Why President Obama Has Earned Our Disapproval

The Atlantic, Nov. 3, 2014
By CONOR FRIEDERSDORF
Immediately after President Obama was elected in 2009, promising to fundamentally change the way business is done in Washington, D.C., to harken in an era of unprecedented transparency, to protect whistleblowers, and to fight the War on Terror without compromising core U.S. values, 67 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing. Today his job approval rating is just 42 percent. His unpopularity is expected to cost Democrats in the midterm elections.
Ross Douthat spends his Sunday column trying to understand this unpopularity. Is Obama blamed for Republican intransigence? Are voters finally losing patience with a weak economy that can no longer be blamed on George W. Bush? Is it the fact that Obamacare has created many losers along with its winners? Is it “a results-based verdict on what seems like poor execution” in foreign policy?
All of these are plausible factors. And there is, of course, no single answer. Different people disapprove of Obama’s performance for different reasons. Here are mine:
1) After denouncing his predecessor’s warrantless wiretapping, Obama presided over the construction of a surveillance state more expansive than any democracy has ever known. What he hid includes documented violations of the Fourth Amendment. And the so-called reforms he urged to satiate the public are a cynical farce.
2) The Obama Administration hasn’t merely violated the law in its failure to prosecute what the president and attorney general acknowledge to be illegal torture. It has also suppressed a still-unreleased Senate report about that torture and done nothing to prevent the next president from restarting “enhanced interrogation.”
3) The Obama Administration continues to wage the most costly, ruinous war in the modern era: the War on Drugs. Obama did not try and fail to end the drug war.
He did not even try.
4) When the Obama Administration kills innocent people in a drone strike, it does not acknowledge its mistake, apologize, compensate the family, nor does it articulate how it will prevent such tragedies in the future. Instead, Obama just keeps quiet. He suppresses the number of innocents killed, preventing anyone outside the executive branch from judging the effectiveness or morality of drone policy. He invokes the state secret’s doctrine to keep the courts from judging whether he is violating the Constitution. And he hides even his own team’s legal reasoning.
5) Obama took two actions that set extremely dangerous precedents: he established a secret kill list, put the name of an American citizen on that list, and ordered his execution by drone strike without charges or trial or any due process. And he waged a war of choice in Libya without permission from Congress.
6) Under Obama, the national security state is out of control. Set aside his policies, whatever you think about them. This is a president who let his Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lie in sworn testimony to Congress without consequences. His CIA director, John Brennan, presided over CIA surveillance of Senate intelligence committee operations, also without consequence.
7) Compared to his predecessors, Obama has been extremely aggressive in his persecution of whistleblowers and journalists who’ve worked with whistleblowers.
Notice two attributes that these indictments share. They’re not campaign promises Obama made and upheld–on the contrary, all are in tension with his self-presentation. Nor are these policy areas where Congress thwarted the White House. In every case, Obama could’ve pursued a much-improved course on his own.
Blaming the transgressions on his opposition won’t work here.
Among Democrats, who vary in their assessments of Obama, there is still broad agreement that he’s better, warts and all, than Bush was, and better than John McCain or Mitt Romney would’ve been. Fair enough. This isn’t an indictment of Obama voters.
Nor is Obama without accomplishments.
But here’s what I find alarming: Confronted with a president who 1) spied on every American, 2) covered up torture, 3) continued a War on Drugs ruinous to minorities and whole foreign nations, 4) killed hundreds of innocents in drone strikes, 5) waged war illegally and killed an American citizen without due process (while suppressing the legal reasoning used to do so) 6) let high-ranking national security officials break the law with impunity, and 7) persecuted whistleblowers – confronted with all of those transgressions, more than four in ten Americans still approve of the job Obama is doing. And most of them are loyal Democrats. Partisanship and tribalism are overriding the moral compass of too many liberals, who ought to be furious with Obama. National security policies he unilaterally pursued will be harming the U.S., its moral standing, and its most vulnerable citizens for years if not decades to come, especially since Democrats are poised to make civil illibertarian Hillary Clinton their party’s next leader.
To see it all with open eyes is to disapprove.
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CONOR FRIEDERSDORF is a staff writer atThe Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

