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Three billion dollars means different things to the same people—that is, us—depending on which side of the ledger one looks.

Roughly $3 billion or more is the added amount of money available to the Legislature to spend compared to what it had last year. Roughly $3 billion or more is also the amount the state’s Road Home program is short of fulfilling the promises it made last year.

In a Capitol giddy with the prospect of carving up the record-breaking $3 billion lag-niappe, realization of the $3 billion hickey is accompanied by hope that no one in that other Capitol will connect the billions.

Too late. A congressman in a committee hearing last week on the Road Home deficit asked how much the state would put up from its surplus to fill the shortfall. He didn’t get an answer.

Nor is there a single straight answer for who is to blame for the hole in the pocket of the $7.5 billion plan Gov. Kathleen Blanco once said was enough.

The president’s Gulf Coast recovery adviser, Donald Powell, said his office warned state officials to compensate homeowners for flood damage only, but that the state extended reimbursements to wind damage not covered by insurance.

Louisiana Recovery Authority director Andy Kopplin blamed FEMA for underestimating by 20,000 or more the number of severely damaged owner-occupied houses. FEMA withheld another $1.2 billion in hazard mitigation grants that, LRA officials claim, Powell said would be OK to use for Road Home. Powell said he didn’t say that and, of course, nothing to that effect was written down.

The state’s generous coverage of wind damage had the unintended but hardly unforeseeable consequence of insurance companies paying out less in claims. Insurers shrewdly, cynically calculated that homeowners would be less inclined to hire lawyers and sue if whatever more they got were deducted from their Road Home awards. The state is at least requiring grant recipients to sign over to it their insurance claims. That just puts the state in the position of going hard after the very companies it is trying to cajole, with not much luck, into writing full-coverage policies in storm-prone areas.

No legislator will say this, but had the maddening slowness of Road Home closings been just one month slower, the Legislature could have spent its surplus before the deficit came to light. Instead, the two intersected last week when lawmakers took up the operating and construction budgets, followed by bills to spend the surpluses of the last two years.

There are calls, so far ignored, to put a large chunk of that money into the housing-program deficit. Instead, there is a strong consensus to spend most of the surplus on highway construction, coastal restoration, an economic development response fund and long-deferred maintenance on college buildings.

Though much of the extra revenue comes from taxes on recovery-related spending in South Louisiana, the rest of the state pitched in to meet desperate needs after the storm and wants—and deserves—its share of the surplus.

Some relief already has come from Congress with passage of the war funding bill that included the long-sought waiver of the state’s 10% match of federal recovery funds, about $800 million. The governor has indicated she wants to plow that into Road Home, but, having earlier promised it for local government projects, she could be pitting the needs of citizens and communities against one another.

The state looks hopefully to Washington for further aid, but shouldn’t count on the executive branch. The grandfatherly Powell has turned Dutch uncle by saying not to look to him to plead the state’s case to the White House.

As for the president, his promise in Jackson Square—“Whatever it takes, as long as it takes”—carries the same moral weight as his “Mission accomplished” banner, which was supposed to signal the end to major combat operations in Iraq in 2003.

Congressional Democrats have promised to help, though they are also bound to ask Louisiana to put up a share. Yet because the Legislature moves faster than Congress, the surplus is bound to be a memory long before the last Road Home promise is kept—if ever.