By Scott Gurian, Eve Troeh and Janet Babin for NJ Spotlight

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.

Read the rest of the article here.