WHAT NEW JERSEY’S SANDY RECOVERY EXPERIENCE HAS TAUGHT US FOR THE FUTURE

NJ Spotlight, Oct. 31, 2014
By SCOTT GURIAN, EVE TROEH, AND JANET BABIN
Experts list key lessons learned for handling disasters yet-to-come
This is the second story in a two-part series. Read the first part.
Two years ago, Hurricane Sandy caused enormous destruction in New Jersey, damaging or destroying some 365,000 homes up and down the coast and leading to an estimated $37 billion in losses.
That was bad enough.
But then came a manmade disaster of sorts.
Storm victims were forced to spend month after month standing in lines, waiting on hold, and taking days off from work to fill out reams of paperwork, only to later be told their files had been lost. Some residents were denied for funding but later found out they should have been accepted. And people struggling to make ends meet — displaced and having to pay for rental housing while simultaneously paying a mortgage and taxes on their old, unlivable homes — have endured lengthy delays to get money to rebuild without ever being given a clear indication of what’s holding up the process or where exactly their application stands.
The sad fact of the matter is that this is hardly a new or unique story. Even worse delays have plagued New York City’s Sandy recovery; there were numerous stumbles in Texas after Hurricane Ike; and a myriad of problems continue to hold back Louisiana from fully recovering, even now, nearly a decade after Katrina.
So why can’t we ever get disaster recovery right? Is there any solution, or are we simply doomed to repeat the mistakes?
In partnership with WNYC/NJ Public Radio and public radio station WWNO in New Orleans, NJ Spotlight has been investigating the roots of the problems and figuring out how to avoid them in the aftermath of the next big storm.
It appears there’s no one, single solution, but rather a variety of steps that must be undertaken on both the state and federal levels to ensure things go more smoothly the next time. Some of the recommendations involve changes to how we lay the groundwork, preparing for disasters before they occur. And experts say we need to thoroughly rethink every stage of the recovery process, from planning to hiring decisions to management oversight if we hope to be more successful the next time a major storms hits the coast.
The New Jersey Department of Community Affairs — which is overseeing much of the state’s recovery – declined several interview requests for this story, and the governor’s press office has also turned down or ignored multiple requests in the past to interview anyone in the Governor’s Office of Recovery and Rebuilding. New York City’s current and former Sandy Czars did speak to us, however, as did several other experts and advocates in New Jersey and Louisiana. What follows is a summary of the key recommendations they made to ensure that future disaster recovery is handled in a more timely and efficient manner.
FIVE LESSONS FOR IMPROVING DISASTER RECOVERY
** Reduce the amount of federal bureaucracy
** Use homegrown help
** Provide more oversight for private contractors
** Develop a skilled, post-disaster workforce
** Create a “cookbook” to help states and cities better and more quickly recover
The first big issue that nearly everyone agrees needs to be fixed is reducing the amount of paperwork and bureaucracy.
For example, attorney Jeffrey Thomas unrolled a long chart he received from a private contractor when he worked for the City of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The document shows all the public hearings, environmental checks, reports, and other steps required for spending aid money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Thomas said his office got to work immediately, streamlining and applying for waivers.
“We spent months taking the seven-foot flow chart and trying to make it five feet,” he said, “but to the public this is all lost on them. This is just delay.”
Thomas explained that as officials, consultants, and contractors touted their Katrina experience for the Sandy recovery, they weren’t saying everything was rosy.
“It’s based on the premise that there is inherent inefficiency to the resources you’re going to be given, and we know how to help you get through it more effectively,” he said.
The federal government says this mountain of rules is intended to prevent fraud and ensure compliance with historic and environmental regulations, but New York City’s former Sandy Czar Brad Gair thinks some of them are just ridiculous. For example, before he was able to secure a waiver from the federal government, he had to send notices to Native American tribes in case there were human remains or other artifacts at the rebuild sites, even when people were just repairing their ceilings and walls.
As for concern about potential abuses by homeowners, Gair thinks it’s easy to go overboard.
“There’s always going to be fraud in every program,” he said. “We spend way more money trying to prevent fraud than we would lose if there was some fraud that just couldn’t be avoided.”
To Attorney Adam Gordon with Fair Share Housing — a group that’s advocated on behalf of storm victims throughout New Jersey — some of the problems with the recovery could have potentially been avoided and repairs could have been done for less money if we had worked more with homegrown organizations that already knew the geography and the culture of the region.
“I think undoubtedly the state needed to hire some outside contractors,” he said, “but there needed to be more of a balance with people who had actual experience on the ground in these communities.” Gordon acknowledged that nonprofits like Catholic Charities probably couldn’t carry the entire load, but he said they at least need a seat at the table.
Brad Gair agrees. “The nonprofit sector, the religious-based sector needs to be brought into the fold and not just be out there on the fringes trying to pick up the pieces around what the governments are trying to do” he said. Such organizations, he added, have a good understanding of what people need following a disaster and how to work effectively on a community level.
Gair said that after Sandy, the city partnered with several local groups to help with mold remediation. The project went well, but it was a pretty straightforward program funded by a private charity rather than governmental money. For larger-scale projects, he worries there might be a steeper learning curve.
“By being nongovernmental organizations, they sort of inherently don’t know how government works all the time,” he said. “So when you then try to throw them into this arena, they could do it. They could catch up eventually. But I think we’d be much better off if we started off with getting those groups involved before a disaster happens and figuring out what role they can play. Habitat for Humanity is building homes all the time all over the country. There are groups like this that could play a big role — both homegrown and national — if we had a coalition that was ready to stand up and do this. It’s like anything else. If you come to them on the fly and ask them to do it, you can get mixed results.”
Amy Peterson — who took over for Gair as the director of New York City’s housing recovery when Bill de Blasio became mayor — agrees that there may have been too much reliance on outside contractors. But the bigger concern, she said, was that the city didn’t watch over them closely enough. Both the blessing and the curse of consultants, she added, is that they’ll do exactly what you tell them to do.
“There’s no kind of nuanced understanding of how to move people forward, how to have a bit of flexibility across this very complex program with lots of regulations,” she explained. But if you add more oversight, when the outside contractors hit roadblocks, government supervisors can step in and use their discretion to change rules as needed and get money out the door more quickly.
Another example of a lack of oversight, said Fair Share’s Adam Gordon, is that some of the state’s requests for proposals from these contractors were poorly written and nonspecific to begin with, so the companies were unclear on exactly what they were supposed to do. He said the state’s expectations were constantly shifting, leading to confusion and frustration for all parties involved.
An additional recommendation experts say would help with more-efficient recovery from future storms is having a better-trained workforce that specializes in post-disaster skills. Local governments hire outside consulting companies because they don’t have enough staff to process paperwork on their own. But the private companies often end up hiring their front-line staff through temp agencies anyway, and spend little time training them. With storms like Sandy and Katrina becoming increasingly common, it’s important to make sure there are enough adequately qualified workers in the pipeline. Certificates and college programs are emerging to fill precisely this need. The irony is that part of the solution to the problems of the disaster industry may be to make the disaster industry bigger and more permanent in the long run.
One final lesson from Katrina and Sandy is that states and cities need a better cookbook instructing them in exactly what to do after following a major storm.
“When you start a big, new program or you’re not set up to review people’s insurance and personal records and come out and inspect their homes for totally different sorts of things than you normally do, and make up the rules as you go, mistakes happen. It’s inevitable,” said New York City’s Gair, who worries that we keep reinventing the wheel. The federal government gives states like New York, New Jersey, and Louisiana the freedom to design their own housing recovery programs, and Gair appreciated that flexibility when he was the city’s Sandy Czar, but he thinks in retrospect that it actually made things way more complicated than they needed to be.
“We’ve got to figure out how to build these programs at the federal level, have them off the shelf, ready to be implemented, turned on right after the disaster and not try to build a program from scratch on each, single disaster. It just doesn’t work,” he said. After Sandy, the federal government did release some model recovery programs that it said could be used as templates adaptable to local needs. While he’s not one to advocate for increased red tape, Gair thinks that in this case, more rules and less flexibility might actually be beneficial.
The way things currently operate, in order for officials in each state to design their own housing recovery, they need to come up with a plan, hold hearings, get approval from the government, and navigate a myriad of federal regulations to make sure state laws are in compliance. And all that consumes valuable time for storm victims desperately in need of funding to rebuild their homes.
Scott Gurian is the Sandy Recovery Reporter for NJ Spotlight and NJ Public Radio; Eve Troeh is the News Director of public radio station WWNO in New Orleans; Janet Babin covers economic development issues for NJ Spotlight partner WNYC.
Copyright 2014 NJ Spotlight

PRACTICE MAKES IMPERFECT: WHY DO WE KEEP GETTING DISASTER RECOVERY WRONG?

