When Hurricane Katrina first hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, I was working as a consultant in the Bethesda, Maryland office of Reznick Group (now CohnReznick).
Being more than 1,000 miles away from the storm, I had no idea how much impact Katrina would eventually have on me — as a professional and as a person.
Working in my firm’s government services practice at the time, we bid on the opportunity to serve as the program manager for the Mississippi Development Authority’s multibillion dollar Homeowner Assistance Program, funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Reznick was very well-known for our housing-related work, and we had also established a niche practice providing program management services to government agencies.
Putting these two areas of expertise together, we bid on and were selected by the state of Mississippi to manage its post-Katrina Homeowner Assistance Program. It was the largest engagement our firm had ever been involved with.Our charge was to set up a process so homeowners — many of whom lost everything in Katrina — could apply for cash grants provided by the state to repair or rebuild their homes. This was a monumental task that would take me well beyond my previous accounting firm experience. More than 80,000 homes across Mississippi had been damaged or destroyed by Katrina as well as much of the infrastructure (highways, bridges, etc.) people relied on for everyday life. With so much devastation, the expectation was that 50,000 residents or more would be applying for homeowner grants.
I soon found myself on a plane to Mississippi and would work there for the next three years helping administer the program. The scope of our engagement included setting up and staffing three grant application service centers across the Gulf Coast of the state — in Harrison, Hancock and Jackson counties. The service center locations we ended up choosing included a boarded-up restaurant, an outlet mall and the gymnasium of St. Stanislaus, a Catholic boarding school. In addition to building the service center facilities from the ground up and setting up computers and other equipment for the application intake process, we needed to hire and train more than 300 local residents to staff the centers. We also hired an additional 300 people supporting our efforts from the state capital in Jackson.
Our work for the state of Mississippi and the victims of Katrina was both daunting and highly gratifying. The volume of applications was enormous and the entire process, including the distribution of funds, was complex as we needed to satisfy regulatory requirements and uphold accuracy. People who lost everything — including family members — waited patiently in line, often in the Mississippi summer heat. Every applicant had a different story to tell, and most of these stories were heart-wrenching. I was so proud of the ways our team members in Mississippi showed compassion as they met with many people who no longer had homes to go back to. In the end, we helped process and distribute more than $2.3 billion in homeowner grants.
So, it is now more than 20 years since Hurricane Katrina first battered the Gulf Coast. As many of us across the country recently paused to reflect on the lives and property lost due to this unprecedented storm occurring two decades ago, I shared in our nation’s remembrance. But my time serving the people of Mississippi as an accounting firm consultant provides me with additional perspective.
I still recall the resilience of so many Mississippians who coped with the storm’s aftermath while committing to rebuilding their homes and their lives. I remember how grateful they were for the work we were doing and how patient they were in applying for, and receiving, the homeowner grants. And I remember, with immense pride, the dedicated team we put together to staff the engagement. This included many business colleagues of mine but also so many Mississippi residents who applied to support our efforts and became our boots on the ground. In addition to assisting other applicants, some of these people were applicants themselves, having lost their own homes to the storm.
When people think of the public accounting profession, they often don’t realize that what we do can have a monumental impact on people’s lives. Certainly, my post-Katrina work is an example of this, but there are many examples. Whether it’s assisting a business owner in creating a succession plan involving their children, leveraging tax credits to help a developer transform a dilapidated theater into a busy community center, or supporting a once-thriving business through a restructuring, the work we do can be life-changing for our clients — and for us.
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, I continue my work as part of CohnReznick’s government and public sector advisory practice. While I am now back in my office in Bethesda, the work I do continues to support communities as they recover from a disaster. Following Katrina, my engagements have included recovery efforts for those impacted by the subprime mortgage crisis, Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Harvey and many other catastrophic events that have deeply impacted our communities.
Hurricane Katrina changed me as a person and as a business advisor. Through the hardest three years of my professional life, I got to experience what an outstanding team — led by accountants — can accomplish when we work together. Everyone in our profession should be proud of what we do. Because what we do can be life-changing for the clients and communities we serve and for each of us as well.
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