Those people would not even meet with us. The various groups that were registering families who were victims of the earthquake slighted them; we were not really given enough authority. We need to do a lot of work to make sure that families will not suffer experiences again that are unnecessary.

Basically, a lot of these organizations need to change their application processes. Many people went back four times for the same procedure.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Huerta can be found in the appendix.]

STATEMENT OF LEO PUIG, NATIONAL FARM SERVICE ACT

PROJECT

Mr. PUIG. As Ms. Huerta has indicated, the housing problem is a problem of qualifying for the programs. My specific recommendation would be that there really should be housing grants. As the State's formal housing program gets phased out, I think that it would helpful if Federal Government subsidized needy families. With the city housing costs, people are spending $30,000 to $40,000 a year so that they can get this housing. These families earn around $8000 a year, so they cannot afford adequate housing.

Another issue that I want to bring up is the quality of housing. National public assistance has been mostly toward affordable housing. We find that the problem is not just the amount of affordable housing, but also its quality. I think that this should be investigated.

Chairman TORRES. Thank you, and I would ask only that you identify yourself so that our reporter can pick up your name and your status.

Mr. PUIG. Yes. My name is Leo Puig. I am with the National Farm Service Act Project.

Chairman TORRES. Thank you. Ms. Huerta.

Ms. HUERTA. You see, we are talking about 1,500 units of very beautiful housing for farm workers that they can afford to live in. This assistance is difficult with we would have received from the cities themselves, but it would have been impossible without the assistance we received from the cities. We think it was possible before the earthquake to try to somehow get affordable housing.

But now, the Federal Government has to be involved, the State has to be involved and the city has to be involved. But it can be done; it has been done in other areas, and we believe that it can be done here also.

Chairman TORRES. Thank you very much. Would you be so kind as to pass that microphone to Ms. Organista. Speak into the microphone, please, so that we can all hear you. I know that you have laryngitis today, so get that microphone very close to you.

STATEMENT OF CELIA ORGANISTA, PROGRAM DIRECTOR, MOTEL VOUCHER PROGRAM, COMMUNITY ACTION BOARD OF SANTA CRUZ COUNTY, APTOS, CA

MS. ORGANISTA. Good morning. I want to welcome you to our community.

My connection comes through the Motel Voucher Program because of the Loma Prieta earthquake. We started working with families then, knocking on doors and trying to get people to help. There was a community response. And more and more, we learned that the problem is not going to be solved by this; it is a temporary solution but this is the only solution for some. Earlier, someone discussed the need for long-term housing, but we also need housing until such housing is reasonable.

I am not a politician. My experience with FEMA has been through the community that I have been servicing. But I am not very happy.

One of the most political problems is that there has been a major offset to short-or long-range planning in our area to using the local leadership dollar to its fullest potential.

The bureaucratic process for determination and response has been too slow. There is a need for improved communication. Large numbers of people displaced have very specialized needs.

F.E.M.A. guidelines need to be flexible enough to deal with problems like the ones we encountered with the population. Many multifamily homes were destroyed, yet if those people applied for assistance, they would be found out to be living in illegal numbers within the housing units, so, what could they do?

More funds need to be poured into the community directly. FEMA should be an advocate for the needy. Funds must be available at the Federal level to assist people with the greatest needs in housing. The Government and the State need to make more funds available for low-income housing. This will make communities like ours begin again and will partially meet our needs for homes.

I want to thank you for the opportunity today to come and testify toward H.R. 3666. Thank you for having me here.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Organista can be found in the appendix.]

Chairman TORRES. Thank you very much for your statement. We would now like to hear from Mr. McNeil.

STATEMENT OF GARY MCNEIL, STAFF ATTORNEY, LEGAL AID SOCIETY OF SANTA CRUZ COUNTY, SANTA CRUZ, CA

Mr. MCNEIL. Thank you very much, Honorable Chairman, Congressman Pelosi and Congressman Panetta. I would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak here and I would like to thank you for coming to our community.

I would also like to take a moment to give a special thanks to Congressman Panetta for all that he has done for community, and also his staff. He has been very helpful to us through the ongoing problems that we have had in Santa Cruz.

Mr. PANETTA. Interpreted, that means my wife. [Laughter.]

Mr. MCNEIL. The problem with FEMA is that it is really designed to address the disaster needs of the generic middle class community, but was really unwilling to adapt to the needs of our county with its large ethnic minority population. We had an acute housing shortage; many low-income residents here house with roommates or with extended families.

Over the last 6 months, I have seen that FEMA is not readily able to adapt these needs. The example that I want to give to you. is the needs of the extended households, primarily in Watsonville, where there are two, three, four families living in the same household. Constant lip service was that these families would be dealt with individually, and that their needs would be met. But the actual situation that we have found is that as families came in, day in and day out, telling us that they were taking related families in households, living in, for instance, $350-$450 for a room for a family of three or four.

And continually, we have found FEMA's policy in this regard has not been successful in dealing with the needs of these people and their families. Their official policy with these families, as we were shown by some people in our office now, is that they are being denied for ongoing temporary housing.

The second group I should talk about is shared living situation, more common in our county where not only people are sharing households, it was necessary to also share other living expenses. They simply do not recognize that this was a fundamental fairness situation that we come up against time after time, where the second or third roommate will come into our office, and the first person already got $100. And it is very difficult to explain why it is that they cannot receive any more for that household.

