UMass alum Feinberg named to head Gulf spill fund

By Owen Boss

Staff Writer

In an attempt to ensure that Gulf residents affected by the BP oil disaster are fairly compensated for their losses, President Obama has named Kenneth Feinberg, a graduate of UMass-Amherst, to head up the victim compensation fund.

"This is about accountability. At the end of the day, that's what every American wants and expects," Obama said, in announcing Wednesday that BP would set aside an initial $20 billion for disaster relief.

Feinberg, 64, who graduated with UMass Amherst's class of 1967, is a national expert in criminal law and evidence and was a chief of staff for the late U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

Feinberg has been called on by the federal government in the past to distribute money to the victims and families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, ground zero workers who inhaled toxic dust, Agent Orange victims and the families of those killed during a 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech. Last year, in the wake of the financial meltdown, he became the Obama administration's "pay czar," setting compensation packages for top executives at the banks and auto companies that received the biggest bailouts, and pay guidelines for other top earners.

"Ken Feinberg is among our eminent alumni, and he is an excellent choice to administer the compensation fund for victims of the BP oil spill," said UMass Chancellor Robert Holub. "Ken has distinguished himself as the world's leading expert on compensation issues, and he will bring a sharp mind and extraordinary experience to this vitally important matter."

At the request of former Chancellor John V. Lombardi, the Feinberg Institute was created at UMass in 2006 to promote the study of how human life is valued. The institute has presented lecture series and other events in the years since.

Named to head the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, Feinberg had to weigh applications from victims' families and distribute awards from a $7 billion-plus pot based on an estimate of what each victim would have earned in a lifetime.

Family members complained that he was cold and aloof in the initial weeks after the attacks.

"At the beginning he was telling families #My way or the highway,"' said Charles Wolf, whose wife died at the World Trade Center. "He had a very poor bedside manner."

But Wolf said Feinberg grew in the job and ended up "bending over backward" to get victims' families to apply to the Sept. 11 fund. In the end, 97 percent of the families applied to the fund; the average payout was $1.8 million.

"He'll approach this thing with firmness," Wolf said. "I'm very pleased."

Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son earned far less than the financial industry professionals who died at the trade center and received a lower payout, said the process Feinberg used was unfair.

"It really created a kind of caste system for human beings," she said. "I know that (Feinberg) kept on saying that he had to go by the guidelines, but don't accept guidelines if there's inequity in there."

In his 2005 book, "What Is Life Worth?: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Fund and Its Effort to Compensate the Victims of September 11th," Feinberg wrote that the Sept. 11 fund was "the single most difficult challenge I had ever confronted in my 30 years as a lawyer." He wrote he wanted everyone to participate in his fund's payout "rather than have them pursue a costly, time-consuming, and emotionally wrenching remedy through the courts."

The oil-spill fund could be more complicated to administer than the Sept. 11 fund, which had a finite number of potential claimants. The eight-week disaster in the Gulf is jeopardizing the environment as well as the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people across the coastal areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com