Road Home Program

This editorial excerpt, about the Road Home Program, says it best:

A program that lacks follow-up, is slow in processing appeals and can't resolve thousands of cases that are more than a year old has systemic problems. When legislators say they keep getting phone calls from frustrated applicants with the same complaints about the program, that reflects a systemic problem.

Unfortunately, one of those systemic problems has been the Office of Community Development, and it's surprising that Gov. Bobby Jindal has not yet made changes in leadership at OCD.

Ms. Elkins' office negotiated a weak contract with ICF that lacked benchmarks and penalties and then had to be browbeaten to add even mild penalties. Even now, the office has yet to negotiate ICF's benchmarks for the first quarter of the year or to determine whether the contractor met all of last year's requirements.

Ms. Elkins also has been a constant apologist for ICF's mishaps and has resisted some efforts to improve the program's performance and transparency. Legislative auditors began citing systemic problems last year -- from data and policy discrepancies to grants that were too low or too high. Ms. Elkins was always quick to dismiss problems or claim that they had been corrected -- even as applicants and sometimes auditors kept exposing more examples of the same issues.