By Colleen Harrington
| Commercial fisherman Lonies Mayeux has spent most his life working the nets off the coast of Louisiana. In four or five years, he planned on hauling in his last catch, selling his boat and retiring.
But he dreamed up these plans before the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and now, Mayeux can’t be certain what the seas will bring him in the short years leading up to his retirement. “All we have are ‘We don’t knows,’” said Mayeux, a resident of the barrier island town of Grand Isle. “We don’t know the unknowns.” Mayeux says he’s unsure what kind of money he’ll be able to reel in over the next few years because of the possibility that there’s oil still mucking up the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The oil, he worries, may spoil future harvests or scare away customers. His worries aren’t unfounded: He says he’s noticed a lack of seabob shrimp in Louisiana waters lately, a species that’s usually plentiful in the winter months. “Maybe the oil got them,” he says. “I have no idea.” It was his empty nets that prompted him to file for his share of the $20 billion fund that BP has forked over to compensate Gulf Coast residents who’ve been impacted by the spill. “I’ve been compensated for 2010, but where am I going in the future?” Mayeux wonders. “We don’t know. We have no idea.” The fisherman says he got a check from the Gulf Coast Claims Facility for losses he suffered in 2010. The controversial payment program is BP’s way of compensating residents who suffered from the worst oil disaster in the nation’s history. The claims process is overseen by Kenneth Feinberg, a high-profile lawyer who has experience attaching prices to personal tragedies: he handed payments to families of the victims of 9/11 and the Virginia Tech shootings. Dubbed the Claims Czar, Feinberg was appointed by President Obama to be the independent mediator in the Gulf claims process. And despite his history handling high-profile tragedy funds, Feinberg is in new territory down in the Gulf, judging by the size of the fund and the sheer volume of claims that have been filed so far. In just under 6 months, Feinberg has paid out a dizzying $3.3 billion. But the money’s not getting out fast enough for the thousands of residents who say they’re still bleeding from the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spewed from the seafloor this summer.
To address concerns like these, Massachusetts-native Feinberg has been holding town hall meetings in oil-spattered areas along the Gulf Coast. In town after town, he takes the podium to quell crowds of spill victims who, in turn, hurl complaints at the man who has become the face of all their frustrations. “We’re trying to do the right thing,” Feinberg proclaimed at a Jan. 10 town hall meeting in Grand Isle, where fisherman Mayeux sat in the audience, along with more than 200 others. “This is an unprecedented job. There’s thousands and thousands and thousands of claims, but we’re getting through them. The money is getting out.” Still, many people say they’re unhappy with the way Feinberg and BP are handling the payment program. Among the sorest of sore points with spill victims is his ‘final quick payment’ option, designed for claimants who feel the oil has already done its worst. Takers receive a check within two weeks, $5,000 for individuals or $25,000 for businesses– but they must waive their right to ever sue BP for more money down the road. During the confrontational question-and-answer segment of the Grand Isle meeting, several residents stood before Feinberg to say $5,000 just adds insult to injury. “You are here today to tell me, in my opinion, that a person’s life is only worth $5,000,” said scornful Grand Isle resident Karen Hopkins, the bookkeeper for a local shrimp wholesaler. Another woman, who said she was a fisherman’s wife, told Feinberg the $5,000 was “a slap in the face.” The attorneys general from four Gulf-region states released a joint-statement in December, urging claimants not to take the final quick pay option without first speaking to a lawyer, unless they were positive they wouldn’t be impacted by the spill in the future. But claims data provided by the GCCF indicates the majority of claimants have seized the quick pay option: Nearly $800,000,000 of the BP fund has been paid out this way to date. There are two other options open to people who have documented proof that the oil has damaged their way of life. They can file a claim for interim payments to receive a check once per quarter, if they can prove past and on-going damage from the spill. Or, citizens can file for a ‘full review final payment,’ which, according to the GCCF, is “an offer of a lump sum amount for all past and future damages based upon specific documentation received and expert analysis of future damage.” But Feinberg says the GCCF is still in the process of determining precisely how to calculate future damages, which is unsettling to many residents like Mayeux, whose years of expertise in local waters are now useless when guessing what future harvests will be like. “I understand where Feinberg is coming from,” said the fisherman in an interview after the meeting. “He doesn’t know either. But give me some figure to compensate for my loss! He can’t come up with it. Feinberg assured the packed house at the Grand Isle Community Center that full review final payment formula would be released within the next few weeks, based on information from “Louisiana experts and fishermen,” he said. He pledged to hold a public comment period after announcing the calculation, to get feedback from claimants before it became final. But that was just one small point in a sea of frustrations, as residents raised a host of other complaints to Feinberg at the meeting. Many complained of the GCCF’s lackluster 1-800 hotline, which irritated many callers with busy signals or unhelpful service. Others took issue with Feinberg’s status as an independent mediator, while BP is paying his law firm $850,000 each month (“Who else is gonna pay for this program?” the lawyer snapped in response). Claimant after claimant stood before him to say they’d been wrongfully denied, when their co-workers or employees had gotten money. And frustration is giving way to desperation. At a town hall meeting on Jan. 11 in Lafitte, one man made local headlines when he got down on his knees before Feinberg to beg for claim money. Feinberg isn’t the only one listening to complaints like these. Local lawmakers have gotten such an earful from their constituents about the GCCF that they summoned Feinberg to Capitol Hill for a Jan. 27 hearing to grill him on his program. There, some criticized the sluggish pace of the process and accused him of a lack of transparency. Feinberg testified at the hearing that he suspects some 7,500 of the 481,000 claims filed so far are fraudulent. The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted at least eight alleged scammers to date. But for the hundreds of thousands of others who are legitimately hurting from the spill, fraudulent claimants are the least of their worries. “I was figuring on four, five more years,” said Mayeux. “Then I was going to throw in the towel. But they haven’t accounted for the oil, and we figure in the spring, it’s gonna come back.” |
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