Eckert Consulting has been a primary member of a disaster recovery consulting team supporting the City of New York (City) in their $11B Hurricane Sandy recovery effort.  In this role, Eckert Consulting has provided FEMA policy issue management services to the City’s on their most high-stakes and complex FEMA PA issues relating to Hurricane Sandy.

 Here are some examples of the successful Hurricane Sandy efforts that were spearheaded by Eckert Consulting:

• FDNY Alarm Boxes
  Eckert Consulting oversaw an effort to claim damages to the Fire Department of New York’s outdated underground copper wire communication system that resulted in $160M of Alternative Project funding for FDNY.  Eckert Consulting created a successful FEMA request package that allowed the FEMA funding to be used to fund a new city-wide FDNY state of the art fiber optic network that is currently being constructed.

• Hazard Mitigation Cost Reasonableness
  Eckert Consulting led an effort to negotiate with FEMA a resolution to a major issue with cost reasonableness analyses being performed multiple times on the City’s Hurricane Sandy mitigation projects which resulted in originally approved mitigation projects being determined ineligible after design work was completed.  FEMA conceded that more than one cost reasonableness analysis was not needed if the City designed and built a project that met the intent of the originally approved mitigation project.  It is estimated that this ruling allowed the City of New York to preserve $1.5B of mitigation project funding.

• Compliance Issues Related to Procurement and Contracting
  Eckert Consulting provided numerous analyses and position papers for procurement and contracting issues.  Eckert Consulting has been the leader in resolving the most complex and fiscally critical compliance issue scenarios for the City of New York Hurricane Sandy Projects.

• Queens Rockaway Boardwalk
  Eckert Consulting lead the effort of creating a position paper that successfully defended a $300M construction contract against a federal audit finding that a fee structure within the contract was the FEMA prohibited Cost-Plus-Percentage-of-Cost fee structure.

• New York Aquarium Hazard Mitigation
  Eckert Consulting lead an effort in attaining FEMA approval for a $70M flood wall to protect the entire New York Aquarium campus from future flood events.

• NYPD Vehicle Usage
  Eckert Consulting created a position paper that successfully argued that FEMA should pay $20M for the New York Police Department vehicle use based on an estimation methodology and not on actual vehicle usage logs due to the extraordinary administrative burden that using the vehicle usage logs would have created.