Tillis, Republicans, blast slow hurricane recovery, promise bill, hearings

Local governments would deal directly with the federal government on multi-million-dollar disaster recovery programs under a bill U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis promised Wednesday, side-stepping the state if it falls behind on spending goals.

Tillis, R-NC, also said his bill will seek out inefficiencies on the federal side of a lengthy approval process, saying he wants to "eliminate every hurdle that we possibly can."

But most of Tillis' ire over North Carolina's slow recovery spending, and that of statehouse Republicans with him at Wednesday's press conference, was focused on Gov. Roy Cooper's Administration, and General Assembly leaders said they would restart legislative hearings into the state's recovery efforts.

"We feel abandoned," said state Rep. Brenden Jones, R-Columbus. "Is it incompetence? Is it just not a willingness to help us? I don't know."

Jones said this wasn't a Republican issue, or a Democratic one. But there were no Democratic legislators at the press conference. Afterward, the Cooper Administration took a shot back at Tillis, who is up for re-election next year in what will be one of the country's hottest Senate races. The administration also questioned whether dozens of local governments would have the expertise on hand to navigate a complex federal program.

"Governor Cooper has and will continue to set politics aside to do what’s right by storm survivors and it’s shameful that Senator Tillis and Republican leaders in Raleigh can’t do the same," Cooper spokeswoman Sadie Weiner said in a release.

Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, said during the press conference that, "it's clear that in North Carolina the disaster recovery process is broken."

North Carolina's slow spending is no secret, and it has only been an issue in one federal recovery program that totals several hundred million in a $3 billion effort. This CDBG-DR money is typically the last money spent in a disaster, and it's used to rebuild homes and get life back to normal.

Legislators from badly flooded areas said they're constantly hearing from people who are still out of their homes and waiting on money.

"Getting these monies in the right places ... it's been far too long," State Sen. Danny Britt, R-Robeson, said Wednesday.

It takes the federal government more than a year, many times, to work out the spending rules in this program after Congress approves this money, and the state more time after that to get the money rolling. North Carolina's efforts were complicated by a departmental move under former Gov. Pat McCrory: Management of this program shifted from the state Department of Commerce to Emergency Management.

Officials familiar with the program left. Then Hurricane Matthew hit. Then Hurricane Florence hit. Of the $226 million North Carolina's version of this program has in hand, about $16.3 million had been spent by the end of July, according to a rundown from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

HUD considers North Carolina a "slow spender," along with about 60 percent of the other grantees it's tracking across the country in this program.

Cooper's office said Wednesday that, if you include money committed as well as spent, the total rises to $93 million. And this is just part of the overall disaster spending after Matthew and Florence, which amounts to roughly $2.8 billion spent in state and federal funds.

Partly because of slow spending in the CDBG-DR program, the Cooper Administration established a new office: The N.C. Office of Recovery and Resiliency. In January, the state brought in Laura Hogshead, a former COO and deputy chief of staff at HUD, to run the new office.

House Majority Leader John Bell, whose Wayne County district was hard hit by the storms, acknowledged this effort Wednesday.

"Now it's time to step up the game and get it done," he said.

Another $168 million just became available to North Carolina this month from the CDBG-DR program. It took the federal government roughly 18 months after Congress approved this money to publish the 125 pages of spending rules the state needed to move forward.

The state is waiting on those rules for another $336 million in from this program, which Congress approved after Florence last October.

"Unfortunately, because Senator Tillis either doesn’t have much sway in Washington or because he cares more about his re-election campaign than doing his job, North Carolina doesn’t yet have one single penny of CDBG-DR federal housing money that’s specifically for Hurricane Florence survivors," Weiner said in her statement Wednesday.

Congress has already approved that money and more, though, and the ball is in HUD's court. Tillis said that, if North Carolina's a slow spender, it leaves him less leverage to ask for more money.

Tillis said his "Ensuring Disaster Recovery for Local Communities Act" will lay task the U.S. Government Accountability Office with finding ways to expedite federal disaster programs. It would also set "tangible spending goals" for the states and let cities and counties ask HUD to send the money directly to them if the state fails to hit those goals for18 months.

If they don't have the capacity to administer the program, HUD would assign someone with expertise to help, Tillis' office said. The bill would be retroactive, potentially allowing counties and cities to take over current state recovery programs in North Carolina.

Tillis said the bill isn't complete yet, and he promised other details in the coming weeks. He said the proposal wouldn't necessarily cut the state out of this program, but give local governments more options.

"We think that with a better link to the local governments we can knock down some of those barriers," he said.

Tillis' office said the bill is based in part on a legislative review that found spending problems with the Cooper Administration's disaster grant program.

That final report paraphrased unnamed local government staff as saying "they could have implemented CDBG-DR themselves, particularly as they felt they had more knowledge of CDBG" and that there was more institutional memory on the program at the city and county level.

NC Emergency Management Director Michael Sprayberry, whose agency includes the Office of Recovery and Resiliency, said in a statement Wednesday that the state doesn't need to "reinvent the wheel, but must continue to work with our state and federal partners to remove unnecessary red tape."

"We have learned from experience that many local governments lack the staff expertise and capacity to administer hundreds of millions of dollars of highly regulated federal aid," Sprayberry said. "The need for this expertise led to the creation of the NC Office of Resiliency and Recovery. In only eight months of operation, North Carolina has made significant progress in building an organization to efficiently get resources to the people who need them."