Governor Christie: Remarks on New Jersey Blizzard (Part 1)

Governor Christie signs letter to FEMA requesting disaster aid for New Jersey blizzard. December 31, 2010. (Transcript Below)

Governor Christie: Good morning, and I wanted to come here this morning to Monmouth County to sign our application to the President and to FEMA for relief given the storm that occurred this past week. Our application as you'll see later on when it's distributed applies to 13 counties in New Jersey which under the FEMA criteria qualify for consideration for extraordinary relief. There will be Bergen, Cape May, Cumberland, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Ocean, Somerset, Union, Atlantic, Monmouth, Morris, and Passaic, and that's based upon as we've gone through before earlier in the last winter criteria regarding snowfall and the amount of money expended to deal with the disaster by each municipality. Now we've already been in touch with FEMA. FEMA will be on the ground here because we've been able to make our application today. FEMA will be on the ground here on Monday to begin their damage assessment, and so we'll hopefully be able to move rapidly through the process of getting a damage assessment done and then getting federal reimbursements to the municipalities and counties across the state who have incurred extraordinary expense with regard to dealing with the storm. First and foremost I want to thank the two gentlemen standing behind me, Colonel Fuentes of the State Police and Commissioner Simpson of the DOT. This has been an extraordinary five days for them. They have been literally on the front lines of this, out on the road together dealing with the various issues that have cropped up across the state which I'll detail for you in a moment but these are the type of really extraordinary leaders that I'm proud to have as members of my cabinet, and when you have a crisis like this there's not any one person who can deal with this crisis. There are literally hundreds of people across government who have to deal with it but they need to have that kind of leadership and the leadership on the ground that Commissioner Simpson and Colonel Fuentes showed over the course of the last five days were extraordinary and I thanked them both personally a number of times over the phone and then in person again this morning, and I wanted to thank them again publicly for what they've done on behalf of the people of the state. I also want to thank the Senate President. The Senate President did an exceptional job as well in being able to provide the on the ground leadership that's required by our constitution given that myself and the Lieutenant Governor were out of the state at the time. Senator Sweeney and I consulted on all of the significant decisions that needed to be made during the period of my time out of the state. We never once disagreed on what needed to be done. We spoke with each other before any decisions were made. We were both briefed by a, you know, what seemed like an every hour or every other hour basis by either Chief of Staff Bagger or Chief Counsel Chiesa on the issues that were going on in addition to the regular conference calls we had with all the emergency management folks that went on from Christmas Eve all the way through this past Wednesday, and so I want to thank the Senate President. He once again has displayed himself to be someone who is putting getting things done ahead of partisanship, and while other members of his party decided to use this as an opportunity to once again bang partisan drums, the Senate President decided as I did to put the people of the state of New Jersey first and not any partisan considerations, and so I thank Senator Sweeney for grabbing the baton for those five days and for doing it in an exemplary fashion, and I thank him also for the great spirit of nonpartisanship that he brought to this task because these are not Republican or Democratic storms. They are storms that affect all the people of our state and they need the leadership that everybody provided across state government. Lastly I want to mention just a few folks too before I get into some other issues. You know everybody who was involved at DOT did an extraordinary job. There was Bill Carter, Jim Hogan, John O'Hern from the New Jersey Turnpike Authority who is here with us, John Cifelli from the Turnpike Authority who really captained the real cleanup that needed to be done here in Monmouth County which was the epicenter of what went on in the storm. I want to thank those folks in particular for their hard work, and the folks at OEM at the State Police who under Colonel Fuentes' leadership worked as a team with DOT and the rest of the administration to get things done. Let me just give you some perspective on this. 2200 different pieces of equipment were deployed during this storm. So that you know, we started to discuss this in earnest—the State Police began on the 22nd of December...