The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection has spent more than $81 million of the money to close on nearly 400 homes.
In May 2013, just six months after the state had endured one of the most deadly and expensive storms in its history, the state launched the NJDEP Superstorm Sandy Blue Acres Buyout Program with a promise to spend $300 million in federal disaster recovery money, offering New Jersey homeowners the option to sell their Sandy-damaged homes at pre-storm values.
Two years later, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection has spent more than $81 million to close on nearly 400 homes.
Most of those homes, however, are inland and far from the heavily battered Jersey Shore, or the state's Delaware Bayshore in Cumberland County.
There are many reasons homeowners along the Shore have been excluded, DEP officials say. Chief among them is a lack of interest on the part of homeowners to sell their properties.
"We've been up and down the Shore," said DEP spokesman Bob Considine. "There was no interest. Or, if there was, it was one homeowner with a property assessed at $1 million."
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To meet the requirements for Blue Acres buyouts, residents had to be in flood-prone areas within a cluster of homeowners wishing to sell in the affected communities.
What the state found were groups of homeowners - mostly inland - who had been affected by flooding for years. Others sustained damage with every nor'easter.
As of Oct. 19, the DEP had closed on 392 homes in tidal areas like Sayreville, South River, Linden and Newark. Missing from the list are the Jersey Shore towns that Gov. Chris Christie said would be targeted by the DEP.
"It's a higher concentration of homes and it works out better for us to buy those," DEP Commissioner Bob Martin told NJ Advance Media.
South River
Homeowners like Jim Hutchison were more interested in the offer to sell their homes than homeowners at the Shore. His family grew weary of the rain long before Hurricane Sandy arrived.
Their home, about a quarter mile from South River, flooded once every six months to two years during the seven years they lived there.
Each heavy rainstorm, caused by high tides and full moons, hurricanes and nor'easters, brought water up through the floorboards and baseboards of the Hutchison home on Washington Street. Their streets filled with water, sometimes to the point where you couldn't see the parking meters anymore, he said.
And there was always that fear that it would happen again. "I was constantly concerned about an approaching nor'easter or a hurricane developing in the tropics and heading toward the East Coast of the United States," Hutchison said.
So he sold the family's home to the Blue Acres program, he said, because "You can't let that control your life." The house was demolished in July 2014.
Avon-by-the-Sea
Communities like Sea Bright, where dozens of homes, businesses and government buildings have been demolished because they were deemed unsalvageable after Sandy, Union Beach, Mantoloking, and the Ortley Beach section of Toms River, where many resident still don't have homes to which they can return, didn't ask for the Blue Acres money.
Avon-by-the-Sea did, however, inquire about the pot of cash. The community, which lost its boardwalk, had flooded streets and damaged homes following the October 2012 storm, inquired about Blue Acres.
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But once they learned that it required residents to sell their properties, borough officials quickly lost interest, said Steve Kegelman, the borough's deputy emergency management coordinator.
"It didn't fit," Kegelman said. "It didn't even seem to fit for us to go out and ask if people wanted it."
Residents and the borough were more interested in mitigation and rebuilding rather than selling, he said.
Cumberland County
Although nearly $220 million in state and federal money remain in the Blue Acres fund, DEP officials say they have no doubt they'll use all of it. There is no deadline to spend that money, and they say the buyout program is still in demand.
Some of that cash will be spent in Cumberland County, where projects are underway to revive the Delaware Bayshore following the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. Twelve buyouts totaling nearly $1.5 million have taken place in the county's Lawrence Township.
The DEP has not closed on any homes in the area, but that doesn't mean residents are not interested, says Meghan Wren, founder and executive director of Bayshore Center at Bivalve
Property owners on Money Island are planning their first meeting with DEP, Wren said.
"A number of residents have started the buyout procedure, as I understand it, and others are not interested," Wren said.
However, Wren said some elected officials are also not interested in the idea of buyouts, and "that makes the process thornier."
Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
MaryAnn Spoto may be reached at mspoto@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @MaryAnnSpoto. Find NJ.com on Facebook.