Homeowners, officials reach boiling point over slow grant program

Homeowners, officials reach boiling point over slow grant program: "'I feel helpless, because I tell people (Barbour) is working on it,' McKay said. 'There's nothing we can do. It's on a state level. It makes me feel bad for people who need money. We have no way of improving the process. It's just telling people to wait and wait. That's frustrating.'

'The whole point of doing this was to give people hope so they wouldn't have to sell their house or be foreclosed upon or just walk away and lose everything,' Taylor said. 'The whole idea was to give them hope that someone was going to come to their help and that they could stay in their houses. And taking this long is hurting those hopes.'

As more than 15,000 Coast homeowners continue to wait for their grant checks, the Mississippi Development Authority advises patience with the Homeowner Grant Program, an unprecedented undertaking that has become much more manual than first expected.

For Taylor and McKay, patience has worn thin.

For their constituents, it's worn out."