Two hundred people came out through street flooding and rain for Comptroller Scott Stringer’s Sandy Oversight Town Hall atBreezy Point’s Colony Theater.They came from Breezy Point, Neponsit, Howard Beach, Broad Channel, FarRockaway, Hamilton Beach and even Red Hook and Canarsie. They drove and walked through flooded roads and rain that poured down so loudly that it sometimes drowned out the evening’s speakers. More than 200 people crowded into the Colony Theater in Breezy Point for a Sandy Oversight Town Hall hosted by NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer.
Stringer said he was there to listen. He brought along five of his deputies to address the numerous problems residents brought up. Assemblyman Philip Goldfeder and Senator Joseph Addabbo also attended.
Things, Springer noted, were not working. Speaking about Build It Back, for instance, he said, “This is a program that has generated more than 100 million pieces of paper.”
Stringer promised swift action. Residents fromRockaway, Broad Channel, Queens andBrooklyn promised to hold him to that task.“As we speak,” he said, “only six houses in all of Queens have begun to rebuild.”
Underlining his office’s power to audit many areas and make things work better, Stringer said, “I could audit from the Municipal Building in downtown Manhattan, but I am not going to get the whole story like that.”
A long line of residents, business owners, community leaders and others stepped up to the mike and made sure he got that story.
As one man said, after 18 months since the hurricane “Enough is enough already. Please help us.”
“The only thing they don’t have yet is my death certificate,” Tom O’Keefe said, holding up a thick blue folder of papers from Build It Back. “That’s just this. I have about 26 pounds of paper from SBA and FEMA.”
Build It Back, SBA and FEMA brought out the majority of complaints.
“My daughter’s (Rockaway) home was leveled, it was destroyed,” one man noted. “Along with her husband and two toddlers, she is still living with me in Brooklyn, and paying her mortgage, her water bill, her real estate taxes and now $1,600 in DEC fines. We have used up our personal resources.”
There were tales of lost forms, numerous re-filings, missing signatures, cancelled appointments and sudden changes in procedures. With so much personal information that has simply disappeared, the issue of identity theft also came up.
Insurance companies also came under fire. One woman detailed how she was told that the insurance adjuster who approved her settlement had gone missing. Then she was told he was on his deathbed.
NYC Parks’ spending priorities were also taken to task, with one speaker saying, “So we didn’t need homes, we didn’t need a boardwalk. We need $20 million lifeguard shacks!”
Even though the Comptroller promised swift action, there was still a strong sense of ‘wait and see’ in the crowd.
“I respect that everyone says this is a new administration. But we are now 18 months from the storm,”Rockaway Civic Association president Noreen Ellis noted. “Every dollar that you are allowing to be paid out (unwisely) is preventing people from getting back into their homes.”
When Stringer promised he would use his authority as Comptroller to wade into the problems Ellis said “We will hold you to that task.”
Stringer replied, “I don’t doubt it.”
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