A 49-year-old woman who lived in New Orleans almost seven years before Hurricane Katrina sent her packing to her hometown of Albany, N.Y., sued Catholic Charities in federal court there Monday, claiming it broke a promise to provide her a safe place to live if she told her evacuation story to help the agency raise money for others left homeless by the 2005 storm.According to Tina M. Zlotnick's petition, the Diocese of Albany and Catholic Charities are pressuring her to leave a rectory they moved her into after forcing her from a $2,700-a-month hotel suite she says they encouraged her to take, helped her pay for and enlisted her help in an allegedly fraudulent effort to get the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse the cost.
Zlotnick's lawsuit, whose defendants also include the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Albany and FEMA, claims that because she was housed in a $2,700-a-month apartment when she had a monthly budget of only $600, "the defendants are believed to have billed or obtained reimbursement from FEMA of $2,000 per month over budget for one year, or $25,200 per year for only one victim."
But Sister Maureen Joyce, head of Catholic Charities in Albany Diocese, called Zlotnick's claim "totally inaccurate."
Her agency, she said, received just under $38,000 in reimbursements from FEMA for short-term housing but spent three times that much from its own funds for direct assistance to 20 Gulf Coast evacuees, Zlotnick among them.
There was no pressure put on Zlotnick to tell about her evacuation experiences in return for Catholic Charities help, Joyce said, adding, "She really wanted to talk."
In an interview Monday, Zlotnick said that when the city flooded after Katrina, she remained on a balcony above her Napoleon Avenue apartment for 5½ days until rescuers agreed to take her and her remaining worldly possessions -- her two dogs -- to safety.
Joyce said Catholic Charities has given Zlotnick a place to live, rent free, for 15 months: first a suite in a hotel that would agree to take her and her two dogs and then a vacant rectory.
According to Joyce, the rectory is being sold but Zlotnick has so far refused to leave and has turned down an apartment Catholic Charities found with a fenced back yard for her pets.
The agency has brought in United Tenants of Albany to help come to terms with Zlotnick on an acceptable apartment, but no agreement has been reached.
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