DAPHNE, Ala. — On Nov. 19, 2009, The Shoulder — a private, Christian-based, substance-abuse rehabilitation program for Baldwin County adult males — sent the Federal Emergency Management Agency plans for a new location.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast, damaging properties, destroying homes and demolishing The Shoulder’s facility of 17 years on the Causeway. The service was forced to shut down for around a month before moving temporarily into the old Albert P. Brewer Development Center on Pine Hill Road in Daphne.

The non-profit organization needs FEMA approval — and funds — to begin building a facility close to the current location.

Staffers thought the approval process — which comprises environmental and historical studies — would take no more than 60 days, allowing them to build the facility in time. The 60-day mark was Jan. 18.

Today, however, is day 358, and the approval process is not complete.

“We haven’t been given a reason other than ‘we’re shorthanded and there were other disasters that happened this year,’” said Rita Byers, board member of The Shoulder. “We’ve been given the runaround.”

Mary Hudak, FEMA Southest Region spokesperson, sees it differently.

“Nobody has put them off,” she said. “We’ve explained many times to everybody who’s asked us about the project, exactly where it is in the process. They are not understanding that there is a normal course of the process that has to be completed before we move their funds.”

The process had progressed in a timely fashion before The Shoulder scrapped original plans and changed the project’s direction, Hudak said. Still, she said, the U.S. Congress didn’t appropriate additional FEMA funding until August’s end. And even then, it took 30 days to receive the money and another 30 days to hire a contractor to complete the consultation process that — in all — takes six months.

Time is of the essence, however, for The Shoulder — whose staffers say must vacate its current, leased facility by June 2011 — because building its new headquarters will take four to six months.

“We’ve been working closely with the team from The Shoulder and we have been working diligently to approve their project since they have changed the direction they wanted to go, and as quickly as we can to get all the final reviews in,” Hudak said. “This project, actually, they have moved along very very quickly for as complicated of a project as it is.”

The Shoulder’s current, leased facility was owned by the state, and The Shoulder was allowed to operate out of the facility while having to pay only utilities, The Shoulder’s Executive Director Philip Drane said. However, the property is smaller than its Causeway headquarters.

The rental property is 7,000 square feet, Drane said, and the first facility was around 26,000 square feet. The Shoulder can house 18 patients at its temporary location, and could house 40 patients at the original space, Drane said.

AltaPointe Health Systems purchased the state-owned facility in 2009, and it let The Shoulder stay at the facility. AltaPointe is renovating the building to set-up a 66-bed psychiatric service, and it expects improvements to be completed between June and September 2011, Alta Pointe CEO Tuerk Schlesinger said.

Byers said that when renovations are complete, AltaPointe will ask The Shoulder to move out, but Schlesinger said that was not the case.

“Philip Drane is a friend and we have a lot of respect for what he does,” Schlesinger said. “We will do everything in our power to allow them to stay for as long as they would like to. We would continue to allow them to stay there unless we had some pressing need (for that area) that we don’t foresee right now.”

Despite the difference in perspective, Byers expressed gratitude for AltaPointe’s support.

“(AltaPointe staffers) have been wonderful working with us and allowing us to stay there while we got our stuff approved,” Byers said.

The Shoulder has been in contact with the Alabama Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, FEMA representatives and Bryan Parker — field representative for U.S. Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Ala. — about a possible time frame for when the project will be approved and The Shoulder can begin building their new home.

When the updated time frame was given by FEMA, Drane said, “This is the third time we’ve heard this.”

FEMA officials told The Shoulder they needed a more detailed environmental impact study before they could approve the new location, and FEMA said it anticipates the environmental reviews to be completed by November.

“We’ve never heard November or a specific date before, but in regards to the time frame this is the third time we’ve had the same thing told to us,” Drane said, citing the 30- to 60-day period.

Byers said The Shoulder did everything required to get approval to begin building, and FEMA received everything around a year ago.

“We did all the environmental impact studies and everything that was required (for the property),” she said.

The property in question is a 6-acre lot next door to the Alta Pointe property, and since the property has not been built on there were a few complications with getting the building approved.

“We needed to get letters from the Alabama Fish and Wildlife, State Tribal Governments — which is the Alabama Indian Affairs — and the State Historic Preservation, and we got letters saying it was fine to build there and we sent those to FEMA back in January,” Drane said.

The approval process is tentative, pending the property’s final evaluations, Hudak said.

 “They are an eligible applicant and we did approve their facility but then they changed their mind about where they wanted to put their facility … and they sent it to us last December. (After plans changed), they got in line behind all these other projects,” Hudak said.

“Here’s the bottom line: we have been working very, very closely with The Shoulder. We have explained to them a  number of times that when they changed the location of the project, that was going to cause a delay in their getting the funding,” she said. “There’s been no delay in processing anything for The Shoulder. The only delay was them determining where they wanted their project to go. Hopefully, we’ll have the outcome that they’re hoping for. But we have to wait for the federal and state agencies to tell us everything is consistent with what they want approved.”

The Shoulder still has to go to the city to get site plan approval whenever it begins to rebuild, Drane said, but the organization cannot move to that step — or any other step — until FEMA approves the building request.

“The problem with getting the approval is that once we get the approval and the grant, the project must be publicly bid,” Drane said.

“Even though we’ve got the plans designed, we’ve got some last-minute tweaking.”