New York City's Office of Housing Recovery Operations failed to properly monitor contractors after Hurricane Sandy and paid $6.8 million to them for flawed or incomplete work, according to an
That contributed to extensive delays in the delivery of aid to more than 20,000 people seeking help, Stringer said in his March 31 report. He said the city's recovery effort after the Oct. 29, 2012, storm was a boon for consultants who failed to do required work and left thousands of victims without help long after the storm ravaged the city.
A message seeking comment was left with the housing recovery office.
"New York City's response to Sandy was a case study in dysfunction," said Stringer. "During the course of this audit, I went to affected communities to hear first-hand the stories of the recovery from hundreds of city residents - from the endless delays, to the lost paperwork and the maddening lack of progress."
The audit examined the Build it Back Single Family Program - which focused on owner-occupants of properties with one-to-four units affected by Sandy - from June 1, 2013 to Aug. 1, 2014. Testimony from six public hearings enhanced the findings.
At one public hearing on Midland Beach, the hardest-hit neighborhood of Staten Island borough, where 23 people died during the storm, Stringer heard a barrage of bureaucratic horror stories that included lowball assessments, inaccurate square-footage measurements and different answers from people at the same agencies.
The multitude of anecdotes stunned Stringer.
"Wow," he said. "You can't make this stuff up."
In a response, a press officer for the Mayor's Office of Management and Budget said Stringer's staff "overwhelmingly" focused on the first seven months of the program's operations in 2013, before Mayor Bill de Blasio took office.
"The direction and progress made by the Housing Recovery Office since the beginning of 2014 are well reflected in the audit report's recommendations," said the response, which cited a de Blasio overhaul of the agency.
The response called Stringer's sample size too small and misleading, and that statements about applicant files were incorrect. It also said that auditors misunderstood or misconstrued program requirements, and that applicant survey findings were incomplete.
