Deborah Koff Ross: “They are fully furnished, 16-foot wide, 60-foot long mobile homes, about a half a billion dollars worth of them. And…”

“They are fully furnished, 16-foot wide, 60-foot long mobile homes, about a half a billion dollars worth of them. And they are parked here at the airport in Hope, Arkansas. Except the theory was they were going to bring them in and then take them to the storm victims from Hurricane Katrina. We are coming up on the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. And so the theory was that they were going to be coming in and then going out. This would be a FEMA staging area. Well, they all came and never went. And as a result, they quickly filled up these old World War II-era proving ground runways and started parking them just in the hay meadow. I mean, just literally on the pasture. And then the Inspector General noted that with the rains they were going to start sinking this past spring. Lord knows, we would love to have rain now. It is awful hot and dry in Arkansas. But FEMA's response was not to get the homes to the people who need them. FEMA's response was to spend 4 to $7 million putting gravel on 200 acres of hay meadow pasture land at the Hope Airport to keep these mobile homes from sinking. The bottom line is, if you can't really get a good look at it there, if you have ever wondered what 9,959 mobile homes look like, that is what it looks like. At one time we had 10,777. We finally have got it down to 9,959. But this is a better look of what it looks like. I mean, there is a fence, barbed wire fence and pasture. They are just sitting there on the areas.…”