Faster U.S. Aid Sought for Victims of Riots, Hurricanes

A coalition of legal aid groups plans today to petition the beleaguered Federal Emergency Management Agency to speed up assistance to victims of the Los Angeles riots and this year’s devastating hurricanes in Florida and Hawaii.

Leaders of Los Angeles-based Public Counsel said the petition will be filed with FEMA officials in Washington seeking greater relief for tens of thousands of people who suffered damage in those three disasters. The group is also seeking aid for victims of a series of forest fires in Northern California.

“People across the country . . . have been left homeless, unemployed and frustrated by a bureaucratic maze which fails to provide the basic relief it promises,” according to a statement from Public Counsel, which is coordinating the campaign. It complains that six months after the Los Angeles riots, “FEMA has disbursed less than 12% of the $300 million in emergency funds allocated to help disaster victims.”

A FEMA official said that the government agency will not comment in detail until it reviews the petition. But Lorri Jean, FEMA’s San Francisco-based deputy regional director, said the charges are based on “totally inaccurate” data.

“All their stats are wrong,” Jean said. She put the assistance to Los Angeles riot victims at more than $100 million.

The issue of disaster aid is likely to get close scrutiny this week--and not just because of the legal aid groups’ complaints.

A federal task force led by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is completing an investigation into fraud in the filing of relief applications in Los Angeles, focusing largely on store owners suspected of burning their own businesses during the riots.

Two federal officials confirmed Monday that indictments of “multiple parties” are expected to be returned Wednesday.

Established in 1978 to coordinate federal civil defense and disaster programs, FEMA has faced unprecedented demands for its resources this year with the series of natural disasters and the riots.

Cynthia D. Robbins, a directing attorney for Public Counsel, an offshoot of the Los Angeles County and Beverly Hills Bar associations, said that similar legal aid groups in the other affected areas are joining in the challenge to FEMA practices. “There is a legal group in Florida, one in Hawaii and one in Northern California . . . but there will be one petition that will be jointly filed,” Robbins said.

One of their complaints is that FEMA has made it particularly difficult for low-income people and non-English speakers to get help. Latino advocacy groups in Los Angeles said it was almost impossible to get aid applications in Spanish after the riots.

But the critics and FEMA offered widely varying statistics on how many people applied for and received assistance after the many disasters--and had varying interpretations of what the data meant.

Public Counsel said that eight weeks after Hurricane Andrew swept through Florida, “FEMA had provided assistance to less than half of the 154,000 victims . . . who had applied for disaster relief.” But FEMA’s Jean said that as of Oct. 22, only 79,000 applications had been received for temporary housing relief. In response, she said, the agency has issued 41,000 checks totaling $86 million.

Jean added: “In fact, most people have gotten help.”

In Hawaii, Public Counsel complained, a flood of 19,488 applications for assistance yielded just 3,593 temporary housing assistance checks from FEMA after Hurricane Iniki prompted the declaration of a federal disaster Sept. 12.

FEMA said that 12,786 applications had been received and that 4,774 checks were issued, totaling about $15 million. About 6,000 of the applications were “withdrawn or denied as ineligible,” Jean said, many because property owners had private insurance. “When they’re covered by insurance, FEMA never pays,” she said.

Times staff writer Jim Newton contributed to this story.