In next Chicago storm, ask feds for a hotel room

It won't be on your credit card statement this month, but it might as well be.

Ten nights at a Marriott in Memphis. A seven-night stay at the Holidome in Dallas. Two weeks at an Embassy Suites in Birmingham.

Didn't stay there, you say? Wasn't you?

Well you're paying for it. We all are.

We're picking up piles of hotel tabs for people who were evacuated during last week's Hurricane Gustav that socked southern Louisiana.

The full-comp hotel accommodations, courtesy of Uncle Sam, were announced by Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Inconvenience and General Mayhem.

You may have missed the announcement of Washington's generosity on your behalf. With CSI-Wheaton, GOP-Palin and Cubs-losing getting most of the local attention, who cares about some government-paid hotel rooms outside New Orleans?

As federal officials tried to finesse the return of Louisiana evacuees with the same skillful precision they had used to successfully extract almost every reasonable person in the region, something became apparent: It is easier to get people out of town before "the mother of all storms" than it is to get back them back in after it fizzled to a "mother-in-law" edition. Those were the words of Mayor Ray Nagin, by the way.

Think of it as a "reverse Iraq moment," in view of how easy it was to get into Iraq and difficult it is to get out.

So, as the repatriating of metro New Orleans dragged on mostly because the local power company couldn't restore electricity fast enough, Secretary Chertoff announced that people in hotels need not worry. The federal government would pay.

Who said a Republican administration can't believe in government solving everyone's problems?

Just sign up at your local office of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, an agency that is in Louisiana so often it really should just move its headquarters there). Then, for the next month, submit your hotel bills to the government, like Fortune 500 executives turn in their expense accounts to the company bookkeeping department.

And be done with it. This evacuation thing isn't too painful after all, is it?

With Hurricane Hanna over the weekend and Ike coming this week, where does taxpayer-backed relocation end?

If people choose to live with tropical storm targets on their backs, every time the usual and expected happens, the rest of the country is supposed to pay their Sheraton bill until their storm-zone home can be rebuilt?

When tornadoes ripped through Plainfield, did the federal government come in and set up a travel agency, signing up displaced residents with government expense accounts?

When the Great Chicago Flood shut down the Loop, did the feds pay for dry office space so that downtown retailers, banks and accounting firms could relocated?

After Hurricane Fiasco in 2005, a storm formerly known as Katrina, FEMA officials apparently decided that they screwed up. As part of the newly minted Department of Homeland Security, they would not misbehave again.

So, ever since, the refrain from FEMA is: nothing that happens is your fault especially if you follow our instructions. Nature caused the storm, government demanded the evacuation, and the power companies are causing the continued outage. You're off the hook.

Seven years ago this week, when terrorists took down the World Trade Center in New York, part of the Pentagon and crashed a jetliner into a Pennsylvania field, there was no Homeland Security Department. FEMA was just a four-letter word on the back of some bureaucrat's windbreaker, who showed up after a bad storm with low-interest loan forms and some cots.

The rest of the help came from neighbors, local government, peoples' insurance companies, the Salvation Army and the American Red Cross.

But ever since Hurricane Fiasco in 2005, when President Bush hailed the "heck-uv-a-job" being done by imploding FEMA Director Mike "Brownie" Brown, the federal government has become big brother, sister, mother, father, next-door neighbor, Gandhi and Mother Teresa in any and all emergencies.

It started with the $2,000 debit cards given to hurricane victims in 2003 and continued with "victims" staying in hotels at taxpayer expense for months.

For taxpayers, the most expensive part of this philosophy is that the government can actually do certain things to prevent all disasters. How much have you and your family kicked in to the $11 billion being spent on concrete walls to keep the water from flooding below-sea-level New Orleans?

If Messrs. McCain or Obama continue this expensive, hand-holding approach to public emergency management, the population of the Gulf Coast is likely to soar. Maybe FEMA could just evacuate southern Louisiana every hurricane season and offer it as a regional paid vacation.

For those of us left behind in Chicago, the next time an electrical storm rolls through DuPage County and ComEd doesn't get your power restored for four days, try this.

Check into the Palmer House and send FEMA your bill.

Just invoke the Gustav Rule. But please go easy on the in-room movies.

The Government Accounting Office is still determining how to code Adults Only.

Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com.