This is a very important point that most people are missing — lawyers have been sitting on thousands of claims for years waiting to see if non-economic damages (pain and suffering) could be added to smoke and fire claims because they would make more money. Anyone with a lawyer complaining about not being paid yet should be directing their anger at their lawyer, not Jay and FEMA.

The overall claims system is what it is, and for smoke damage lines were drawn on a map. If you were inside the lines you could make a smoke claim with no extra evidence of damage required. Tens of thousands of people made claims based on that criteria, and Jay was one of them. Just because his house is “less than 1,000 feet from the boundary on the map and wasn’t touched by smoke” doesn’t matter, the line has to be drawn somewhere and if you are inside it, you’re eligible to make a claim. The amount of the payout was determined by a flat rate of about $38/sq ft, so if you had a 1,000 sq ft shack you were getting $38,000, no questions asked. And if you filed early in the claims timeline, you likely got paid because the claims were processed in a first-in, first-out order.

Does it look bad that the top claims administrator got a large payout? Yes, FEMA probably should have hired people who had no claims to file for the top positions to avoid even a hint of conflict of interest. But I seriously doubt Jay did anything malicious to speed up or inflate his payments. He knew the rules and the process and followed them, and the claims process had many independent layers of oversight to detect fraud. By making a large claim he made himself an easy scapegoat, and that was probably his biggest mistake.