Deborah Koff Ross: “Nobody. Here is the story. FEMA shows up in Hope, Arkansas, my hometown. I now live 16 miles down the road in Prescott…”

“Nobody. Here is the story. FEMA shows up in Hope, Arkansas, my hometown. I now live 16 miles down the road in Prescott, Arkansas. They show up at city hall and say, we understand you have these inactive runways as a result of World War II. We want to use them as a so-called FEMA staging area. The idea was these manufactured homes were going to come into Hope and then go to the people who lost their homes and everything they owned as a result of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. They started coming. They started coming in October, and they came and they came, but they never went. So as a result of that, 25 percent of them now sit on these inactive, closed military runways, and 75 percent of them are sitting in a cow pasture. That is 11,000 brand new, fully furnished, manufactured homes sitting in a pasture in Hope, Arkansas, and FEMA owns them, they have already bought them. And FEMA at the same time is spending our tax money to provide housing in hotels and motels for some 12,000 storm victims. If that is not enough, we all know about the tent city that is set up near Pass Christian, Mississippi, where families in the winter are living in a tent while FEMA has 11,000 brand new, fully furnished manufactured homes sitting in a cow pasture in Hope, Arkansas. That is an aerial photo of some of the 11,000. There is the barbed-wire fence, and there are the manufactured homes. Most of them are 14 feet wide, 60 feet long. Some are 80 feet wide.…”