And they are finding that where the people who live in motel or hotel housing are saying that 30 days prior to the occupancy of 1989 earthquake, they are told that they are not residents.

In order to address some of these concerns, we have certain suggestions that we would like to have put into place. FEMA does have to develop clearer standards for people who have multiple residents in the same household. Loan checks should be written for low-income housing. There should be money to replace the long SRO housing stock.

We suggest that there be congressional oversight of the FEMA administration. To us, our experience shows that FEMA is an intransigent bureaucracy, and they need accountability. There are numerous examples of that.

Supervisor Keeley spoke of our effort in the class action lawsuit against FEMA. Now, the section 403 remedy provides Federal money for emergency shelters and to correct the longstanding housing problem. This was something that was clearly ironed out in the settlement agreement which was reached. Since then, FEMA has tried to back out of that portion of the agreement. I am not the attorney in our office who is dealing with this lawsuit, but just in reading their pleadings, I can see that their position is really disengaged.

After the hearing, I spoke with the State officials who implemented the section 403 language, who told me that FEMA has said that there is really no difference in the funds that were already administered. Indeed, that is something that they put in their pleadings to rescind that portion of the agreement, that they did not understand what they were responding to. That agency was put in charge of assisting our community to recover from this earthquake. Another example. Someone had to remind them that they still have to communicate with our clients in Spanish. They sent people

who did not make Spanish forms available to them. They still need all the forms and letters in Spanish; that has apparently been put on a back burner.

We need a sincere presence in our community from FEMA. They removed themselves to a remote bunker in Mountain View, where there are 800 telephone lines that are constantly busy and constantly unavailable. People are hysterical; they cannot get through even when they have problems for which they need help.

It is very difficult to explain to some of our clients why the assistance is much more scarce than it was 4 months ago. Currently, I have clients who have applied for a trailer and they were denied because the inspector, who apparently did not speak Spanish, left his inspection sites, assuming that the families had insurance; they did not. Now, while FEMA is not processing that claim, their neighbors, who had less damage than they did, were getting approved.

And finally, I would like to speak about the process. Yesterday, we had Congressman Panetta hearing many people who believe that the people in the motels should be sent to trailers. These will be the same people who were denied other types of housing. We think that it would be important to have some kind of impartiality in the review process.

We also ask Congress to consider building in some meaningful appellate review process because right now, there are no rights for individuals dealing with FEMA to have review authority or anyone from the arbitration community.

I would also urge that this oversight method include some coordination of FEMA with the existing community groups that are in place and are there to help. Such agencies, as well, have an obligation. People have been denied ongoing certification for temporary housing because they were told that they lacked the money for a security deposit. FEMA's position is that their money is only for rent. FEMA's position is also that security deposit money was available if they applied. This information was never imparted to the disaster victims, that they had the right to this money.

Finally, I just want to comment on FEMA's intransigence in dealing with the long-term housing needs of this community. Unfortunately, there was a dire housing shortage in this community before the earthquake which, as people have testified, the earthquake made much worse. Does it really make sense to provide temporary housing assistance money into a community that does not have housing stock rather than to provide long-term replacement housing?

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. McNeil can be found in the appendix.]

Chairman TORRES. Thank you, Mr. McNeil. We will now hear

STATEMENT OF DARRYEL NACUA, STAFF ATTORNEY, SALINAS REGIONAL OFFICE, CALIFORNIA RURAL LEGAL ASSISTANCE, SALINAS, CA

Mr. NACUA. Thank you. I will take your advice to submit a written testimony and, rather than going into a lot of statistical data that is provided, I would like to bring you a little closer to the problems here.

We represented one family who was housed in the labor tents that did qualify for housing assistance. Early on, they had received money from housing assistance. There is a little portion, but it is in English, that says to call this number if you need assistance. And they did that, and did that, and did that; they could not get through. And finally, when they did get through, they reached an English-speaking person. So unfortunately, they used that money to buy necessities which they needed to replace. And they needed that money for the cars they used to get to work. The labor tents are 17 miles away from where they worked.

They indicated to the local FEMA representative that they were willing to pay the money back; they just said that they did not have it all in cash, and wanted to make payments through local offices. The problem there is miscommunication; the problem is that they were not being told in Spanish what their responsibilities were. At the same time, when they were being disqualified from the program, they were told orally that although the regulations required that there was some follow-up to be provided, they did not receive it.

We also represented another family who submitted an application for approximately $4600 for personal items that they lost. And unfortunately, in the process, they lost track of what was happening to their application. Eventually, FEMA paid them $10,000, which was quite a bit more than they actually needed. They spent only $4600 and kept the other money because they had identified as needing. Unfortunately, the letter that they received in English indicated that they were supposed to go ahead and purchase the needed items, but they were not told about this in Spanish.

They were informed a little while back that because of this problem, they were no longer qualified for housing assistance until they return that money. They returned the portion that was unspent, the portion that they did not apply for but now, they have this ongoing problem with housing assistance. Later, in contact with FEMA, they indicated that the policy problem was not that they had spent that money but that they had not made another application or that they used ongoing help. For about a 2-month period, this family was very, very scared that they were going to be back out on the streets.

My point in these two cases is that FEMA needs to be a more strictly controlled Federal process. The actual process needs to be set out more closely in regulations and we believe that it should also provide for some kind of informal hearing, at least, for the victims or the applicants so that they have an opportunity to present their side. A lot of the victims that we have run across were unable to go ahead and provide all the extra information that they needed.