This week, the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force released their report on the rebuilding effort, lessons learned, and recommendations for going forward. The task force, led by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, subtitled the report “Stronger Communities, A Resilient Region” and indeed that is the goal after any disaster. Make the affected area better and less vulnerable to future disasters. You can call it the “Six Million Dollar Man” approach, making communities better and stronger than they were before.

The hefty tome weighed in around 200 pages and while many of the observations and recommendations made good sense, it felt like there was still a lot to be done to ensure that both the recovery and future disaster planning are done right.

First the numbers. At $65.7 billion, Sandy is the second costliest storm in American history, a distant second to Katrina ($148.8 billion) but well outpacing third place Andrew ($44.8 billion, all 2013 dollars). Private insurance property claims are estimated to be $18.8 billion and federal flood insurance $6.7 billion. As of July, just over $4 billion of the more than $50 billion of Sandy supplemental appropriations has been spent, the vast majority by the Department of Homeland Security (which contains the Federal Emergency Management Agency). Another $5 billion has been obligated, which means the feds know where it is going, but the check hasn’t gone out yet. So there’s still a lot of work to be done.

There are a series of recommendations on targeting disaster related community development block grant funding ($16 billion total in the Sandy supplemental) more (but not exclusively) toward low to moderate income housing, which makes sense. Historically, lower income people are disproportionately affected by storms because they have less financial wherewithal to deal with the increased costs of alternative housing and job interruption. There are also recommendations on green and resilient rebuilding standards. And recommendations about how the feds, states, and locals should interact now and in the future. Good stuff.

The absence of one possible recommendation is a good thing. Some lawmakers have been loudly arguing to delay positive reforms in the federal flood insurance program. The program that is roughly $25 billion in debt to the Treasury. That only took in $3.6 billion in premium revenue in 2012. And where  roughly 20 percent of the policyholders pay less than half of what they would with truly risk based rates. Instead of delaying premium increases, the task force recommended figuring out ways to help the truly needy (means tested) pay their premiums.

Here’s the story: Under legislation adopted last summer some (roughly one third) of those subsidized policyholders would see their rates gradually increase to risk based rates. Others would see premiums gradually rise – or fall – as new flood rate maps are issued. This has led to claims that some policyholders premiums would go up from as little as less than $1,000 per year to more than $28,000. It’s hard to see that happening in too many cases because the maximum you can insure is $250,000 (plus $100,000 for contents) and simple math indicates that a premium that high would essentially mean expectation of a total loss every decade or so. There are some bigger problems with that property than just the insurance premium. Any reasonable solution to this problem would be contained within the program (probably through a policy surcharge), targeted (means tested), temporary (through the rate increase period), and would not alter the overall rate structure.

The task force ended the report by talking about transparency and data availability. If only there was some. While they noted that the public’s interest in tracking stimulus spending indicated a real thirst for following the money, there is precious little data provided to the public. To track Sandy spending we have had to rely on www.usaspending.gov and trust the government agencies to code their spending as Sandy related. Transparency delayed is too often transparency denied. The task force should err on the side of publishing the data and making it pretty later. The taxpayer deserves to know who is getting their money to buy what. The legislation opening the taxpayers’ wallet for this disaster passed seven months ago. The one year anniversary of the storm is around the corner. It’s time to let the public see how their investment is going.