Rebuilding with Resilience

Regional coordination — Regional coordination also poses a challenge to implementation of the project. The
grantee must coordinate a broad diversity of small jurisdictions across a large geographic area. New Jersey is a
“home rule” state and the Meadowlands area has fourteen individual jurisdictions, which presents challenges for
implementing a regional approach to reducing flood risks. While the design team had hoped that the existence
of the Meadowlands Commission (a regional entity) would present a vehicle for coordinating across local
governments in the region, regional coordination has remained a challenge. The Commission does not supersede
local authority and, thus, coordination among the individual jurisdictions is still needed to develop a viable project.
Land-use changes — The proposal also called for upzoning and resilient mixed-use or multi-family
development projects around the Meadowband. The proposal envisioned that upzoning could generate property
tax revenues to support future phases of work and justify transit investments. However, these proposed land-use
changes are not being pursued for a couple of reasons. First, in New Jersey local governments are delegated the
powers to adopt land-use regulations. As a result, implementation of any of the land-use measures included in the
proposal would require local action. In addition, members of the community were opposed to increases in density
in this region, which has made these zoning changes and this source of potential revenue infeasible.
Meadowlands Before and After
This picture and rendering illustrate how a berm system would be integrated with wetland restoration projects to enhance flood resilience and the
land-use changes called for by the proposal.
Procurement — State procurement rules slowed the grantee’s work at the outset of the process. The State
of New Jersey has time-consuming state procurement rules that require approvals from several different
government agencies, and it takes between 8 to 12 months for an agency to accept bids on a contract and select a
contractor. 7 As a result, it took a year from HUD’s allocation of funding (October 2014) for the grantee to hire a
contractor who could start design, feasibility analyses, and environmental review (October 2015). Although state
procurement rules are put in place to ensure fiscally sound use of public dollars, lengthy procurement processes
can pose particular challenges for implementing disaster-recovery projects where federal funds must be obligated
and expended under quick timelines. Although HUD authorized the use of non-competitive processes (i.e. “solesource”
contracts) to streamline procurement for implementation of the RBD projects, 8 New Jersey rules are more
limited. In order to justify the award of a sole-source contract, the grantee had to show that no other qualified
vendor could provide the services under New Jersey procurement rules. 9
76 Chapter 6: New Meadowlands | Rebuilding with Resilience GEORGETOWN CLIMATE CENTER