Taxpayer dollars poured in - nearly $3.3 million. But not for what you might imagine. The U.S. government agreed to repair tennis courts, fix a gazebo, patch boardwalks, replace street signs, pay for landscaping, buy tourism brochures, and rebuild beaches.
And the victims?
Records show that there were no injuries, deaths or destroyed homes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) budgeted more for paperwork and administration than it did for aid to individuals.
"We didn't ask a lot of questions for why we got that disaster [declaration]," said Joe Painting, a state emergency management official.
Nor, apparently, was New Jersey as desperate as federal officials had been led to believe. The state finished the year with a $1 billion surplus - enough to give New Jersey property owners rebates averaging $120.
By comparison, it would have cost the state's eight million residents just 41 cents each to have paid for the storm damage themselves.
An aberration?
Hardly.
Thanks to the largesse of Washington, an ever-expanding definition of federal emergencies, and a legacy of risky building along the coast, disasters have become a growth industry. Among the beneficiaries are exclusive beach towns and resorts with some of the lowest tax rates in America.
Many use taxpayer-funded disaster relief as a form of insurance for their municipal property. They carry little or no coverage, relying on federal funds to cover storm damage, including ruined Christmas decorations, flooded tennis courts and snapped flagpoles.
The average number of annual federal disaster declarations has more than tripled - from 13.4 in the 1950s to 41 in the 1990s. The number peaked in 1996, an election year, at 74.
