Prometheus 6

Feds collect files from nonprofit
by Andrew Vanacore, The Times-Picayune
Monday August 11, 2008, 10:02 PM

Federal investigators collected documents Monday from the shuttered New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corp., the city-chartered and city-financed nonprofit that ran a home-remediation program in 2006 and 2007....

The city nonprofit has been under intense scrutiny for the past several weeks, as news reports raised questions about whether its contractors billed taxpayers for work they didn't perform on blighted New Orleans homes. The remediation program, aimed at the poor and elderly, was touted as a salve to sagging neighborhoods by Mayor Ray Nagin in his 2007 budget address.

But some of the homes listed on NOAH work sheets were in fact gutted by volunteer groups, records show. Meanwhile, more than 100 of the 870 properties that the agency's contractors claim to have remediated have since been torn down. Neighbors have said that some of the demolished homes were not cleaned up at all before they were razed, though taxpayers were billed for the service.