Sandy fixer nets new gig
Amy Peterson — the head of the city’s delay-plagued and overbudget Build it Back program — is taking on a new job as the director of the Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development, the city said.
Peterson will continue to lead Building it Back and the Mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery as the program enters what the mayor’s office called the “final stages” of Hurricane Sandy recovery, the city said.
“When I was elected, the Build it Back program suffered from bureaucratic entanglement, and thousands of New Yorkers were left to fend for themselves. Then Amy Peterson took over, streamlined the program and people finally began getting the help they needed to recover,” said Mayor de Blasio said.
Hizzoner said Peterson, who took the helm of the troubled program in 2014, had “nearly worked herself out of a job,” with the city finally closing out cases from the 2012 storm. Her new gig will involve connecting New Yorkers to jobs — something she did for 1,600 Sandy victims during her tenure at Build it Back through the Sandy Recovery Workforce1 programs, which trained people hit by Sandy for construction jobs.
Peterson praised de Blasio’s vision of creating “the fairest big city in America.”
“I’m excited by the challenge that lies ahead and look forward to working with Deputy Mayor (Phillip) Thompson to build on these efforts and to continue helping New Yorkers find a pathway to the middle class,” she said.
As head of the program, Peterson often faced the ire of residents who were caught up in seemingly endless delays in construction and home elevations, and had to grapple with tremendous cost overruns that led the city to reach into other resiliency projects to fund the program.
Nearly six years after the storm — and after scores of homeowners simply quit the program — about 95% of the 8,300 residents who stuck with Build it Back are either back in their homes, have been reimbursed for repairs they made or have sold their homes to the city. According to City Hall, 99% of the construction projects managed directly by the city are now complete.
“I was in the trenches with her, so I think I have a really good perspective — and I think the world of her and the job she did,” Staten Island Borough President James Oddo, a Republican who in 2012 was a councilman representing the area of the borough hit hardest by the storm, told The News. “She was handed a nearly impossible task — she inherited a mess.”