Published November 12, 2013
By Kate Zernike

As the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy approached, the Christie administration had distributed only about a quarter of the $1.2 billion that the federal government had awarded to help New Jersey homeowners and renters recover from the storm.

 The numbers were included in documents released in October to housing advocacy groups that have sued the administration in an effort to understand how the state awarded the recovery grants, and why so many residents have complained that they were promised disaster relief money but still have not seen it.

They add to other complaints about heavy bureaucracy and a lack of transparency in Gov. Chris Christie’s efforts to help the state recover from the storm, which he frequently describes as his “mission.”

A spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Community Affairs responded that the amount of money that had been distributed was slightly higher than the figures in the documents, and she attributed delays to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But Staci Berger, executive director of the Community Development Network of New Jersey, said the slowness seemed excessive, given that the federal department had signed off on the state’s plan on how to spend the money more than six months ago, and released the $1.6 billion to the state in May.

“For a lot of residents, it does not feel like the help that they expected is coming at anywhere near the rate they need it, and nobody is telling them why,” she said. “Blaming HUD in Washington is not a why. The governor doesn’t generally take those things lying down; why would he in this case?”

According to the data released to the housing groups, by early October, about 15 percent of the $780 million intended for homeowners had been distributed, and about 48 percent of the $330 million intended for renters. The state has already approved grants for about 4,300 homeowners in one of those programs; last week, it proposed shifting more money to that program to allow it to include about 1,000 more homeowners.

Representative Bill Pascrell, a Democrat whose district includes Little Ferry, a town that was severely damaged by the storm, asked the administration to reopen applications to the program, saying that many missed the application deadlines because the state waited too long to perform damage assessments on their homes.

Lisa Ryan, a spokeswoman for the Community Affairs Department, said on Tuesday that 34 percent of the federal funds had been given to residents.

She said that the federal housing department required several layers of additional approval before the money could be given to homeowners — an effort to prevent the kind of fraud that followed Hurricane Katrina.

Among other things, she said, the department has to determine how much money the homeowner has received from private insurance or other federal programs, verify all receipts and conduct environmental and historic reviews of each property.

But the housing groups argue that Mr. Christie, who fought a public battle with Republicans in Congress to get the money in the first place, has not done enough to explain the delays to residents. He declined invitations to have administration officials speak at several legislative hearings on storm recovery over the last three months.