NJ Spotlight, Oct. 30, 2014
By SCOTT GURIAN, EVE TROEH, AND JANET BABIN
Two years after Sandy and nearly a decade after Katrina, a look at how we screwed up and what we have learned
This is the first story in a two-part series
U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan gave Gov. Chris Christie a firm handshake and smiled for the cameras. It was April 29, 2013, six months to the day since Sandy had devastated New Jersey’s coast, and Donovan had come up from Washington to make the official announcement that the feds had approved the state’s plan for spending its first batch of $1.83 billion in recovery funding, and to start the flow of money.
The two men stood in the center of the dining room at a seafood restaurant in Highlands, one of several bay shore communities that had been devastated by the flooding. There was no oversized, Publishers Clearinghouse-style check, though the governor quipped that Donovan would later hand off the money in suitcases in the back room.
Joking aside, the HUD secretary assumed a cautious tone.
“We’ve got to be responsible with this money. And we’ve got to make sure that it’s spent right,” he said.
From the get go, a smooth recovery was doomed. The state did not have the personnel or experience to handle a disaster of this magnitude, and the federal government gave it the freedom to deal with problems as it saw fit. So New Jersey ended up hiring the very same contractors that failed with Katrina, and then it failed to oversee them closely. It took seven months to identify these problems, and once they were, the chief contractor was fired. But by then, tens of millions of dollars had already been spent.
That would all come later, though. Back in the restaurant, Donovan was optimistic New Jersey would get things right. He spoke of the need to balance safeguards against waste, fraud and abuse with getting the money out the door expeditiously, drawing upon the federal government’s experience handling past disasters. And he added that he had worked with Christie’s team to develop a program that was sure to be successful. New Jersey’s Sandy recovery, he seemed to say, wouldn’t repeat the mistakes that had plagued the Gulf Coast.
“It’s never fast enough, but it will be a lot more effective and faster than what we had in Katrina, and we’ll get better results because we’ve set it up right in the first place,” he said.
Now, a year and a half later, much of the visible damage along the coast is gone, and state officials are proudly proclaiming that they’ve committed more than $1 billion in housing assistance for storm victims. The feds have delivered to New Jersey a second tranche of $1.46 billion in aid, and a third batch is expected to arrive next spring.
Yet despite the promises of Donovan and Christie, thousands of homeowners are still waiting for long-term rebuilding aid, and popular dissatisfaction with the recovery is rampant. Along with the successes it’s had, it’s been plagued with horror stories of delays, lost paperwork, and bureaucratic red tape. A Monmouth University poll released earlier this week found widespread dissatisfaction among storm victims, who cited poor communication and responsiveness when they tried to apply for aid. And one-quarter of applicants who were denied funding from the state’s largest grant program said they don’t even fully understand why.
The problems are frustrating, but they’re not unique to New Jersey or even superstorm Sandy. New York City had many of the same issues, as did Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 and Texas after Hurricane Ike in 2008.
The failures stem from numerous reasons, beginning with paperwork requirements by the federal government and extending to the lack of accountability on the part of the state in overseeing the contractors.
In partnership with WNYC/NJ Public Radio and public radio station WWNO in New Orleans, NJ Spotlight has been investigating why disaster recovery always seems to be fraught with error and what best practices should be adopted for dealing with the aftermath of future storms. The answers to these questions, it turns out, are far from simple.
For many people, the starting point for discussions about what went wrong after Sandy revolves around the private contractors the State of New Jersey hired help manage the recovery.
It’s hard to get a complete sense of exactly how much the State has spent on outside firms. But according to the latest, publicly available Sandy Integrity Monitor report — which tracks all Sandy projects whose prices exceed $5 million — more than $90 million has been paid so far to seven firms managing large parts of the recovery (as of the quarter ending June 30).
Several of the companies the state hired have come under criticism at one point or another for their mishandling of the recovery. For example, housing advocates said CDM Smith ignored federal rules and used erroneous data in its initial action plan that later had to be revised by the state. And the Christie administration abruptly terminated URS Corp.’s contract last Februrary after it was discovered that a high percentage of grant applicants had been wrongly rejected (though officials denied the move was related to poor performance).
Perhaps the most notorious contractor-related issues to arise from New Jersey’s Sandy recovery, however, revolve around New Orleans-based Hammerman and Gainer International.
HGI wasn’t hired to conduct brick-and-mortar repairs. Instead, its tasks included processing paperwork to determine who is eligible for what sort of federal aid. The company was brought on board in May of 2013, shortly after its New Jersey law firm, Capehart Scatchard, made a $25,000 donation to the Republican Governors Association, which. Christie now heads. The RGA contributed $1.7 million to Christie’s 2013 reelection campaign.
HGI was also hired to operate nine intake centers where storm victims could apply for long term rebuilding aid. If you were one of the thousands of homeowners who needed help, you might have gone to one of these centers.
“The housing recovery centers were set up to help process applicants that didn’t feel comfortable applying either online or over the phone … primarily elderly applicants that were not particularly computer-literate,” explained “David,” a former employee who worked in a management position in one of the centers. He’s afraid that going public could hurt his chances for future employment, so we’ve agreed not to disclose his real name or other identifying details.
Like most of the other employees, David was hired through a temp agency — actually a subcontractor of a subcontractor of HGI.
“The senior people, in my opinion, were adequately qualified,” he said. “Most of the lower-level people were a mix of typical temporary workers and college students.” Few if any had any sort of experience doing this kind of work.
David said that higher-level managers received a week of training, while the rest of the employees including customer service reps were basically trained on the job. The workers shared a genuine commitment and desire to help everyone who came through their doors, he said, but they faced a series of obstacles.
“We were coached to give rote answers to questions,” he recalled. “Many of the applicants wanted more information, and we were urged not to provide further information.”
Although HGI’s initial contract was worth $68 million, he said the subcontractor that ran the centers on behalf of HGI appeared to be cutting corners to save money. The computers ran cloud-based software that had all sorts of glitches. There weren’t enough chairs for applicants to sit while they waited in long lines. And several of the centers were located in buildings that seemed to have cheaper rent but were miles from where most storm victims lived, in inconvenient areas inaccessible to public transportation.
On top of all that, there were communication difficulties, so homeowners would sometimes make appointments through the call center, but when they showed up, the staff did not know to expect them.
“The sense I got was that the management of the program was more interested in perpetuating their contract than they were in helping the victims of the storm,” David said. “I’m from New Jersey, and I live in the coastal area, and I had any number of friends that were in severe distress,” he added, “and to see a program extending their distress rather than trying to help them in the most efficient manner possible angered me.”
The problems David saw on the inside provide a window into what was going on behind the scenes of a severely broken recovery process. Meanwhile, back on the outside, the state’s recovery was met by repeated criticism from homeowners and advocacy groups over lost paperwork, repeated delays, and claims it had wrongly blocked many storm victims from getting aid.
The state had hired HGI based on its experience managing past disasters, including Hurricane Katrina. The point of hiring outside firms like this is supposed to be to provide extra manpower and make the recovery more efficient. But in this case, it wasn’t working.
Richard Constable, the New Jersey Commissioner of Community Affairs, acknowledged as much at a hearing before state lawmakers last January.
“We know there were some issues and concerns,” he said. “Once we were made aware, we wanted to make sure from a training standpoint that the housing advisors that would be hired by our consultants were well informed and could do the best job possible.”
David said he tried making suggestions for improvement at the recovery center, but his bosses were not receptive. Eventually, he was fired. State officials declined to respond to David’s specific complaints, but said they’ve taken several steps to refine the program.
“We work every day to improve customer service and employee training, and these efforts are paying off,” Lisa Ryan, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Consumer Affairs, said in an email. “The State’s recovery programs, including RREM, are running more efficiently and achieving their goals.”
For its part, HGI complained in legal filings that the state kept piling on extra work with unrealistic deadlines that went beyond what the company had originally agreed to perform.
Eventually, the Christie administration cut its ties with the firm due to “performance-related concerns,” though administration officials have never provided a public accounting of just what those concerns were. The Department of Community Affairs declined multiple requests for interviews, including even a general discussion about the use of outside contractors. According to the latest figures, HGI has received $36 million for its New Jersey work.
State officials have been less than forthcoming, so most of what’s known about the termination of HGI’s contract comes from public records uncovered by the group Fair Share Housing. The Christie administration has refused to release internal records on the firing on the grounds that they are “deliberative” and “advisory” draft documents. The company has billed the state an additional $22 million, but it’s unclear if the dispute is currently in litigation or mediation.
After HGI was fired, its duties were handed off to another contractor called ICF. At the same time, state officials assumed more of a hands-on management role than they did in the past. Housing advocates say things do appear to have improved somewhat in recent months, though it’s unclear how much of that is due to the change in contractors and how much is the result of greater oversight or the fact that the state is simply farther along in its recovery process.
VISIT THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY
LandofOpportunity, an experimental web platform that explores post-crisis community rebuilding in America, has teamed up with Sandy Storyline to produce Katrina/Sandy, an interactive timeline comparing the two disasters through personal narratives, analysis, and commentary from leading mediamakers, journalists, advocates and scholars.
View it here.
ICF is a familiar name in Louisiana, where New Jersey’s post-Sandy stumbles sound all too familiar.
After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed 200,000 homes in 2005, that state established the Road Home program to funnel billions of federal dollars to homeowners in the form of rebuilding grants. And it hired Virginia-based ICF for $900 million to administer the program. The company went public shortly after it won the Road Home contract.
But the program found critics early on.
“The company, in hindsight, we can all say should have done a better job,” said Davida Finger, a professor at the Loyola Law Clinic in New Orleans. “That program was plagued from the beginning: very serious issues with how the program was assessing damage, with how the program was estimating costs, with serious race discrimination issues that eventually went to federal court.”
Louisiana’s legislature tried to fire ICF and have the feds investigate its business practices. Finally in 2009, the state let the company’s contract expire. The company declined to comment on its Road Home work for this story. One of its partners in the program took over: HGI – the same firm that would be hired by New Jersey four years later, after Sandy, only to be let go within a year.
So in an ironic case of musical chairs, Louisiana and New Jersey made the exact opposite hiring decision, but both faced similar problems.
In Louisiana, the change in contractors did lead to some improvements, but the state still ended up fining HGI more than half a million dollars between 2009 and 2013, primarily for delays in handling applications. New Jersey officials, meanwhile, said they’d heard about HGI’s troubles in Louisiana, but hiring the firm was the best choice at the time. HGI’s proposal was $127 million less than the only other bid the state received. In addition, California-based Tetra Tech. — the other bidder — did have experience working on the Katrina and Rita recoveries along the Gulf Coast and had been contracted to rebuild levees and floodwalls, but it was very different sort of work than they were applying for here, to help manage the RREM program for Sandy-affected homeowners.
HGI, however, seemed to have exactly the sort of experience managing Louisiana’s Road Home program that Trenton was looking for.
In Louisiana, nearly a decade after Katrina, homeowners continue to battle both ICF and HGI over recovery money. Last year, the Road Home program sent letters to 50,000 residents saying they had to pay back some or all of their grants. Homeowners complain that they’ve tried to figure out which rules they’ve violated or what documentation they’ve failed to provide, and they’ve been met with unreturned phone calls or told their files are lost.
“I never could have imagined that ten years later, we’d still be hearing about Road Home and FEMA and other post-disaster programs, although people who were familiar with post-disaster work told us it would take at least ten years,” Finger said.
After Sandy, many Louisiana companies and officials helped write legislation to try to help New Jersey and New York avoid Katrina-style missteps, but it wasn’t enough.
Despite technocratic leadership under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and an expensive, top-down analysis of how to run a rebuilding program, New York City’s efforts ran up against many of the same obstacles.
The city started out vowing to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past by undertaking a comprehensive review of not just Katrina but also Hurricane Ike and the 2008 floods in Iowa.
“One of the very first things we did was we engaged the Boston Consulting Group to help us look at all the past disasters, all the problems that they had, all the lessons learned from those, and try to put together a program that would avoid those problems,” recalled Brad Gair, the city’s former Sandy Czar.
“It was easy to categorize them and classify them and identify solutions, but those solutions can’t be implemented independently at the local level, like the environmental issues that often delay these programs for months and months. We couldn’t change that unilaterally. The federal government can’t change that quickly.”
In addition, the contractors running the city’s recovery program ended up losing applicants’ paperwork as they tried to navigate the complexities of the federal Sandy legislation.
“Things go wrong in the best of circumstances, so when something’s put together quickly, implemented on the fly, more things go wrong, people start scrambling for solutions and trying to do quick fixes that may Band-aid one problem but then it just pushes the problem down the line,” Gair said. So what started out as small problems have only gotten worse over time.
“Meanwhile, the homeowners are sitting there,” he added.. “All they know is they’ve applied, they’ve done everything they’ve asked, and it’s really not very transparent to them what’s going on to cause the delays.”
Repairs on the first home in New York City using federal housing aid did not begin until March of this year, about 14 months after Congress approved the $50 billion Sandy aid package. And even though the pace has picked up considerably, a report earlier this month by the city’s Department of Investigations found that 90 percent of applicants have yet to receive any assistance from Build it Back, the city’s program.
New York City’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, has instituted numerous changes and committed to begin repairs on 1000 homes by the end of the year. But observers predict that if another disaster were to hit in the near future, many of the same problems and delays could happen all over again.
After hearing about all the problems New Jersey, New York City, and Louisiana faced, it’s easy to blame the contractors and assume that things might have turned out better if we simply hadn’t hired the same firms that had spotty track records to begin with.
But the field of disaster recovery is a relatively small world. There simply aren’t that many companies out there that do this kind of work. And many of the ones that do have encountered their share of difficulties. Furthermore, NJ Spotlight’s investigation identified a number of structural problems with how disaster recovery is handled that mean it’s likely many of these same problems would occur regardless of which firm is in charge. There will be more discussion of how to address those underlying problems in the second part of this report.
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Scott Gurian is the Sandy Recovery Reporter for NJ Spotlight and NJ Public Radio; Eve Troeh is the News Director of public radio station WWNO in New Orleans; Janet Babin covers economic development issues for NJ Spotlight partner WNYC.
Copyright 2014 NJ Spotlight

U.N. Panel Warns of Dire Effects From Lack of Action Over Global Warming

NY Times, Nov. 2, 2014

By Justin Gillis

COPENHAGEN — The gathering risks of climate change are so profound they could stall or even reverse generations of progress against poverty and hunger if greenhouse emissions continue at a runaway pace, according to a major new United Nations report.

Despite rising efforts in many countries to tackle the problem, the overall global situation is growing more acute as developing countries join the West in burning huge amounts of fossil fuels, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said here on Sunday.

Failure to reduce emissions, the group of scientists and other experts found, could threaten society with food shortages, refugee crises, the flooding of major cities and entire island nations, mass extinction of plants and animals, and a climate so drastically altered it might become dangerous for people to work or play outside during the hottest times of the year.

“Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems,” the report declared.

In the starkest language it has ever used, the expert panel made clear how far society remains from having any serious policy to limit global warming.

Doing so would require finding a way to leave the vast majority of the world’s reserves of fossil fuels in the ground, or alternatively, developing methods to capture and bury the emissions resulting from their use, the group said.

If governments are to meet their own stated goal of limiting the warming of the planet to no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, above the preindustrial level, they must restrict emissions from additional fossil-fuel burning to about 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide, the panel said.

At current growth rates, that budget is likely to be exhausted in something like 30 years. Yet energy companies have already booked coal and petroleum reserves equal to several times that amount, and they are spending some $600 billion a year to find more. Utilities and oil companies are still building coal-fired power plants and refineries, and governments are spending another $600 billion directly subsidizing the consumption of fossil fuels.

By contrast, the report found, less than $400 billion a year is being spent around the world to reduce emissions or otherwise cope with climate change. That sum is smaller than the revenue of a single American oil company, ExxonMobil.

The new report comes just a month before international delegates convene in Lima, Peru, in an effort to devise a new global treaty or other agreement to limit emissions, and it makes clear the urgency of their task.

Appearing at a news conference in Copenhagen Sunday morning to unveil the report, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, issued an urgent appeal for strong action in Lima.

“Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in their message,” Mr. Ban declared. “Leaders must act. Time is not on our side.”

Yet there has been no sign that national leaders are willing to discuss allocating the trillion-ton emissions budget among countries, an approach that would raise political and moral questions of fairness. To the contrary, they are moving toward a relatively weak agreement that would essentially let each country decide for itself how much effort to put into limiting global warming, and even that document would not take effect until 2020.

“If they choose not to talk about the carbon budget, they’re choosing not to address the problem of climate change,” said Myles R. Allen, a scientist at Oxford University in Britain who helped write the new report. “They might as well not bother to turn up for these meetings.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a scientific body appointed by the world’s governments to advise them on the causes and effects of global warming, and potential solutions. The group was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, along with Al Gore, for its efforts to call attention to the climate crisis.

The new report is a 175-page synopsis of a much longer series of reports that the panel has issued over the past year, culminating a five-year effort by the body to summarize a vast archive of published climate research.

It is the fifth such report from the group since 1990, each finding greater certainty that the climate is warming and that human activities are the primary cause.

“Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, and in global mean sea-level rise; and it is extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the report declared.

A core finding of the new report is that climate change is no longer a distant, future threat, but is being felt all over the world already. The group cited mass die-offs of forests, including those in the American West; the melting of land ice virtually everywhere in the world; an accelerating rise of the seas that is leading to increased coastal flooding; and heat waves that have devastated crops and killed tens of thousands of people.

The report contained the group’s sharpest warning yet about the food supply, saying that climate change had already become a small drag on overall global production, and could become a far larger one if emissions continue unchecked. The reported noted that in recent years the world’s food system had shown signs of instability, with sudden price increases leading to riots and, in a few cases, the collapse of governments.

Another central finding of the report is that climate change poses serious risks to basic human progress, in areas such as alleviating poverty. Under the worst-case scenarios, factors like high food prices and intensified weather disasters would most likely leave poor people worse off. In fact, the report said, that has already happened in some places.

In Washington, the Obama administration welcomed the new report, with the president’s science adviser, John P. Holdren, calling it “yet another wake-up call to the global community that we must act together swiftly and aggressively in order to stem climate change and avoid its worst impacts.”

The administration is pushing for new limits on emissions from American power plants, but faces stiff resistance in Congress and some states.

Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University and a principal author of the new report, said that a continuation of the political paralysis on emissions would leave society depending largely on luck.

If the level of greenhouse gases were to continue rising at a rapid pace over coming decades, severe effects could be headed off only if the climate turned out to be much less sensitive to those gases than most scientists think is likely, he said.

“We’ve seen many governments delay and delay and delay on implementing comprehensive emissions cuts,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. “So the need for a lot of luck looms larger and larger. Personally, I think it’s a slim reed to lean on for the fate of the planet.”

© 2014 The New York Times Company

Hurricane Sandy anniversary brings reflection, volunteerism, calls for action

NJ.com, Oct. 29, 2014

By Rob Spahr

The second anniversary of Hurricane Sandy brought crowds of officials, media and volunteers to the Jersey Shore on Wednesday.

Something else that was present throughout the day was the understanding that two-years later, more needs to be done to help the victims of the historic storm, many of whom still have no idea when they will be able to return home.

Gov. Chris Christie and members of his administration visited several shore communities throughout the day, where there were rebuilding projects ongoing and where some angry Sandy victims voiced their frustrations.

"I’m still homeless thanks to you. Two years later," a woman shouted at Christie during his visit to East Dover Marina in Toms River.

Without addressing them directly, Christie said he sympathized with them and was doing the best he could to make victims whole as soon as possible.

"For anybody who’s not back in their home yet, they’re going to be incredibly frustrated. I understand that but we can only go as fast as we can go," Christie told reporters at the marina. "We’re doing the best that we can."

However, state Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) slammed Christie’s conditional veto of his “Sandy Bill of Rights” in May and Senate Republicans’ refusal to override him.

"The buck stops at the desk of the governor… this is the state’s failure, not the federal government’s failure," Sweeney said while speaking in Perth Amboy on Wednesday. "The money is here. We can’t get the money in the hands of the people who need it."

At a private meeting at the Union Beach home of Maria McQuarrie on Wednesday morning, a group of residents and advocates told U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro and federal lawmakers about the ongoing struggle to recover from the 2012 storm. The obstacles keeping families displaced varied but included problems with flood insurance and the state’s largest rebuilding grant program, which is funded with $1.1 billion in HUD grants

"We should have been home by now but we’re not," said McQuarrie, who moved into the trailer from a hotel with her husband, Scott, and 10-year-old daughter, Brianna, 21 months ago. "They don’t want to pay the insurance money so now we’re just waiting on the grants."

At a news conference Wednesday, U.S. Sens. Robert Menendez said more accountability, transparency and efficiency is need in the state’s relief effort.

"Two years later, we find a myriad of what is nothing less than horror stories of conflicting information, of lack of transparency, of an inability to get an answer and, most importantly, the inability to get back into home," Menendez said. "We must do better."

While those debates and calls for action were taking place, hundreds of volunteers flocked to shore communities to mark the anniversary of Sandy by helping storm victims return home.

Gateway Church of Christ – which has been at the forefront of the Bayshore region’s post-Sandy recovery since the storm hit – organized a group of dozens of volunteers, including groups from the Starbucks corporation and the United Way, to tackle projects in Union Beach, Belford and Keansburg. Meanwhile, Habitat for Humanity and St. Bernard Project were completing projects in Union Beach and Keansburg, respectively.

Carl Williamson, the Gateway Church’s lead evangelist, said that the church and its affiliated volunteer groups have completed more than 500 home renovation projects in the last two years, attempting to average between 10 to 20 homes per month. But the need for assistance is still growing, he said.

"To date, we continue to grow in the number of projects that are needing to be done. Right now, in queue, there are 258 projects that still need to be completed," Williamson said. "I’m not sure where the blame is supposed to go, but it definitely is taking a long time for people to get back home and it’s tiring for them. Imagine being out of your home for two years and you’re still not on the road to knowing when you’re going to finish. No one wants to take a hand out, but I think people who are in this situation now are being forced to get help."

For many of the people who volunteered their time and talents, the lack of progress in some areas was surprising.

"It’s incredible how much work remains to be done," said Ken Garrison, 67, of Little Silver, a volunteer with First Presbyterian Church in Red Bank, which has deployed volunteers every week to help area Sandy victims fix their homes.

"There was one man we helped who was still washing all of his dishes in the sink of his second-floor bathroom," Garrison said. "It’s hard to imagine that someone would still be living like that after two years, but it’s happening."

The anniversary of Hurricane Sandy was not only recognized in shore communities.

A ceremony outside of Hoboken City Hall, was dedicated to the city’s first responders, who were faced with city-wide blackouts, massive flooding and thousands of stranded residents due to the storm.

Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer said that the city has mostly recovered from the storm, but that the city is working to implement a four-part water management strategy, which will create infrastructure and soft landscape to guard against future flooding.

"The reality is, we’re still very much at risk," Zimmer said.

–NJ Advance Media’s MaryAnn Spoto, Erin O’Neill, Matt Friedman and Kathryn Brenzel contributed to this report.

Rob Spahr may be reached at rspahr@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TheRobSpahr. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

66℅ dissatisfied by Sandy response

NJ Spotlight, Oct. 29, 2014

Two years after Hurricane Sandy, those hardest hit by the storm feel they’ve been forgotten (71 percent) and are dissatisfied with the state’s recovery efforts, according to a new poll from the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Thirty-eight percent said they are very dissatisfied and 28 percent said they were somewhat dissatisfied.

No one knows the official count of those who have been unable to return to their homes after the storm, but anecdotal evidence from the Monmouth study indicates that many are still waiting. Over half of the survey participants were back in their homes within the year, and another 10 percent moved back last year. But that leaves about 40 percent still displaced, and 12 percent said they will never be able to return.

The state receives poor marks overall for communications with residents, specifically Sandy victims. Only 36 percent said the state has done a good job in that area.

The RREM (Reconstructive, Rehabilitation, Elevation and Mitigation) program comes under particular fire. This program is responsible for helping residents rebuild, repair or elevate their homes. Responsiveness to residents’ needs were criticized. Just 36 percent said the state did a good job of informing them of where they were in the process, while the rest said the state did a bad (28 percent) or very bad (36 percent) job. Those who were denied financial assistance complained of not having been given reasons for the denial.

Lastly, when asked to list agencies or people who have been helpful during this time of trial, Sandy victims chose friends and family (88 percent) as the most helpful. Least helpful? County government, followed by insurance companies, and then state government.

Troubled waters: N.J. still struggling to clean up polluted waterways, feds say

NJ.com, Oct. 26, 2014

By S.P. Sullivan

New Jersey is still struggling to clean up its rivers, lakes and streams as required by the Clean Water Act more than 40 years after the law was passed, federal officials say.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday belatedly approved New Jersey’s 2012 list of polluted waterways. According to the EPA, there are 1,770 instances where contaminants have tainted waters across the state.

That pollution ranges anywhere from nitrogen in a local stream to the dioxin-laden sediment at the bottom of the Passiac River, which is among the most toxic waters in the nation. PCBs, arsenic, phosphorus and low dissolved oxygen rank among the most common pollutants.

The list, compiled every two years, is used to assess pollution and develop clean up plans known.

Seventeen bodies of water were taken off the list by the EPA because they achieved federal standards, the agency said. More than 400 hundred others were removed because of changes in the state Department of Environmental Protection’s reporting criteria.

However, more than 300 sites were also added since 2010, according to an EPA spokesman.

Judith Enck, the EPA’s regional administrator, said New Jersey has made strides in improving water quality — including a new combined sewer permitting process that will reduce harmful pathogens — “but we still have a very long way to go.”

A DEP spokesman said the agency was “working hard” to bring the state’s waterways in line with the Clean Water Act, and another said the EPA’s assessment of their water quality data was “misleading.”

Environmental groups, meanwhile, say both agencies have failed to clean up the state in the decades since the landmark law’s passage.

“We are disappointed that the EPA has signed off on New Jersey’s list because it is allowing them to hide their failures of cleaning up New Jersey’s water,” said Jeff Tittel, head of the New Jersey Sierra Club. “This is a dirty deal for dirty water.”

Fewer than 3 percent of New Jersey’s waterways meet federal standards that would make them "fishable and swimmable,” down from 10 percent a decade earlier, according to a Sierra Club analysis of EPA data.

EPA spokesman John Martin couldn’t confirm those numbers, but said Friday that “close to every water body in New Jersey and most of the Northeast has at least one impairment.”

Chris Len, an environmental attorney for Hackensack Riverkeeper and NY/NJ Baykeeper, said that federal law requires the state to establish clean up plans for every impaired waterway, but had adopted just a dozen since the Clean Water Act’s passage.

“At some point 35 years go by and you just think, ‘This can’t go on like this,’” Len said.

He said that the EPA is empowered by federal law to reject the state’s list if it doesn’t meet federal standards, but despite a two-year review period, the agency did not appear to require significant changes.

“If they find the DEP’s not doing a good job, they should take over,” Len said. “That they released (the updated list) in a press release on a Friday lets you know what they think about it.”

Larry Ragonese, a DEP spokesman, said his agency is “making great progress in water quality in the nation’s most densely populated state,” addressing the combined sewer issue and working with the EPA on an extensive Superfund clean up along the Passaic.

“We’re taking the glass half full tack,” he said. “Because I think what we’re doing is working.”

Tittel disagreed.

“Is the glass half full or half empty?” Tittel said. “Whether it is or isn’t, you may not want to drink what’s in it.”

S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Request for Proposals: NJEJA Strategic Plan

The New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance (NJEJA) is seeking a consultant to guide the organization’s Executive Committee, Steering Committee, General Body, partners and staff through the development of a 3-year strategic plan.

Request for Proposals

Strategic Planning Consulting Services

* Scope of Work:

The New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance (NJEJA) is seeking a consultant to guide the organization’s Executive Committee, Steering Committee, General Body, partners and staff through the development of a 3-year strategic plan.

* Background:

The New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance (NJEJA) is an alliance of 33 NewJersey-based organizations and individuals committed to working together to createhealthy, sustainable and just communities by eliminating environmental injustices in low income and communities of color. With a statewide reach, NJEJA supports and works with communities through local, state, and national policy development, targeted campaigns and organizing, education, advocacy, training and technical assistance focused on critical environmental justice issues. The organization is socially and geographicallydiverse, an important asset that permits acknowledgement of unique perspectives.

* Contract Schedule and Duration:

* RFP Issued: 10/23/14 by 12 a.m. EST

* Questions Due: 11/05/14 by 5 p.m. EST

* Questions and Responses Posted: 11/14/14 by 5 p.m. EST

* Proposals Due: 11/24/14 by 5 p.m. EST

* Proposals Evaluated: 12/05/14 by 5 p.m. EST

* Interviews: 12/10/14

* Consultant Selected: 12/15/14 by 5 p.m. EST

* Contract Awarded: 12/19/14 by 5 p.m. EST

* Strategic Planning Begins: 01/05/15

* Strategic Plan Due: 09/14/15 by 5 p.m. EST

* Budget: The fixed price contract will be paid upon NJEJA acceptance of each deliverable.

* Proposal Submission:

Proposals should be emailed to director@
njeja.org

Acknowledgement of proposal submission will be given within 1 business day. NJEJA may request bidding consultants to appear for an interview. Related expenses associated with the proposal submission or consultant selection are the responsibility of the bidder.

Proposal Format

* Background:

Provide a brief profile of the bidding organization and it’s experience providingsimilar services. Include the contact information for no more than 3 references for those services. Links to illustrative examples of work would be helpful.

Make special note of experience aligned with NJEJA’s mission, decision-making by consensus, planning and facilitation of stakeholder meetings, key stakeholder interviews, web surveys, and other experience the bidder deems relevant.

* Executive Summary:

Provide a brief summary of the proposal.

* WorkPlan:

Describe the services provided and a timeline, including the participation of NJEJA, partners, and community.

* Staffing Plan:

Identify the project manager and any individuals or sub consultants who will work on this project, including their respective roles. Submit a resume for each person identified.

* Budget:

For each task identify the expected hours of work, the hourly rates for each teammember working on the task, the task cost, and total project cost.

* Selection Process:

NJEJA reserves the right to reject any and all proposals, to reissue the RFP, and to waive any technicality or irregularity in the proposals received. The final decision rests with NJEJA.

* Final Deliverables:

Deliverables include, but shall not be limited to, a 3-year Strategic Plan that is aligned with the organization’s mission. Areas of consideration are as follows.

Areas of Consideration

* Goals, Objectives, and Tasks

* Community Needs

* Services Provided

* Priorities

* Outputs and Outcomes

* Partnerships

* Campaigns

* Training

* Funding

* For Further Information Contact: director@njeja.org

Please note that no questions will be accepted or answered verbally. All questions and answers will be posted to the NJEJA website by 11/14/14 by 5 p.m. EST.

* Additional Information:

NJEJA reserves the right to modify or cancel the RFP or contract award at any time before the execution of the contract.

‘Environmental Racism’ And The Fight For Green Space In The South Bronx

ThinkProgress, Oct. 9, 2014

BY ARI PHILLIPS

SOUTH BRONX, NEW YORK — An undeveloped area couched between a waste transfer station and a FedEx shipping facility with the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge passing overhead is just about as wild of a place as exists in New York City. It’s the site Mychal Johnson, an environmental activist in the South Bronx, wants to turn into a waterfront park. There are other designs on the space, however, namely the new headquarters for FreshDirect, an online grocery delivery service, which would bring a massive warehouse and over 1,000 diesel trucks, plus a fueling station, to the site.

“When you have a space like this that’s undeveloped, don’t put a 500,000-square-foot warehouse on it,” said Johnson, a founding member of South Bronx Unite (SBU), a local environmental justice group, as he looked out over a wind-strewn parcel of land along the South Bronx waterfront in New York City in late September.

Johnson, 50, spends most of his time fighting this proposal. A real estate agent and former South Bronx Community Board member, he founded SBU over two years ago when FreshDirect initially announced it would relocate. In September, he was one of 37 civil delegates — only four of whom were from the U.S. — to attend the United Nations Climate Change summit for his work in environmental justice. Members of SBU were featured prominently at the front of last month’s historic climate march through Midtown Manhattan.

The crime and the drugs; this is not the South Bronx of the past.

“The crime and the drugs; this is not the South Bronx of the past,” said Johnson, his frosty gray goatee bobbing as he talked. “A lot has changed and improved for residents since those hard times. Now why do we have to wait for those higher income earners to get here before we create something that can really benefit the community.”

Johnson was referring to other recent urban renewal projects in New York City that feature green space, such as the High Line Park in Lower West Side, Manhattan or the Brooklyn Bridge Park. These parks are a valuable asset to the communities they inhabit. They entice businesses, improve quality of life for residents, and offer tangible environmental benefits, including storm surge buffers in the case of another Sandy-like storm.

The South Bronx waterfront, which borders Randall’s Island, is lined, in part, with a 5000-ton-per-day waste transfer station, a power plant, and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal printing and distribution centers. Because of its industrial past, the area already has some of the highest asthma rates in the country, and rates of death from asthma are approximately three times the national average. It also suffers from elevated obesity rates and is an acknowledged food desert.

At the same time, the South Bronx has gone through two rezonings in the last 20 years to reform the area from being strictly industrial to more residential, mixed-income, and mixed-use. There is only one real park in the vicinity, according to Johnson, St. Mary’s, and several supposed parks that are all covered in asphalt. There is no shortage of basketball hoops; they simply blend into the dense urban landscape with little of the relief one expects from a recreational space.

So they want to move 1,000 diesel trucks to an area already suffering a health crisis?

“So they want to move 1,000 diesel trucks to an area already suffering a health crisis?” said Johnson. “Where else would that be OK? There’s some environmental racism going on here.”

As of 2010, the South Bronx represented the poorest congressional district in the country, according to a Center For American Progress breakdown, with 256,544, or 38 percent, of its residents living below the poverty line. Since then it has been redistricted and is now part of New York’s 15th Congressional District. The median household income for the district is $25,801according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The median household income for the nearby 12th District, which stitches together the east side of Manhattan with parts of Brooklyn and Queens, has a median income of $91,628. It includes the current Long Island City-headquarters of FreshDirect.

Even as the relocation process pushes forward, with New York offering FreshDirect $140 million in subsidies to stay in the state rather than move to New Jersey, Johnson remains positive that his grassroots actions are making a difference.

“They called it a done deal in February of 2012, but they haven’t put a shovel in the ground yet,” he said. Johnson said that he thinks it’s always possible to win when people come together and fight for something that’s not only affecting their lives but also their neighbor’s lives. He viewed his role at the U.N. Climate Summit as one illustrating a microcosm of how local issues, mostly in communities of lower economic status and of color, add up to create the global climate crisis.

“I feel that the issue of environmental justice is the local effect of what grows into climate justice and global warming,” he said.

While South Bronx Unite is opposing to the FreshDirect relocation, the group is proposing a plan that creates something the community doesn’t have: waterfront access and space. The Mott Haven-Port Morris Waterfront Plan calls for a green ribbon of seven sites that would open up green space while also mitigating storm surges that threaten the community. Johnson worries that another major storm could cause a local electricity substation to fail and leave vulnerable people without power in many of the area’s large public housing edifices. The waterfront exists in flood zones 1 and 2 according to FEMA maps, and flooded substantially during SuperStorm Sandy. Johnson said the proposal is being considered by the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation as a priority project.

FreshDirect is leasing a 28-acre parcel of the nearly 100-acre South Bronx waterfront industrial site owned by the New York State Department of Transportation. The company did not perform a new Environmental Impact Statement for this site, instead basing their traffic projections and pollution numbers on a 1993 study done for a previously proposed rail-to-truck offloading station.

“They based their Environmental Impact Statement on 21-year-old data,” said Johnson. “This community changes every year, and rezoning has taken place twice since then. This wasn’t taken into account with the EIS.”

Johnson also said that Particulate Matter 2.5, or fine particulate matter, which can cause premature death and harmful effects on the cardiovascular system, wasn’t part of the EIS. These particles can form when gases emitted from power plants, industries and automobiles react in the air, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA established PM 2.5 National Ambient Air Quality Standards for the first time in 1997, four years after the EIS was performed. According to the EPA, diesel trucks emit 0.202 grams-per-mile of PM 2.5, compared to 0.044 grams-per-mile for standard gasoline vehicles.

Williamsburg Is An Example Of What Not To Do

In a cautionary tale of how rezoning and redevelopment can work against the environmental justice issues of a community, look across the East River to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, said Eddie Bautista, Executive Director of NYC Environmental Justice Alliance (NYCEJA). While he said South Bronx Unite is waging the good fight, NYCEJA believes industrial waterfronts are a key component and necessary sector for the communities they work with. In Williamsburg, the Latino population dropped 20 percent in the decade leading up to 2010, from 60 to 40 percent, and that was during the recession years. Bautista attributed this change to rezoning that led to widespread gentrification and displacement in the name of real estate speculation.

“Home and property owners tend to be the ones that are most anti-manufacturing zoning,” said Bautista. “Williamsburg is an example of what not to do. If the interest is to improve local environmental quality, I presume you want to do that for the people that live there, not just clean-up for other people of higher income and resources.”

In the case of the South Bronx Waterfront, there are a number of competing concerns. NYCEJA supports smaller manufacturers mostly, like auto shops and metal fabricators. FreshDirect and FedEx are different. As far as the waste transfer station, Bautista said that his organization encourages the city to export waste using rail or marine export rather than trucks, as that’s more environmentally sound, “but that’s small comfort to those who live in and around that community.”

He also said that larger companies tend to be the ones that win tax subsidies and environmental concessions, as has clearly been the case with FreshDirect. While Bautista highlighted the benefit that relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs can bring to lower class communities, he does not want this to be interpreted as being soft on pollution prevention or other environmental justice issues.

We champion mixed-use waterfronts — with manufacturing, open space, and residential — and as a society we need to make sure they are all compatible.

“Part of the problem is that people still cleave to the dated paradigm of pitting environmental justice against economic development,” he said. “I wholeheartedly refute that paradigm. We need to protect the environment and we also need a place where people can work. We champion mixed-use waterfronts — with manufacturing, open space, and residential — and as a society we need to make sure they are all compatible.”

NYCEJA isn’t a part of the formal campaign against FreshDirect and didn’t speak directly to whether or not the relocation should be permitted.

Monxo Lopez, a cartographer with New York City and Geographic Information System teacher, said that many local business owners are unhappy with the FreshDirect project because it unfairly uses public money to give preference to outside companies. Lopez has worked with Johnson at SBU for over two years on a volunteer basis.

“FreshDirect is not obligated in any way to provide a single job to anyone in the Bronx, it’s all just promises,” said Lopez, who has lived in the South Bronx for a decade. “So we’d rather see local business owners being supported.”

Lopez’s greater concern about the relocation plan stems from climate change and how bigger storm surges will impact the waterfront property. He said climate change shouldn’t be a “byproduct of plans, but the first consideration,” and that plans must take into account “the geographic reality” of the area.

If Lopez had his way, the area would be covered with “light construction” that acts to protect the community from more flooding. “Rather than have water come all the way to the residential area, the landscape should be used in a way that employs recreational levees to somehow protect the area,” he said. Lopez said that SBU has helped bring the struggles of the local community to the forefront, and demonstrated that the health crisis the community faces is man-made.

“So there are human solutions to those problems,” he said. “And that starts with an accountable and responsible government.”

FreshDirect Rotten On Labor, But Still City-Approved

FreshDirect sees its move to the South Bronx as a job creating opportunity for a community in need, however, the company has a stained record when it comes to labor. The company has received multiple accusations of underpaying workers and has faced at least nine unfair labor claims with the city, state, and federal agencies. According to Welcome2theBronx, a Bronx-based blog, FreshDirect’s subsidy application revealed that these discrimination claims included “unfair labor practices and claims of discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, age, disability, religion, and gender.”

Earlier this year FreshDirect drivers filed a class action lawsuit alleging that the company is violating federal and state law by withholding more than $23 million in overtime wages and tips per year from drivers.

“A FreshDirect warehouse worker working full time for a year makes a touch under $20,000,” reported the New York Times in 2012 when FreshDirect first proposed the move. “Thanks to city, state, and Bronx subsidies, FreshDirect will be paid about $130,000 per job to create 1,000 more of these jobs.”

The deal was approved by the administration of former New York City major Michael Bloomberg. Current Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke out against the relocation during his campaign but has yet to address the issue.

“We have to take subsidies away from big companies like FreshDirect. Give them to small businesses in the forms of loans,” de Blasio said in September of last year. Johnson said his group is yet to hear back from de Blasio, even though they had over 400 South Bronx residents email or phone his office requesting a response.

“If you’re truly a progressive and you come from the grassroots, and most of your staff comes from grassroots and labor, then you should understand or at least give us respect for a call back,” said Johnson. “Let’s at least talk about what’s wrong with this community and what’s been going on for decades.”

De Blasio’s office did not respond for comment on this article, however, emails obtained by the New York Post this month found that FreshDirect’s direct lobbying efforts led the de Blasio administration to drop his campaign promise to end the firm’s city subsidies. The company’s decision to give unionized employees — about half of its workforce — a 20 percent raise over the next three years apparently led Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen to agree to stop pushing back against the project. Mayoral spokesman Wiley Norvell also said City Hall doesn’t have the leverage to stop the project.

FreshDirect declined to be interviewed for this article, but provided a written statement. Launched in 2002, FreshDirect now operates in five states. The company said that after 12 years in Queens, they need to relocate in order to continue to grow the business and better serve customers. They say the move will create about 1,000 new jobs, many of which will go to Bronx residents, and that working with Bronx-based vendors has yielded over $16 million for local businesses.

“The new facility is being designed to be an efficient and environmentally friendly operation,” said the company. Operations are currently divided into three locations, and consolidation in the Bronx will significantly reduce overall carbon footprint, according to the statement. Additionally, deliveries from the new site will make immediate use of the Bruckner expressway, allowing most of the vehicles to bypass the closest residential neighborhoods.

“We are committed to continuing to identify steps that we can take to minimize our impact on the environment — from food sourcing to packaging to our fleet,” wrote FreshDirect. “We chose this site in the Bronx because of its convenience for our nearly 2,500 employees, nearly 20 percent of whom live in the Bronx, as well as the excellent transportation access.”

FreshDirect has promised to have an all-electric trucking fleet within five years of moving to the Bronx, but that is also a non-binding gesture. After Superstorm Sandy, the company replaced many of its trucks with similar diesel versions, leaving community members skeptical.

On The Waterfront

Even with the backlash raised by SBU and other community groups, the new FreshDirect facility is still supported by many. A lawsuit seeking to halt the project was recently dismissed and the state’s economic development agency has voted to approve the project’s financing.

FreshDirect will be a good neighbor to the people of this borough.

“FreshDirect will be a good neighbor to the people of this borough, and we look forward to their relocation,” John DeSio, communications director for the Office of the Bronx Borough President, said. Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. is a longtime supporter of the relocation, and has openly disagreed with Johnson. In June 2013, Johnson accused Diaz of booting him from the borough’s Community Board 1 for his open disapproval of the deal.

With Johnson no longer on the board, Desio said that “it is worth noting that Bronx Community Board 1, where the project is located, overwhelmingly supports the project.”

DeSio said that with the relocation to the Bronx, Governor Andrew Cuomo and former Mayor Bloomberg saw an opportunity to utilize an “unused parcel of industrial land” to preserve 2,000 existing jobs in the city while creating 1,000 new jobs in the Bronx. He also said FreshDirect has already addressed many of the criticisms that were made when they announced their move through hiring initiatives for local residents, adding service to the entire borough, efforts to expand services to those who receive government assistance to buy food, and the new contract with unionized workers.

The borough has plans for housing, commercial space, and parks along sections of the Bronx waterfront — just not in the area around the Bronx Kill waterfront where FreshDirect is proposing to relocate. DeSio mentioned the Special Harlem River Waterfront District, a mile or so up the west side of the borough’s waterfront. In announcing the plan, Diaz said it would lead to development similar to the Brooklyn Bridge Park.

The proposed site of the FreshDirect facility is part of the Harlem River Yards, land that is owned by the New York State Department of Transportation, but leased for 99 years to Harlem River Yard Ventures (HRYV), part of the Galesi Group. The area is a key component of a long-term goal of bringing more railroad freight service to the area to reduce regional traffic congestion on all the bridges and highways. This intermodal freight transport has not yet occurred and FreshDirect’s relocation is another indicator that the realtor has other priorities.

Johnson is not the only one proposing a large project with such local emphasis. The South Bronx Greenway is part of a city-led initiative to create links between the waterfront and Bronx residents. This 2006 initiative includes the Randall’s Island Connector — a pedestrian and bike pathway leading from the South Bronx to the 400-plus acres of recreational facilities on nearby Randall’s Island. Launched in December 2013, the project is on track to be completed early next year according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC).

“The Randall’s Island Connector will provide South Bronx residents and visitors with new opportunities on the waterfront and bring them closer to the many amenities offered on Randall’s Island,” said EDC spokesman Ian Fried in a statement earlier this summer.

The bridge is located several blocks from any subway stations in an area controlled by HRYV along the Bronx Krill waterway. After much consternation over whether HRYV would give up land in their lease for the bridge, they eventually agreed to an easement to allow for its construction.

“There’s no rebuild New York happening here,” said Johnson at the site of the proposed FreshDirect facility. The rush of overhead cars muffled his voice as he spoke. A few blocks away the smell of the waste transfer station wafted into the air.

“We have the largest maritime industrial area in the city. The other supposed working waterfronts have been de-zoned and they’ve started making waterfront parks out of them and increasing quality of life. You create jobs by creating green space because that’s where people go and recreate.”

© 2005-2014 Center for American Progress Action Fund