Katrina Update 6 -- and April 6 DC-Area Reception
Sunday, March 19, 2006
- Organization: Mississippi Center for Justice
- Source: Katrina
Friends,
Six months have passed since Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Mississippi coast. In less than three months the 2006 hurricane season will be upon us. Since my last update, so much has happened that each passing week makes the prospect of writing a new one more daunting. But fundamentally, so much remains unchanged.
Katrina was a force of nature big enough - and with an impact long lasting enough - to profoundly disrupt well settled ways in Mississippi. The natural disaster was so severe and its scale so vast that the state's devastated coastal region looks today much as it did right after the storm - mile after square mile of wrecked dwellings and apocalyptic landscape.
Yet human forces are at work, with political leadership that promises "bigger and better" and community voices raised in support of "more just and inclusive." Not since the Civil Rights Movement has there been such an intense national spotlight on the Deep South's continuing problems of racial and economic injustice - or such potential for lawyers across the country to help rebuild healthier communities in our nation's poorest region.
The Mississippi Center for Justice and our many partners are in the middle of the action, seeking to ensure that this potential is fully realized.
The report that follows is an abbreviated version of the story told in the latest issue of our newsletter, Call to Action, which will go in the mail soon. If you want to be on our mailing list, please send your address to mgalloway@mscenterforjustice.org.
Our annual DC-area fundraiser - the 2006 Mississippi on the Potomac Reception on Thursday, April 6, invitation and reply card attached - will be a forum for personal reports from the coast and a short video created by documentary filmmaker Morgan Currie and photographer Mike Lang. We will also honor David Stern, Equal Justice Works CEO and Stern Family Fund president, for his inspirational leadership in general and his steadfast support of MCJ in particular. And we will recognize and thank the dozens of DC folks who have been our lifeline of support in these recent, eventful months. Please come and bring a friend.
New legal capacity on the Coast
Our new Katrina Recovery Office in Biloxi opened in December and is staffed by senior attorneys John Jopling and Reilly Morse and part-time pro bono coordinator Kim Duffy. We are lucky to have found space just off the I-110 ramp in a former medical clinic - unfortunately, a sign of the coast's loss of doctors and health care capacity since the hurricane.
Since my last update in December, Reilly has been named to a two-year Equal Justice Works Katrina Relief Fellowship at MCJ, funded by the Association of Corporate Counsel, and Kim has joined the staff thanks to the JEHT Foundation grant that also funds John's position. Your many other grants and donations, large and small, made it possible to launch our legal effort immediately and to provide additional staff and consultant support.
Since late February, the office has been humming with dozens of law students on spring break, doing community outreach and education and tracking justice court eviction dockets and conditions at apartment complexes. Today, in a front-page special to the Biloxi Sun Herald, two of this week's batch of 30 students report on their experiences (http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/14129096.htm; for the version with full photo coverage, including a group photo of the students in front of and all but obscuring the new office, go to http://activepaper.olivesoftware.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=QlNILzIwMDYvMDMvMTgjQXIwMDEwMA==&Mode=HTML&Locale=english-skin-custom).
This week, Weil Gotshal associate Leah Turner - the first of four who'll be externing in two-week stints - was in the office to launch a project initiated by the firm and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, in which Weil Gotshal will provide pro bono assistance to people pursuing appeals of adverse decisions by FEMA. The office also provides a base of operations for community legal clinics sponsored by the Lawyers' Committee (our new national affiliate).
Our weekly staff calls include not just MCJ staff in both offices, but Mississippi Center for Legal Services' coast attorneys Jeremy Eisler and Dita McCarthy and Lawyers' Committee attorneys Trisha Miller and Jon Hooks. Also participating are Bonnie Allen, who has been volunteering since September, and Karen Lash, who started as a volunteer but recently converted to consultant status as national pro bono coordinator with the help of a grant from the ABA Section of Business Law.
Advancing Affordable Housing as a Hallmark of Recovery
With 65,000 south Mississippi homes destroyed or severely damaged, 35,000 households now occupying FEMA trailers, and thousands more still living in tents, cars and unrepaired apartments, our focus from the beginning has been on the legal needs generated by this unprecedented housing crisis.
