I completely agree. Rewriting a system on the fly is absolutely going to fail. There are no requirements and without the domain knowledge, there is no way that anything could be completed correctly in any reasonable time. This is a project that should have been scheduled years ago.

Some level of technical debt will exist in every organization. The problem is that NJ never had prioritized this work and now they have an emergency and they are looking for volunteers. They should absolutely should be paying for this work.