This past week the NY Times featured a lengthy, detailed article about the travails of New York residents struggling to recovery from Hurricane Sandy. See: Hurricane Sandy Recovery Program in New York City Was Mired by Its Design; Broken Pledges and Bottlenecks Hurt Mayor Bloomberg’s Build It Back Effort.
Shortly after it appeared I got a note from James Fossett making the following points: “Your readers may be interested in this account of the difficulties New York City’s been having getting its home repair program moving after Hurricane Sandy. All the execution problems that have been noted before in trying to stand up an improvised program from scratch—bad design by expensive consultants, large numbers of untrained temporary hires who don’t quite get how programs are supposed to work, software that doesn’t work, plus too much focus on avoiding fraud. We still don’t know how to do large scale recovery effectively.” [He is the author of an important piece titled Let’s Stop Improvising Recovery, which I posted here some months ago.]
I urge you to read the whole NYTimes article, but here are a couple of key points:
While hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money sat waiting to be used, devastated homeowners were stuck in a n application process that was overdesigned and undermanaged……”
Nearly every federally financed disaster recovery problem has stumbled because of complicated rules and the difficulty of creating a large-scale operation in the aftermath of a crisis. But there is a widespread perception … that … the city’s program miscalculations worsened matters.
Granted that recovery may be perceived as a “wicked” problem, a term the public public administration community uses for complex and/or intractable problems. But there is some serious literature on such problems — just plug the term into Google Scholar and look.
More than once I have also lamented the fact that federal officials have never made the effort to engage the public administration and related research communities — via either the National Academy of Sciences of the National Academy of Public Administration — to help them think through the process of long term recovery from disasters. We have wasted time and billions of dollars over the past several decades. Not to mention the human anguish from inept recovery efforts.
All levels of government and all sectors of society have work to do to improve recovery. It’s time to admit the inadequacies and get help dealing with them.
Recovery Diva 