Will NC finally finish Hurricane Florence, Matthew recovery this year? Lawmakers grill state leadership

North Carolina’s new leader for rebuilding homes after hurricanes Matthew and Florence said Thursday that his agency’s long-delayed work should finally be done by the end of the year — but only if the legislature is willing to put another $200 million into the efforts.

Pryor Gibson, who took over the work after the embattled former leader was pushed out in November, also offered advice to the legislature Thursday on how the state can learn from mistakes during the years-long delays to those eastern North Carolina recovery efforts, and apply those lessons to Helene recovery in western North Carolina.

Lawmakers were looking for more than just advice, however, as they grilled Gibson during a multi-hour joint legislative committee hearing focused on disaster recovery.

“Somebody has to be held accountable,” said Rep. Brendan Jones, R-Columbus. “We can’t go through this again with families in the west.”

Sen. Tim Moffitt, R-Henderson, said he and his neighbors in western North Carolina will never let Helene recovery turn into the nearly decade-long effort that the recovery from Florence and Matthew has become.

“I can assure you that if we have to have committee meetings like this six or eight years from now, we will have already seceded from the state,” Moffitt said.

Hurricane Matthew hit North Carolina in 2016. Hurricane Florence hit in 2018. Both were large storms that caused widespread wind and flooding damage throughout eastern North Carolina. And as of the start of 2025, more than 1,100 eastern North Carolina families were still living in temporary housing while they wait for the government to finish rebuilding their homes that were damaged or destroyed in those storms.

WRAL's Documentary Unit has extensively covered the program's struggles in "Aftermath: North Carolina hurricane victims left behind."

The lengthy recovery process to Florence and Matthew became a political liability for former Gov. Roy Cooper, whose administration ran the recovery efforts. After new Gov. Josh Stein won the 2024 election to replace Cooper, his first action as governor was to create a brand new state agency to handle Helene relief.

Sen. Warren Daniel, R-Burke, indicated that was a good start.

"We don't want the ghost of Gov. Cooper's failed recovery agency to haunt us in western North Carolina," he said.

Stein kept Gibson on board to finish up the eastern North Carolina recovery efforts. Gibson was Cooper’s trusted fixer for problems in state government; he also took over the unemployment office after issues arose there early in the Covid-19 pandemic.

Stein put former Wake County Commissioner Matt Calabria in charge of Helene recovery efforts; Calabria also testified to the legislature on Wednesday.

At Thursday's hearing two of Stein's other top Helene recovery aides, Jonathan Krebs and Stephanie McGarrah, also testified to lawmakers about their work in western North Carolina.

McGarrah said Stein plans to have Helene recovery handled by a much smaller team than the one that ran Florence and Matthew recovery under Cooper, in an effort to cut down the chain of command and create a more nimble bureaucracy. Krebs warned lawmakers that there still isn't enough money, from either the federal or the state government, to do everything that needs to be done out west.

"The number one mission we have is to manage scarce resources," Krebs said. "That means setting priorities."

The top priority to start, he said, is rebuilding homes. Beyond that the state will need to decide how it wants to focus recovery efforts — in terms of funding from the legislature as well as implementation by the Stein administration.

Spending decisions to make

On Thursday, the Republican-led legislature wasn't happy to hear Gibson wants even more money to finish up the Florence and Matthew recovery work, particularly with Helene relief needs adding up.

Florence had previously been the most damaging storm in state history, but new estimates show that Helene did more than three times as much damage.

Gibson said with an extra $217 million from the state legislature, he can get all 1,000-plus families left from Florence and Matthew back into their homes by the end of the year. But if that funding either doesn’t come through, or if it takes months to be approved, he told the committee, “I cannot 100% guarantee you” that the work won’t keep dragging into future years.

Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, questioned why lawmakers should believe Gibson. “We’ve now gone over budget by 30%,” Hise said, compared to estimates from several years ago.

The committee Thursday didn't immediately make any decisions on whether to approve Gibson's funding request.

Now lawmakers must decide how to balance the eastern North Carolina needs with new needs from Helene, which are even larger.

"We've got 10,000 severely damaged homes in western North Carolina," said Hise, whose represents a large swath of that region.

Adding to the uncertainty is President Donald Trump's executive order Monday seeking to put a stop to much federal spending. Some North Carolina Republicans in Congress said they didn't think Trump meant to cut off Helene recovery aid. But on Wednesday, Krebs told state lawmakers that the FEMA aid portal was shut down following Trump's order. On Tuesday Trump's order was blocked in court, on a temporary basis, and by Wednesday FEMA money had begun flowing into North Carolina again.

Recovery pace picking up

Testifying under oath Thursday, Gibson was open about the struggles within the agency he took over three months ago, the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, which is also sometimes called NCORR or Rebuild NC. He acknowledged it has gone too slowly, due to issues with accounting and its struggles to retain contractors.

Many of the problems were internal, he said. But part of the problem, he added, was due to the legislature not providing consistent funding levels. For instance, Gibson said, the legislature gave NCORR only half the money it asked for in 2019. Then the pandemic hit, the housing market boomed, and many contractors who had been rebuilding homes for NCORR moved on to other opportunities that seemed like safer business decisions. Gibson said the cash infusion he's asking for now should be enough to get contractors back on board and finish the work.

Jones took exception to the idea that the legislature should share any of the blame for NCORR's struggles.

“It’s y'all’s fault, not ours,” Jones told Gibson “... Nobody over there can seem to do correct arithmetic. Nobody can get the estimates correct. Nobody’s been close.”

Gibson said despite several years of slow work after the pandemic, NCORR is now exceeding expectations. The agency put 150 families back into their homes in December, he said — an average of five every day — and another 120 this month.

“This is not to try to lessen or to dampen the mistakes, the bureaucracy, the things that have happened in the eastern recovery and NCORR in the months past,” Gibson said. “But there's no other disaster recovery agency, in the history of the United States, that's done better than NCORR in the last several months.”

As long as the agency has the funding to let it keep up that pace, he said, all families should be taken care of by the end of the year.

Gibson said the only thing that could hold up 100% completion is a handful of tricky situations — for instance, properties that have been passed down over generations and are now co-owned by a dozen or more family members who don’t all agree on what to do with the home, or even simply can’t be found to sign the necessary paperwork.

Gibson warned that while those issues with multi-generation property ownership exist in some places in eastern North Carolina, they're much more prevalent in western North Carolina. Being prepared to deal with that is only part of what might make Helene recovery even trickier than Florence and Matthew recovery, he said.

But as for Helene recovery, Gibson said in response to questions from lawmakers, two things should happen to speed things up: The recovery funding needs to be approved faster, and the state also needs to be stricter on how it goes about it.

That second part, he warned the politicians in the room, might make their constituents angry in the short term even if it will help things go more quickly overall.

With Florence and Matthew recovery, Gibson said, “we gave too many choices. We did exactly what everyone in [the legislature] wanted to do — and the governor’s office, and the communities, and the homeowners. We gave them as many choices as we could, as much time as we could. We gave them assistance for rentals while the project was going on. We gave them assistance with storing their items. …. But everything you do like that adds to the time, adds to the expense.”