Legislature Holds Oversight Hearing On The Christie Administration’s Sandy Response
$100 Million AshBritt No Bid Debris Removal Contract to be Focus
Debris Removal Just The Tip of the Iceberg
Joint Assembly and Senate Oversight Committees will hold a hearing today (starts 1:30 pm) on the Christie Administration’s preparation and response to Superstorm Sandy – today’s hearing will focus on debris removal (you can listen here).
We are extremely pleased, because we called for legislative oversight hearings on these issues 4 months ago:
Commissioner Martin should be called before legislative oversight hearings to explain and defend his priorities
John Reitmeyer at the Bergen Record has a good set up story on a basic and across the board point we have been trying to make for months now – the lack of preparation and the dismantling, delegation and outsourcing of State programs to prepare and respond, see:
Lack of emergency contract left N.J. scrambling after Sandy
By the time superstorm Sandy hit, some states along the North Atlantic had emergency debris-removal contracts waiting in place for the next weather disaster that experience told them was bound to come.
New Jersey absorbed the same lessons delivered by events like Hurricane Irene in 2011, but it reacted in a different way.
Instead of arranging its own emergency contract, it directed local governments to put arrangements together themselves. And Sandy’s devastation led the state to piggyback on a massive contract awarded years before by Connecticut to AshBritt, a Florida-based disaster recovery firm with close ties to Haley Barbour, one of Governor Christie’s key allies.
Why that contract was struck, and why the state didn’t have its own in place and one worked out through competitive bidding in New Jersey during a less fraught period, will be at the center of what could be a heated hearing of the joint legislative oversight committee today.
But, as we’ve been writing for months, debris removal is just the tip of a huge iceberg of bad policy, mismanagement, and incompetence.
So, to set the broader context and challenge legislators and media to ask tougher questions, we repost these prior reports.
The posts have links to most of the warnings that were either ignored or downplayed and the State DEP responsibilities that were neglected, dismantled, outsourced, or delegated (hit the blue links to open):
DEP Neutered Its Own Coastal Management Professionals and Programs
Climate Adaptation Work Like the Proverbial Tree Falling in the Forest
Commissioner Martin should be called before legislative oversight hearings
Christie DEP Ignored Multiple Warnings on Imminent Coastal Storm Risks