NYC Promises To Expedite Sandy Recovery

From the Wall St. Journal: New York Mayor Pledges to Fix City’s Sandy Recovery Programs. Some excerpts:

At least 500 New York City homes damaged by superstorm Sandy would be rebuilt and 500 reimbursement checks would be issued to storm victims by the end of this summer, under a new recovery plan outlined by Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday.

“We want to put forward clear, strong goals, and we want to be held to them,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference on Staten Island. “I’m holding myself accountable, and the whole team accountable…. If we’re not reaching people tangibly, we’re not doing our job.”

Mr. de Blasio released a 33-page report that his aides described as an overhaul of the city’s Sandy recovery programs. They see it as an official reset in the wake of complaints from frustrated storm victims and elected officials who say City Hall has been heavy on promises and short on results.

To date, the city has been awarded $3.22 billion in federal “community development block grant disaster relief” funding, including $1.45 billion specifically for the city’s Build it Back program, which serves homeowners, owners of rental buildings and low-income renters.

Aides to the mayor said all of the new initiatives are fully funded, but the city is seeking an additional $1 billion from the federal government for other Sandy-related needs.

Note that his plans include another major cash infusion from the federal government.

____________________________________________

Additional articles about H. Sandy recovery are available from this HSDL site.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.