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Is it magic? Is Kenneth making numbers appear out of thin air...?
Oil spill claims of $357 million have been paid to 12,300 Louisiana residents.
New data from the Gulf Coast Claims Facility show that oil spill claims administrator Kenneth Feinberg has more than compensated Louisiana's fishing industry for its estimated losses through 2013.
More than compensated? Really? Define "more" please...
Feinberg has paid more than $357 million to 12,300 Louisianians who catch fish, crabs, shrimp or oysters for a living, according to official oil spill claims data. That's well beyond the $300 million that GNO Inc. recently estimated to be the worst-case spill-induced loss to commercial fisheries statewide.
The average total payout to Louisiana fishers is more than $29,000. That's $5,000 more than the average compensation across the whole program, which has paid more than $5.1 billion to about 207,000 claimants hailing from all 50 states and several foreign countries.
Despite the high-dollar payout amount thus far, community leaders continue to blast Feinberg's process, saying many fishers are being forced by impending economic ruin to take "quick" final payments of $5,000 for individuals or $25,000 for businesses.
These "quick payments" have often seemed to play on the genuine desperation of people trying to feed their families with no income immediately after the gusher - but Feinberg downplays the "desperation" aspect.
Feinberg says there's no proof that fishers who take quick payments are "settling" for less out of desperation, when they could otherwise continue to document further losses.
Still, he is concerned enough about the persistent complaints that he has agreed to an independent audit of his operations. In the next couple of weeks he and Attorney General Eric Holder's office will select an auditor to review claims and assess whether the Gulf Coast Claims Facility has been fair to similarly positioned claimants, Feinberg said.
"I see no evidence that economic compulsion is driving the decisions of individual claimants (to opt for quick payments), rather than their acceptance (that they already received) full compensation for their loss or the absence of proof that they have any further loss," Feinberg said. "I think the audit will validate what I've said all along, that there's absolutely no evidence of demonstrable inconsistency at all."
However, Catholic Charities, which provides counseling and advice to struggling claimants in six parishes, considers commercial fishers who took quick payments as part of their target population of families in distress.
Feinberg also posits that some who accepted a quick payment may have already been compensated, and are merely double-dipping.
Clint Guidry, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, agreed there are a raft of "fly-by-night" fishing claimants who fit that bill, but many are "legitimate fishermen" who have been backed into a corner because they haven't gotten any compensation since last September and they're facing cash-flow emergencies, he said.
"Then you got some people who are so frickin' desperate because they fell through the cracks on interim payments," he said. "Come May, they couldn't make any money with the small (brown) shrimp and the bad prices, and they took the $25,000 because they needed to put food on the table for their kids."
There are some, however, who have been unwilling to settle for the $25,000. George Barisich, a shrimper, oyster leaseholder and harvester who is president of the United Commercial Fishermen, said last year's emergency payment fairly compensated him for his first six months of losses. But his attempts in 2011 to reach a final settlement have fallen well short.
Barisich said he went from $250,000 in oyster sales in 2009 to zero in 2010. But Feinberg offered him only $25,000 on top of his emergency payment, he said. He would not disclose how much he got in his emergency payment, but he said the final offer fell far short of fully compensating him.
Asked if Feinberg's recent decision to pay oyster leaseholders as much as seven times their 2010 losses helped him, Barisich was blunt.
"Seven times zero is still zero," he said.
But Feinberg has paid just 160 interim claims to Louisiana fishers through Wednesday. Those payments average $13,754 per claim.
In thousands of cases, the Gulf Coast Claims Facility has not offered interim payments, contending that the claimants got more than enough from last year's emergency payments to cover any losses they may continue to suffer in the first three quarters of 2011.
Again, Feinberg, who has repeatedly acknowledged early mistakes, flatly dismissed the current criticism about interim claims.
"I just think people should move on already. I mean, this is not a lifelong operation," Feinberg said. "I have no objection to people taking the interim payments, but I do think that there should be a recognition that it's in the claimants' interest at some point to move on."
BP continues to pay Feinberg's law firm $1.25 million a month to administer the claims fund. At those prices (yes, I know it is for the entire office) you would think he would want this to go on forever, or at least until BP's money runs out...
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