NC lawmakers kick off 2025 with focus on Helene recovery

North Carolina lawmakers returned to Raleigh Wednesday to discuss what’s next for the state’s ongoing response to Hurricane Helene damage in western North Carolina, and to grill state disaster recovery leaders.

Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s first official action after being sworn in this month was to sign several executive orders targeted at Helene relief. One order created a new state agency called GROW NC to handle the work, taking over for the Rebuild NC program that had drawn criticism for slow and over-budget recovery efforts under his Democratic predecessor, Roy Cooper.

The House Select Committee on Helene Recovery met Wednesday to hear an update from GROW NC’s leader, Matt Calabria, the former Wake County commissioner who was picked by Stein to lead the effort.

The committee, led by Reps. John Bell, R-Wayne, and Dudley Greene, R-McDowell, kicked off the efforts of the new legislative session to determine how much more to spend — and how to spend it — as western North Carolina continues reeling from what was the state’s deadliest and most economically damaging disaster.

"Recovery effort are very definitely active, and there's a lot of work for us to do," said Greene, a former McDowell County sheriff who has previously spoken about watching Helene floodwaters ravage his own property. He began Wednesday's meeting with a moment of silence for the 104 people who died in Helene "and the many who are still missing."

During the meeting, Calabria detailed how the state is prioritizing who to help first, by income level as well as geographic area. He said he plans to let agencies like the state's transportation and environmental departments mostly handle their own work without micromanagement, and to instead focus the GROW NC efforts on "driving the recovery, coordinating across agencies and tracking our progress."

Stein set up GROW NC to be smaller than other disaster recovery groups in the past, Calabria said, but that's by design. "We don't want to bog this down with thick layers of bureauracy," he said. "We want to move nimbly."

Another top Stein advisor on Helene recovery, Jonathan Krebs, told the committee there simply hasn't been enough money set aside for relief. He urged Republican state lawmakers to ask their GOP colleagues in Congress to push for more federal funding.

At the state level, Cooper had previously called for the legislature to set aside nearly $4 billion for Helene relief. So far, state lawmakers have spent just under $1 billion.

On Wednesday a western North Carolina Republican lawmaker, Haywood County Rep. Mark Pless, said he thought the state emergency management department had done a good job considering its limited resources. He urged Stein's advisors to continue regularly telling the legislature what they need, and how much it's going to cost.

"I don't want to hear what we're going to do, and then find out we have no money and we're not really doing anything," Pless said, adding: "I know it doesn't happen overnight, and I know it doesn't happen as quickly as it was destroyed. But so far we haven't moved the needle."

More oversight planned

On Thursday a legislative oversight committee led by state House and Senate Republicans is scheduled to hear testimony from the head of Rebuild NC under Cooper as well as two more of Stein’s top advisors for Helene relief efforts.

While there has been some partisan debate at the Republican-controlled state legislature over exactly how the state should handle Helene relief, there’s unanimous acknowledgment that whatever the state spends will pale in comparison to whatever the federal government ends up spending.

Drastic changes could be coming at the federal level. President Donald Trump visited western North Carolina last week and said he’s thinking of asking Congress to get rid of FEMA entirely. He floated the idea of a new system in which, after natural disasters, the federal government would pay money directly to state governments and have them handle how to spend it, instead of having FEMA coordinate efforts.

Trump signed an executive order Monday that attempts to shut down government spending on grants and other aid programs through the Office of Budget Management, or OMB. The order was vaguely worded — fueling questions, rumors and speculation about what would or wouldn’t be affected. The White House put out a memo attempting to clarify the order on Tuesday, but then on Wednesday rescinded that memo.

Stein said he was worried that Trump's order freezing federal spending could harm recovery efforts in western North Carolina, if allowed to go into place. Trump’s anti-spending order was temporarily blocked by a federal judge, but it could go back into place as soon as next week.

“I am concerned that freezing federal funding will hurt North Carolinians, especially those recovering in WNC,” Stein wrote on social media on Tuesday. “My office is currently reviewing and seeking clarity about what OMB’s order to freeze federal grants means for our state. We are also working with federal partners to ensure people in WNC get the support they need.”

During Wednesday's hearing Krebs said Trump's order did lead to FEMA's aid portal shutting down on Tuesday, although he said it had since opened back up. It wasn't clear if the flow of money for Helene relief restarted because of actions taken by the Trump administration clarfiying that he didn't mean to target FEMA, or because of the court order blocking the order from going into place.

U.S. Rep. Tim Moore, a Republican from Cleveland County and the former speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, said Tuesday he reached out to the White House and was told Trump didn’t intend to shut down disaster relief funding.

“President Trump’s leadership is focused on ensuring resources are prioritized for the Americans who need them most, and not for the previous administration’s woke and wasteful policies that diverted funds away from their intended purpose,” Moore wrote in a news release.