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— New York City taxpayers paid nearly twice as much as their counterparts in New Jersey to clean up the mountains of debris left by Hurricane Sandy, documents show.

New York City’s cost for the Army Corps of Engineers was about $100 per cubic yard — which is about the size of a dishwasher — significantly higher than the $56 rate most towns in New Jersey paid to the private contractor handpicked by Gov. Chris Christie through a no-bid contract, according to records and correspondence.

Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for Christie, said the cost gap shows criticism of the governor for New Jersey’s post-Sandy cleanup price tag was "exaggerated, misplaced and, frankly, myopic."

But New York’s high cost was driven largely by how far the city had to transport its waste — and what it took to get it to a landfill in the Finger Lakes region west of Syracuse, according to Col. John Pilot, who headed the city’s cleanup efforts.

In New York, the Corps employed barges to haul much of the debris up the Hudson River to Albany before it was put on trucks and transported 185 miles to the Seneca Landfill in Waterloo. The total trip from New York City was about 300 miles.

In New Jersey, most of the debris was hauled less than 15 miles, ensuring the lowest rates in the state’s contract with the Florida-based AshBritt. If New Jersey was forced to haul its debris nearly 300 miles, the costs would have skyrocketed, according to the state contract.

Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen), who is part of a legislative committee investigating New Jersey’s contract, said the disparity does nothing to assuage her concerns about what the state paid.

"There’s the world according to Chris Christie, then there’s the world," Weinberg said. "If you compare apples to apples, you’d be spending more money with AshBritt."

Weinberg noted that Christie refused to consider less expensive options and several towns that decided against using AshBritt did the job for less. "They can try to rewrite history, but you can’t change the facts," she said.

Christie awarded a no-bid contract to AshBritt despite warnings from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that the decision could threaten federal reimbursements if the agency determines the firm’s rates are higher than the market average. Christie was advised to choose AshBritt by former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a close friend and the founding partner in a lobbying firm employed by AshBritt.

New York had the option of hiring its own private contractor as well, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, decided to go with the Army Corps of Engineers to handle the post disaster cleanup. The Corps has competitively bid contracts in place that it activates during disasters.

Jo-Ellen Darcy, head of the Corps. told U.S. Rep. Alan Nunnelee (R-Miss.) in an April 2 letter that it cost $100 per cubic yard to pick up, haul and dispose of debris in New York City. The Corps has been paid about $177 million for disposing nearly 1 million cubic yards of debris — which includes about $77 million for other tasks such as helping to demolish some homes or removing tree stumps, according to a report last week in the New York Times.

Officials from Ocean County told investigators from the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee that the same work was being done by AshBritt for about $56 per cubic yard. The latest national average is $46 per cubic yard, according to the New York Times.

AshBritt was hired by 53 New Jersey towns and collected and disposed of about 3 million cubic yards of debris, at a total cost of about $150 million, the firm’s CEO recently told a legislative panel.

Drewniak said the administration initially considered the Army Corps because of its track record but was eventually scared off because of its reputation for higher costs.

"Ultimately, we chose well with an experienced national firm that did the job fast and efficiently for New Jersey towns that chose to use it — and at roughly half the cost of the Army Corps contract in New York," Drewniak said.

The letter from Nunnelee, who was a Mississippi state senator when Barbour was governor of that state, was provided to The Star-Ledger by the Christie administration. The administration began making the argument that it decided to go with AshBritt because it was cheaper than the Army Corps after it released the letter.

Pilot said clearing debris in the nation’s largest city presented unprecedented challenges, from figuring out where to dump it to dealing with rising fuel costs as trucks trudged through congested roads. He said there aren’t any landfills in or near the city where they could dump the debris.

"We had a lot of logistical problems to deal with when hauling, and that sometimes doubled or tripled the costs," Pilot said.

Much of the debris hauled by AshBritt in New Jersey was transported less than 15 miles, which assured towns paid the lowest possible rates in the contract, according to invoices obtained under the state Open Public Records Act.

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The AshBritt contract included steep escalators when the debris had to be hauled more than 15 miles. For example, AshBritt charged towns $21.25 per cubic yard when it hauled debris less than 15 miles, but that rate ballooned to $110 per cubic yard if hauled more than 320 miles, according to the contract.

Pilot could not say specifically how much of the $100 per cubic yard cost in New York was related to transportation, nor would he discuss New Jersey’s cleanup costs.

The costs of debris removal in the two states has caught the attention of U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a veteran fiscal watchdog. He was heavily critical of the cleanup costs associated with Hurricane Katrina, and he’s afraid history may be repeating itself.

"We will continue to carefully look at the cost of debris removal over the next few months to ensure taxpayer funds are spent properly," Coburn said. "If the final costs are as high as the Army Corps is initially reporting, it will be essential the agency be fully transparent about why the costs rose so high."

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