Audit shedding light on NC disaster-response failures set to release July 1

There are still many unanswered questions about why the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency (NCORR) ended up over $300 million in the hole while tasked with building homes for victims of Hurricanes Florence and Matthew in eastern North Carolina.

The office was created in 2018 by Democratic former Gov. Roy Cooper to assist in the rebuilding process following the hurricanes, but its ongoing failures with financial mismanagement have created a backlog of people waiting to have their homes repaired or rebuilt.

Nearly a decade later, over 750 homeowners are still awaiting a home to go “home” to.

Four state government operations hearings over the past few years, with the last in January, have also generated very few answers, often following a cycle of “wash, rinse, repeat,” with asking the same questions and getting the same answers from NCORR officials.

State Auditor Dave Boliek is hoping to change that.

A new audit will examine past mistakes and how to avoid them going forward in terms of spending money in response to disasters.

In a recent exclusive interview, he told Carolina Journal that the ultimate result shouldn’t be pointing fingers and placing blame, but examining and giving a full accounting of how the money is being spent.

“What kind of return on investment did taxpayers get on that money?” Boliek said. “How do we operate moving forward so that we don’t find ourselves back in a situation where a new executive director of a disaster relief agency is sitting in front of the Joint Oversight Committee asking for $300 million to fill a hole that the General Assembly believed was filled with the first appropriation. We need to prevent that from happening because it’s really hard, I think, for everyday North Carolinians, and quite frankly, hard for me, to really wrap my arms around what $300 million really is. That’s a tremendous amount of money.”

To put that number into context, he said that his office’s current budget is $26.5 million.

“I can tell you the goal is best practices, and how do we need to do this moving forward, and if we can’t deliver that from the state auditor’s office, I don’t feel like we’re doing our job,” Boliek told CJ. “We have progress meetings on our NCORR audit team every week and sometimes twice a week. What are we doing? Where are we on the data collection? Where are we on our crunching of the numbers, and where are we in terms of being able to give a full picture result? So, it’s been a step-by-step process, and it’s been very, very productive.”

So much so that he said that his office will be able to meet the July 1 deadline of when the audit is due.  

“Very confident that we will be able to shine a light not only on how the money was spent but give some direction and some solid common-sense processes and procedures of how we need to manage these dollars, large sums of money,” Boliek said. “Our legislature, for example, worked really hard in creating the rainy-day fund, and then it rained. So it’s time to use the money, and that has been hard-saved money. Individual taxpayers and citizens and people out here save money, and you bank money, and you invest money, and you got that money. And then when you pull that money out of savings to spend it on an emergency, you’re glad you had it, but you’re also cost conscious of how you’re spending it.”

Boliek said that the same needs to be done in terms of how money is spent when it comes to disasters in the state, like asking for quotes or estimates from different providers or companies before “throwing money at the problem.”

Boliek’s office has also been keeping an eye on the Governor’s Recovery Office for Western North Carolina (GROW NC), which Stein created as one of his first executive orders on his first day in office.

GROW NC was created to help with Hurricane Helene recovery in western North Carolina.

There have been mixed results so far.

At a March Governmental Operations Subcommittee hearing, legislators expressed doubt over leaders’ plans to quickly and efficiently aid hurricane victims, and urged Stein’s officials to clearly communicate their needs so the General Assembly can leverage its power to aid in recovery efforts. 

Rep. Brenden Jones, R-Columbus, called for regular updates on accountability, requesting weekly or bi-weekly reports to ensure their team receives the necessary support.

“This gives us the opportunity to be on sort of the front end of a disaster response,” Boliek told CJ. “So we’re tracking dollars that are spent by GROW NC, and auditing standards for us to release an audit would require quite a bit of work, but we are going to issue some special reports along the way to inform the taxpayers and policymakers in the legislature and in the executive branch on exactly where money and how money is being spent.”