Reform of Disaster Aid Agency Sought; Lawsuit Threatened : FEMA: Attorneys file a multi-state petition claiming that victims of riots, fires and hurricanes are being neglected. A review of assistance guidelines is asked.

After her small but thriving clothing boutique was destroyed during last spring’s civil unrest, Maria Ramirez was among the first to apply for disaster assistance.

The single mother of two had poured years of sweat as a laborer at a cement factory into realizing her dream of owning a business. She even had been able to make a down payment on a home.

But if the riots destroyed her business, Ramirez says that the subsequent response from federal disaster officials crushed her dreams. She was denied temporary housing assistance, is on the verge of losing her home and has been told that the stress she has suffered could lead to her hospitalization.

“I had only asked for two months’ housing assistance and if I had got help it could have resolved all of my problems,” said Ramirez, one of thousands of disaster victims across the country with similar tales of exasperation and despair.

On Tuesday, legal aid attorneys representing victims of the riots in Los Angeles, wildfires in Northern California and hurricanes in Hawaii and Florida filed the first-ever multi-state petition asking that federal authorities review the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster guidelines--and make immediate reforms.

The petition, which makes seven demands, is a precursor to a possible lawsuit, said Cynthia D. Robbins, directing attorney for Urban Recovery Legal Assistance, an offshoot of the Los Angeles public-interest law firm Public Counsel. The legal aid attorneys have asked FEMA to respond within 10 days.

“We don’t know what it’s going to be like to live through a disaster until it’s happened, but we need a disaster relief agency that lives up to its name,” Robbins said at a Los Angeles press conference to announce the petition.

In Washington, a FEMA spokesman said that neither Director Wallace Stickney nor Associate Director Grant Peterson would be available to comment on the petition.

But William M. Medigovich, FEMA’s San Francisco-based regional director, denounced the complaints, contending that FEMA is being used as a political whipping boy. “Legal aid organizations are exploiting disaster victims and misleading the media in an attempt to advance their own political agendas,” he said in a statement issued Tuesday.

Lorri Jean, deputy to Medigovich, said the charges in the petition are without merit and based on inaccurate data.

“Our attitude is and has been that if we can find any way to help these victims, we will,” she said. “We have talked to (the legal aid attorneys) and have asked them to come up with any other means of delivering assistance, and they haven’t been able to.”

But the legal aid lawyers charged that FEMA has failed to fulfill the mandate of the Stafford Disaster Relief Act, which provides for prompt disaster relief, fair and equitable treatment of victims, full notification of benefits and the provision of a wide array of aid programs. The federal law grants FEMA power to coordinate relief services of other federal and state agencies.

The petition faults FEMA on all those counts. It specifically alleges that the agency has “delayed provision of initial relief to victims, delayed in authorizing certain benefit programs and processing initial grants, delayed in implementing entire programs for housing recovery to avoid home foreclosure or evictions, denied applications for relief without fair process and has provided exceedingly low grants for victims in dire need.”

The petition demands that FEMA speed up relief efforts, eliminate overly restrictive conditions in disaster programs, extend application deadlines and provide hearings for those denied aid.

“What we have learned is that FEMA has a pattern of coming into a disaster area, providing minimal relief and then folding up the tent,” said Terry Coble, a senior attorney with Legal Services of Greater Miami, which joined in the petition.

Coble said that eight weeks after Hurricane Andrew devastated South Florida, less than half of the 154,000 victims who have applied for assistance have received aid.

Most victims are still without telephone service; their homes, if still standing, lack roofs, she said. The huge tent cities have been dismantled, but many residents have resorted to pitching their own makeshift accommodations on the sides of roads or in church parking lots.

Despite the destruction of more than 80,000 homes, FEMA has so far declined to provide funds for home repairs, instead offering checks for temporary housing assistance, said Coble. Hurricane victims have also been hampered by the small size of the grants that have been awarded.

The Individual and Family Grant program, for example, allows a maximum of $11,500 for loss of personal possessions. But grants in Florida have averaged about $3,400, said Coble, “despite the fact that people have lost everything.”

In Hawaii, too, where Hurricane Iniki destroyed or damaged more than 14,000 homes last month, legal aid lawyers complain about delays in getting disaster assistance to victims and the small size of grants awarded so far. Officials also contend that FEMA has failed to provide mobile homes or manufactured housing of the types made available to Florida hurricane victims.

In Los Angeles, legal aid attorneys say that hundreds of riot victims face foreclosure and eviction from homes and businesses because of inadequate disaster relief.

“I say to you that I don’t think it is just that I should have to lose my home and my business,” Ramirez said with a trembling voice at Tuesday’s press conference.

Her attorney, Dominique Shelton, said FEMA demanded that Ramirez produce accounts, business receipts and other records that had been destroyed with her business in order to prove her income.

Ramirez was able to get invoices of purchases and declarations from the wholesale suppliers, but her claim for housing assistance was turned down in July and her appeal was also denied, said Shelton.

“She is hard-working and very proud,” the lawyer said. “She is the model of someone who was not dependent on the government, striving to better herself and the lives of her children.”