Work groups addressing the issues listed below reflect the evolving legal needs and the truly incredible outpouring of effort from partners and associates at many national law firms, attorneys and policy advocates at numerous national advocacy organizations, and professors and students at dozens of law schools. Thank you all!
How are we holding up, you may ask? I, for one, feel tremendously motivated by the dire needs I witness on each trip to the coast, inspired by the amazing work my colleagues are doing about it, and privileged to be part of what I believe is an historic opportunity to make lasting change in my beloved but immensely challenged home state.
Thank you again - so much - for all your past support and for continuing to provide the financial support (which you can donate on-line - www.mscenterforjustice.org!) that makes our work possible.
Take care,
Martha
Six months have passed since Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Mississippi coast. In less than three months the 2006 hurricane season will be upon us. Since my last update, so much has happened that each passing week makes the prospect of writing a new one more daunting. But fundamentally, so much remains unchanged.
Katrina was a force of nature big enough - and with an impact long lasting enough - to profoundly disrupt well settled ways in Mississippi. The natural disaster was so severe and its scale so vast that the state's devastated coastal region looks today much as it did right after the storm - mile after square mile of wrecked dwellings and apocalyptic landscape.
Yet human forces are at work, with political leadership that promises "bigger and better" and community voices raised in support of "more just and inclusive." Not since the Civil Rights Movement has there been such an intense national spotlight on the Deep South's continuing problems of racial and economic injustice - or such potential for lawyers across the country to help rebuild healthier communities in our nation's poorest region.
The Mississippi Center for Justice and our many partners are in the middle of the action, seeking to ensure that this potential is fully realized.
The report that follows is an abbreviated version of the story told in the latest issue of our newsletter, Call to Action, which will go in the mail soon. If you want to be on our mailing list, please send your address to mgalloway@mscenterforjustice.org.
Our annual DC-area fundraiser - the 2006 Mississippi on the Potomac Reception on Thursday, April 6, invitation and reply card attached - will be a forum for personal reports from the coast and a short video created by documentary filmmaker Morgan Currie and photographer Mike Lang. We will also honor David Stern, Equal Justice Works CEO and Stern Family Fund president, for his inspirational leadership in general and his steadfast support of MCJ in particular. And we will recognize and thank the dozens of DC folks who have been our lifeline of support in these recent, eventful months. Please come and bring a friend.
New legal capacity on the Coast
Our new Katrina Recovery Office in Biloxi opened in December and is staffed by senior attorneys John Jopling and Reilly Morse and part-time pro bono coordinator Kim Duffy. We are lucky to have found space just off the I-110 ramp in a former medical clinic - unfortunately, a sign of the coast's loss of doctors and health care capacity since the hurricane.
Since my last update in December, Reilly has been named to a two-year Equal Justice Works Katrina Relief Fellowship at MCJ, funded by the Association of Corporate Counsel, and Kim has joined the staff thanks to the JEHT Foundation grant that also funds John's position. Your many other grants and donations, large and small, made it possible to launch our legal effort immediately and to provide additional staff and consultant support.
Since late February, the office has been humming with dozens of law students on spring break, doing community outreach and education and tracking justice court eviction dockets and conditions at apartment complexes. Today, in a front-page special to the Biloxi Sun Herald, two of this week's batch of 30 students report on their experiences (http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/14129096.htm; for the version with full photo coverage, including a group photo of the students in front of and all but obscuring the new office, go to http://activepaper.olivesoftware.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=QlNILzIwMDYvMDMvMTgjQXIwMDEwMA==&Mode=HTML&Locale=english-skin-custom).
This week, Weil Gotshal associate Leah Turner - the first of four who'll be externing in two-week stints - was in the office to launch a project initiated by the firm and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, in which Weil Gotshal will provide pro bono assistance to people pursuing appeals of adverse decisions by FEMA. The office also provides a base of operations for community legal clinics sponsored by the Lawyers' Committee (our new national affiliate).
