timing of his initial complaint, Generes could very well have been among them.

--- ICF deadline today ---

Rainwater said ICF has turned in files and made arguments hoping to avoid an $800,000 fine for mishandling resolution cases 10 months ago. ICF's deadline is today, but Rainwater said his team will need 21 days to review the company's claims.

The contractor had claimed it resolved 727 cases more than 120 days old by the end of July, which it said met a contractual obligation to take care of more than 95 percent of the old cases in its database. But the auditors found in February that there were more than 1,800 cases open in the same database and concluded ICF failed to meet the requirement.

"They said they solved those cases, but their own data didn't support that they were solved," lead auditor David Greer said.

Greer's investigators found Road Home was marking cases as "resolved" when the program had taken only preliminary steps to answer applicants' complaints. The auditors also said some cases that went into the resolution process had been moved into other internal Road Home reporting categories even though issues weren't settled.

Asked about the audit findings and what has happened to the resolution files, ICF spokeswoman Gentry Brann declined to comment.

--- New standards ---

Last week, the state and ICF agreed to new performance standards in which the Road Home would have to answer more than 2,300 formal appeals by June 30. That's a step forward, said Davida Finger, a pro-bono advocate for low-income Road Home applicants at the Loyola University Law Clinic, but she has been unable to determine which, if any, of her clients are in that number. She's talked to top officials at the state and ICF for months about dozens of people and has gotten either no response or updates on cases that don't involve her clients.

Many were caught up in the resolution black hole, she said. Others filed formal appeals that appear to have been ignored, she said. Finger said she fielded two complaints last week from applicants who checked boxes on an official Road Home form indicating they wanted to appeal their awards, only to learn later that their appeal never registered because they didn't send formal appeal letters within two months.

"Fundamentally, something is so off, it's hard for me to imagine how they're going to make more than a minor shift with this new focus on customer service," she said.

Greer agrees that the program's data problems are troublesome, but he said all is not lost for those mired in the dispute-resolution process. Even if ICF didn't acknowledge them, Greer said, the people who tried to use the process in early 2007 have been identified by his auditors.

"We do know who these people are, because we went through the case files themselves," Greer said.

That offered some comfort to Generes, who had to use his retirement savings to finish repairing his home. He said he'll manage even if he doesn't land additional Road Home money, but he's worried about others who have fallen through the cracks.

"As long as people have a fair shot at getting their case reviewed, that's what I care about," he said.

. . . . . . .

David Hammer can be reached at dhammer@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3322.