Ten years after Superstorm Sandy ravaged New York City, it stands as an example not only of the vulnerability of our public and private infrastructure to what is an ever more destructive climate, but our failure to have a swift and effective government response to looming crises.
That much has been made clear in Comptroller Brad Lander’s recent report on resiliency spending in the post-Sandy era, which found that $4 billion of the federal government’s $15 billion in grants to shore up our defenses against similar catastrophes remains unspent. That’s atop hundreds of millions more in city capital spending.
This is partly a practical failure and partly a conceptual one. On the former front, the capital project process as a whole is a bureaucratic morass of pointless pitfalls and mounting costs, one that the Adams administration should double down on plans to streamline. The irony is thick when environmental reviews endlessly delay environmental necessities.