Our weekly staff calls include not just MCJ staff in both offices, but Mississippi Center for Legal Services' coast attorneys Jeremy Eisler and Dita McCarthy and Lawyers' Committee attorneys Trisha Miller and Jon Hooks. Also participating are Bonnie Allen, who has been volunteering since September, and Karen Lash, who started as a volunteer but recently converted to consultant status as national pro bono coordinator with the help of a grant from the ABA Section of Business Law.
Advancing Affordable Housing as a Hallmark of Recovery
With 65,000 south Mississippi homes destroyed or severely damaged, 35,000 households now occupying FEMA trailers, and thousands more still living in tents, cars and unrepaired apartments, our focus from the beginning has been on the legal needs generated by this unprecedented housing crisis.
Work groups addressing the issues listed below reflect the evolving legal needs and the truly incredible outpouring of effort from partners and associates at many national law firms, attorneys and policy advocates at numerous national advocacy organizations, and professors and students at dozens of law schools. Thank you all!
- Upgrading Mississippi's legal intake/advice/referral system to accommodate Katrina-related demand and national offers of assistance. This top-priority effort is a prerequisite for being able to say yes to your generous offers of pro bono assistance. It involves the legal services programs (whose 800 numbers have absorbed Katrina calls since the YLD disaster hotline shut down January 31), Mississippi Volunteer Lawyers Project, MCJ, and the intake resources that Equal Justice Works' new Pro Bono Legal Corps attorneys will make available.
- Developing the Weil Gotshal/Lawyers' Committee commitment to handle FEMA appeals, Mintz Levin's provision of backup on foreclosures and bankruptcies, and King & Spalding's offer of assistance in evictions as replicable models for meeting the challenge of matching local needs with remote assistance.
- With the indispensable assistance of law students, educating community and faith-based groups about legal rights and the availability of legal services.
- Stemming the tide of evictions in coastal county justice courts.
- Representing tenants and tenant groups in their negotiations with apartment building owners for rent abatements and repairs and to prevent mass evictions.
- Promoting housing development to accommodate low- and moderate-income homeowners and communities.
- Utilizing the governor's two-year foreclosure moratorium proclamation to forestall home foreclosures. The proclamation is posted at http://www.governorbarbour.com/ProcMortgage.htm.
- Implementing the attorney general's recent application of the price gouging statute to rent increases and monitoring the emergence of other consumer abuses. The price gouging opinion is posted at http://www.agopin.state.ms.us/ .
- Ensuring that $5 billion in federal CDBG funds - that's $1 billion more than Mississippi's entire state budget of $4 billion - equitably addresses the housing needs of low-wealth, low-income, minority and elderly Katrina survivors. The governor's plan for the first $3 billion was published last week with an 8-day public comment period (plan posted at http://www.mshomehelp.gov/) . Under the plan, all assistance would go to homeowners - nothing to renters. Also, it would categorically exclude homeowners who were in the flood zone but didn't have flood insurance and homeowners outside the flood zone who didn't maintain regular homeowners' insurance. The plan seeks a waiver of the low- and moderate-income targeting requirements of the CDBG program, despite its obvious disparate impact on this population. Lawyers' Committee's Joe Rich and Jon Hooks prepared the comment letter filed yesterday on behalf of 24 groups including the MS NAACP, the MS Area United Methodist Church, MCJ and others.
How are we holding up, you may ask? I, for one, feel tremendously motivated by the dire needs I witness on each trip to the coast, inspired by the amazing work my colleagues are doing about it, and privileged to be part of what I believe is an historic opportunity to make lasting change in my beloved but immensely challenged home state.
Thank you again - so much - for all your past support and for continuing to provide the financial support (which you can donate on-line - www.mscenterforjustice.org!) that makes our work possible.
Take care,
Martha
Martha Bergmark
President
Mississippi Center for Justice
736 N. Congress St. (39202)
P. O. Box 1023
Jackson MS 39215
phone: 601-352-2269
direct line: 601-209-1892
fax: 601-352-4769
www.mscenterforjustice.org
Topics:
