Shaw Group to help manage troubled La. home-elevation effort

Despite the controversy surrounding the state’s home-elevation grant program for the past year, the Shaw Group—the Baton Rouge company that has staffed and helped manage the program—is part of a team selected to manage it and the Road Home program going forward, the state confirmed to The Times-Picayune on Monday. Asked about an internal Shaw email message obtained by the New Orleans newspaper, state spokeswoman Christina Stephens acknowledged the award of a new contract for managing both the elevation grant program, which is a $750 million effort paid for by FEMA, and the Road Home, the massive home-rebuilding program that is winding down after having paid homeowners $9 billion in grants. That combined management contract will start in March and goes to the company that has been running the Road Home since 2009, Hammerman & Gainer’s Lutcher-based HGI Catastrophe Services. Shaw would be a subcontractor to HGI. Other terms of the deal were unavailable. Shaw was previously a key subcontractor on the Road Home program under controversial prime management contractor ICF International. For the past two years, Shaw held a $66 million contract to provide staff for the elevation program, supplementing the state’s in-house staff, and it will continue to do so through October, Stephens confirms. But Shaw employees didn’t just fill staff positions; they held key management jobs. There was also some bleed-over of state and Shaw employees in the program. Read the full story here. Meanwhile, a former Shaw Group employee has been charged with bribing or paying off one of the state’s elevation program managers and three former program employees who worked for Shaw or its subcontractor. Check out that full story, also by The Times-Picayune, here.