It appears, however, that another crew has taken credit for demolition work at Grandpre’s house. City records show that Hall & Hall Enterprises, the highest-paid contractor in Mayor Ray Nagin’s home remediation program, billed the city $7,830 for gutting and boarding up the house and cutting the grass at the St. Anthony Street property.
The house is one of at least seven addresses that appear on two lists detailing post-storm remediation. One list belongs to the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana’s Office of Disaster Response, which organized volunteers from across the country to come to New Orleans and provide free home remediation services, such as gutting and boarding up homes, to residents in need of help.
Those same addresses appear on a list produced by the nonprofit New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corp., which oversaw a remediation program that contractors billed a total of $1.8 million.
The homeownership corporation, also known as NOAH, billed taxpayers more than $25,000 for work at those addresses.
Grandpre, a retired nursing aide at Charity Hospital, said Wednesday that she has no idea how her address got on NOAH’s gutting list. Since January 2007, she has lived in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer in her side yard, and no city contractor has ever stopped by.
“A group of kids took the stuff out,” she said. “The only people who helped me was people from outside the city.”
Gulf South Free Press 