Treyger Takes Issue With Wolfson's Sandy Statement

New York City Councilman Mark Treyger took issue with former mayor Michael Bloomberg's deputy mayor Howard Wolfson's attempt to share credit with the de Blasio administration for their progress made in superstorm Sandy recovery. 

On the same day that the de Blasio administration announced that it had begun construction on 535 new homes and distributed 543 reimbursement checks as part of the Build it Back recovery program, Wolfson released a statement touting the Bloomberg administration's contribution to achieving that benchmark, specifically through the Rapid Repairs program, which provided free government assistance to thousands of homeowners left without heat, power and hot water after Sandy.

""The [Rapid Repairs] program was unprecedented in its scope and speed in the U.S., and more than 70 percent of the homeowners who signed up for Build It Back already had one round of construction work completed through Rapid Repairs," Wolfson said in his statement. "Altogether, Rapid Repairs injected approximately $640 million directly into the repair of homes damaged by Sandy."

Treyger, who chairs the Council's Committee on Recovery and Resiliency, offered a more negative view on the Rapid Repairs program. Treyger said that while he was not a member of the Council at the time of the program's inception, from what he's heard anecdotally from Sandy-impacted New Yorkers and what he learned at a hearing he held on Sandy recovery in March, the program's execution was haphazard at best.

"I’m not sure what [Wolfson's] hearing, but one of the biggest criticisms [of Sandy recovery] was the Rapid Repairs program," Treyger said. "During my hearing, and during many tours I’ve taken around the city, people have complained that the work done during Rapid Repairs was very shoddy, and that whether someone hired a personal contractor afterwards or the city’s contractor came in, they now have to redo all the work. Some of the [contractors] who did Rapid Repairs are claiming they were never paid for the work...so I would not call that a stellar success by any means. It plays a part in some of the delays that we’re seeing to some extent."

Treyger added that the bureaucracy that impacted residents complained about when reaching out to the city for assistance was largely a function of how the Bloomberg administration structured Rapid Repairs, and that many of the changes made under the new Sandy recovery leadership were undoing the work of the previous administration. He pointed to the previous administration's process of distributing Sandy aid to Build it Back applicants through priority levels based on income as one misstep that has since been corrected. 

"[Sandy victims] didn’t know who to turn to, who to speak with, people never got calls back, and each time you contacted someone it was a different person each time," he said. "Let’s be mindful of the fact that the new Build it Back program that [Director of the Sandy Housing Recovery Office] Amy Peterson is trying to unfold basically did away with any structure that the Bloomberg administration set up with those priority 1, 2, and 3 buckets. That was their interpretation of HUD regulations and now we have an entirely new interpretation of HUD regulations. I would not call their efforts last year a stellar success."