Why do I wonder if Chris Christie will ever be held accountable for the appearance of using our federal tax dollars as his own political slush fund? There is a great deal of evidence that he is using over a billion dollars in Sandy funds as punishment or reward money for his political agenda. We are all weary of the corruption of those not accountable — Wall Street, Congress, and now Christie.  Christie’s oversight appointees for the hundreds of millions of dollars of Sandy relief have been giving NJ and us the finger, by not attending any accountability meetings and providing no accounting of how the money is being spent. Now the company hired to oversee the money, HGI, is not accountable either.

It is common knowledge that Christie used Sandy funds to produce tourism ads that starred him and his family, this for an ad agency with the highest bid. By all appearances, it was a campaign ad, including Christie and his family. Christie spent $2 million of Sandy money for the ad last year before Christie was elected to a second term as governor.

It was bad enough that Dawn Zimmer, Mayor of Hoboken, NJ,  revealed that the Christie officials suggested that she would get more for Sandy relief if Hoboken approved a property deal Christie wanted, but we also learn that it appears to be a general practice for Christie’s people to use the Sandy federal funds to reward or punish officials in cities stricken by Sandy. Two cities, relatively untouched by Sandy, with mayors who endorsed Christie, shared Sandy funds. Six million dollars went to a senior complex in Bellville, approved before Sandy hit and having nothing to do with Sandy’s damage. It was also revealed that $4.8 million in Sandy funds was given to a luxury project, Baraie Development’s skyscraper in New Brunswick. Again, it was approved before Sandy and had nothing to do with Sandy’s fury.

We also learn that Hammerman and Gainer (HGI), a contractor doing the bulk of the Hurricane Sandy reconstruction work, was quietly fired by Gov. Chris Christie last December. HGI was hired and paid $68 million last May to oversee $780 million in Sandy fund distribution to victims of the hurricane. They were fired quietly for being inefficient and unhelpful, and for losing paperwork. Little information was available from the Christie administration, one which should be eager to lay blame for many failures to distribute relief money to many victims who have been waiting over a year and who have received ambiguous, sometimes outright false, information from HGI and Christie representatives. Incidentally, HGI got a reward of $10.5 million for its incompetence. No explanation has been given. It was revealed later by Fair Share Housing Center that 80% of Sandy victims who were rejected were later deemed eligible.

One would expect the Christie administration to celebrate HGI’s incompetence as an excuse for Christie’s miserable record in distributing Sandy funds to those suffering storm damage. The lack of information coming from the Christie people was clear when Marc Ferzan, a Christie spokesman, answered pointed inquiries about HGI, saying, “Their services were not needed” and that the Christie people would distribute Sandy funds themselves. However, there is no explanation about claims not being processed or when and if funds will be forthcoming.

There is still some $1.4 billion dollars in federal Sandy funds to be given to worthy Sandy victims, but no answers about their disbursement seem to come from the Christie people. Representative Frank Pallone, the New Jersey representative in the US House of representatives said, that reluctant conservative representatives in the House can rightly say they were right about not wanting to risk putting federal money into the hands of the Christie administration

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