BATON ROUGE - The Office of Community Development is reopening the Restore Louisiana Homeowner Assistance Program survey until October 19.

According to a release, OCD also extended the formal application deadline until November 16 in response to a pending agreement reached by the U. S. House of Representatives and Senate to address the policy that currently considers Small Business Administration loans to be a duplication of benefits for federal grant funds, preventing many flood survivors from receiving the assistance needed to rebuild.

“We have been fighting to remove this federal impediment so that the Restore Louisiana program could provide assistance to more homeowners as they struggle to recover from the devastating floods of 2016,” said Gov. Edwards. “Given the pending agreement reached in Congress, we want to give homeowners more time to complete the program survey and application to provide as many flood survivors with the assistance that should have been available to them from day one."

The initial program survey was reopened Monday. All flood-impacted homeowners who got SBA loans and haven't taken the initial program survey are encouraged to do so.

The survey takes less than 15 minutes to complete and is accessible online at restore.la.gov or by calling 1-866-735-2001 from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.