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Joint Powers Authority property manager Scott Bradshaw has to unlock a gate to get to McClellan's Starships, intended 12 months ago to welcome 1,200 evacuees from Hurricane Katrina.

The 1800 area of McClellan where the first Starships, the Army's name for the 29-year-old barracks, were renovated shows signs of neglect. Weeds have sprung up from the cracks in the asphalt, and Bradshaw keeps the premises tightly locked.

A year later, according to who you ask, the area's experiment in providing post-Katrina emergency shelter is remembered as an act of community hospitality, lingering institutional racism against African-Americans or a chapter in a larger tale of a bumbling agency of the federal government.

Anniston Mayor Chip Howell remembers the weeks and months following Katrina as a blur, a point where “time stood still.” Helplessness led to hope as leaders tried to offer comfort to those displaced, even though fewer than a dozen took the city up on its housing offer.

“There were meetings every day for people who wanted to help and did help,” Howell said. “I don't believe that would have come together (without the Starships.) Good things happened and will happen in the future because of that coalition built.”

On Aug. 30, the day after Hurri-cane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Howell got a phone call from former mayor David Dethrage.

Dethrage suggested the Starships were available, but Howell initially balked because they'd been closed since 1999. Howell called Bradshaw, who said the idea seemed impossible, at first.

Bradshaw thought he could pull it off and he knew local contractors who could breathe life back into the old barracks

“They mobilized and they hit the ground running,” Bradshaw said, noting they went to work before negotiating a contract and were later reimbursed by the JPA. “They knew me; I (was) putting my neck and reputation on the line.”

A March report from the Gov-ernment Accountability Office es-timates the cost to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for renovating the buildings to be approximately $10 million.

“To renovate the facility, FEMA headquarters awarded a contract without consulting local FEMA officials in Alabama,” the GAO reported. “According to FEMA officials in Alabama, however, the facility was not needed and they tried to stop the renovation.”

The following Monday was La-bor Day. City officials called it the Labor Day of Love as thousands poured in to renovate the Starships.

“I'm still amazed by it,” Brad-shaw said.

Melanie Griffis, of Oxford, was there with her two daughters, Jes-sica, 12, and Clara, 8.

“Everyone just found a place to be,” Griffis said.

In the middle of the renovations, which took approximately two months, there were complaints that the Starships were not suitable for the evacuees. Leading the opposi-tion was Anniston City Councilman Ben Little

“My position is simple,” Little said at the time. “The Starship bar-racks are inadequate for family living, especially when we have apartments that are available.”

JPA officials said the buildings were never meant to be permanent housing.

“You can't call it home,” Brad-shaw said. “But you could use it till you got on your feet.”

Little, Anniston NAACP Presi-dent Rev. Randy Kelley and a group of like-minded ministers visited the Starships and deemed them unsuitable for evacuees.

On cleanup day, churches and others handed out bottled water to volunteers working on the Starships and helping clear weeds and debris from the buildings.

While volunteers worked at McClellan, Little was contacting Rep. Mike Rogers, Gov. Bob Riley and FEMA officials.

He also visited evacuees, telling them the Starships were unsuitable, evacuees said.

“It was a Starship that was a sinking ship,” Little said.

Kelley said he thinks the build-ings were inadequate for people who still were dealing with the strain of losing everything. He said the buildings were meant to drive black victims away from McClel-lan, not help them to their feet.

“They had housing right there behind the Starships and they had FEMA, which was lily white, and they were in that housing,” Kelley says. “The evacuees were black and white, and the main thing was they didn't want those black people out there. They wanted a facility that would be a deterrent to people liv-ing out there.”

Little said he did not know any-thing about the JPA's plans until he saw Howell and City Manager George Monk on television with Gov. Bob Riley, discussing plans for the Starships.

Howell said he still has a voice-mail message from Little, dated Sept. 1, 2005, asking him why he wouldn't open other buildings to evacuees. He said Little's concerns were addressed.

“He was throwing a lot of things out there,” Howell said.

Little believes the JPA misled volunteers into getting a free reno-vation for the Starships. He says he immediately made Howell and the JPA aware of his concerns, but they told him they were moving ahead.

He says he took FEMA person-nel at the time to the base's 3700 area. Houses there had been slated for demolition, but have since been purchased by Keller Properties for renovation and re-sale. The JPA told FEMA then the buildings would be knocked down.

City officials said, and still say, there were no other buildings avail-able at the time.

FEMA deemed the Starships suitable and hired The Shaw Group to take over the rehabilitation on Sept. 6. FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak told The Star last week the agency would not reveal how much The Shaw Group was paid for the Starships project unless the paper filed a formal request under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

Two days later, FEMA began assigning evacuees to dormitories that normally house trainees at the Noble Training Center, less than a mile from the Starships.

When the first evacuees moved into those buildings on Sept. 11, the people promoting the Starships were caught by surprise.

“We didn't get any communica-tion from (FEMA), until a couple of weeks later it was learned FEMA offered housing in the (No-ble Training Center),” Howell said.

The training center held 180 evacuees at its peak, and some re-mained well into the spring.

Hudak said the Starship plans were based on “raw data” projec-tions that later turned out not to be the case. She said evacuees sought shelter in cities with which they were familiar and work ceased when that fact became clear.

She said FEMA stayed in con-stant communication with JPA of-ficials about work at McClellan.

As to why FEMA did not tell the JPA they were housing people in the Noble Training Center, Hudak said, “I'm not sure that needed to be discussed with them.”

The GAO report cites a lack of communication among FEMA offi-cials. Evacuees ultimately were given three choices: cash for a hotel or apartment, the Noble Training Center or the Starships.

JPA officials still were hopeful the buildings could be used after Hurricane Katrina. When Hurricane Rita struck Texas and Louisiana on Sept. 24, Bradshaw and others were expecting a busload of 600 evacu-ees from Louisiana.

The bus never arrived, for rea-sons that remain unclear.

At the end of September, about a half-dozen evacuees were in the Starships, and there were rumblings in Congress about investigations into FEMA and its response to the disaster.

JPA officials still were optimis-tic about the possibility of provid-ing shelter for evacuees until FEMA pulled the plug on the Star-ships' renovation on Oct. 22, say-ing they were not needed.

Griffis said her two children were too young to understand that their lesson in helping others pro-vided mixed results. But if she had it to do all over again, she would.

“I was surprised when we had a plan B when our plan A was great,” Griffis said. “I don't know where the problem was. I didn't look into what happened. I was just table-spoon disappointed. I wasn't sorry about what I did.”

Little said he was ridiculed for his opposition to the Starships, but he stands by it. And he even found some good in it, after all.

In November, Little's church took 150 mattresses from the Star-ships for distribution to hurricane victims. At the time he said there was no conflict between his earlier criticism of the Starships and using the mattresses donated for them.

Griffis said she did not feel like she had been misled and was proud of her work on the Starships.

“They sure did get free labor,” Griffis said. “Free labor from will-ing volunteers. There's a big differ-ence (between that and) someone being malicious.”

Howell and Cleckler praised Anniston for its outpouring on that Labor Day and for the donations of clothing and money, for the meals catered to Starship residents and workers by local restaurants, and the countless other acts of generos-ity.