What the N.C. legislature should do right now for hurricane recovery

North Carolina needs a "paycheck protection program" and temporary hires immediately. Then, we need answers.

The General Assembly is slated to reconvene this week to pass a second funding bill for hurricane recovery. Presumably, this will replenish the North Carolina Office of Resiliency and Recovery, giving it the money it needs to set up operations for Hurricane Helene recovery.

Ideally, the legislation will take into account the lessons learned from the painfully slow response to Hurricane Florence in 2018 and systemic mismanagement of the recovery department.

We can’t use the same exact playbook this time. Since N.C. Senate leader Phil Berger says he’s “collecting suggestions from folks,” I have a few of them.

But the General Assembly also needs to start getting answers and demanding improvements in North Carolina’s disaster response. I lay out eight hearings the legislature’s investigatory committee should schedule before the end of 2024.

Short-term needs: 4 items the General Assembly should fund this week

North Carolina has roughly $4 billion in the rainy day fund to respond to Hurricane Helene, and another big chunk of it will be spent this week. Here are four ideas for strategic funding items the General Assembly should consider.

Bonus pay for search-and-rescue teams, first responders

Dozens of North Carolinians are still missing, and the stories from their families are heartbreaking. Gov. Roy Cooper hasn’t shown much public urgency on this front, but the state of North Carolina owes it to their families to continue the search until every last person is accounted for.

I’m grateful for the search-and-rescue teams serving our state who have been tirelessly working since the storm hit. At a minimum, this bill should cover all the overtime, fuel and equipment needed to finish the job.

And while they certainly don’t do their jobs solely for the money, it would be a good gesture to find a mechanism to award them bonus pay for their continued hard work. The same goes for the first responders, State Highway Patrol and National Guard members who are still working to help people in need.

A state-run ‘Paycheck Protection Program’

So much of western North Carolina’s economy is based on tourism, and this year’s leaf season has been all but wiped out. If we want these local businesses and their employees to be able to hang on until next year, the state should give them a boost.

The General Assembly should fund a “paycheck protection program” similar to the federal program run in 2020. The Golden LEAF Foundation has already put $7.5 million toward a small business loan program, but the state government can do much more with its rainy day fund.

These loans can keep tourism industry workers on payrolls and help these businesses stay in operation until next fall brings more visitors.

However, the General Assembly needs to take care to learn lessons from the federal program and tailor our version to avoid waste, fraud and abuse.

Temporary hires in the unemployment office

Last year, the General Assembly investigatory committee learned that the North Carolina unemployment office is unprepared for another spike in first-time claims. Well, that spike is here, according to Federal Reserve data.

While that looks modest in comparison with the COVID era, it’s still three times higher than previous and I fully expect it to rise in the coming weeks. Here’s the year-to-date graph.

During the COVID shutdown, it took months for people to get the benefits they deserved. The General Assembly should fund temporary positions to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

The state has a temp job program, but zero temp jobs related to disaster recovery have been posted in the past 30 days, according to the state’s job board.

If the administration needs help, Cooper should give Red Ventures CEO Ric Elias a call. While his company is over the border in South Carolina, Elias lives in Charlotte and is active North Carolina politics in general (he maxed out to AG candidate Jeff Jackson earlier this year). Red Ventures is a master of inbound marketing and could help get call centers set up ASAP.

Watchdog help for insurance claim payouts

As families begin to rebuild, they start by filing with their homeowners insurance. These companies are notoriously difficult to deal with, and the General Assembly should direct Attorney General Josh Stein and Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey to watchdog insurance company payouts.

Stein has primarily talked so far about price gouging. While this is helpful, I guess, making sure North Carolinians get their due from their insurance companies would be much better. If these offices need more workers to do it, let’s fund temp staff there, too.

Long-term answers: 8 hearings the General Assembly should hold

Once the proper recovery funding is in place, the General Assembly should quickly turn to getting answers about North Carolina’s disaster response. We need a full assessment of what went right and wrong with Helene so that we can be better prepared for the next storm that is sure to come.

General Assembly committees have the ability to hold hearings and subpoena witnesses — even the governor — and they’ve only just started to use this power effectively.

These hearings should not be political in nature, so hold them after the election. But we shouldn’t wait until a new administration takes office on Jan. 1, 2025.

How can we better coordinate the immediate disaster response?

For weeks after the storm, the Cooper administration had no way of knowing how many of its citizens were unaccounted for. Emergency management director Will Ray blamed “multiple data sets.”

In the aftermath of a storm, information is vital — and managing that data so that it’s actionable is just as important. The General Assembly should examine how the state collects, logs, tracks, processes and acts on emergency and 2-1-1 calls during a disaster to avoid this situation in the future.

Furthermore, there seemed to be significant chain-of-command issues as the federal government, state emergency management, local first responders and private citizens all rushed to help. There were complaints about a lack of helicopters and no mechanism for enlisting private help.

The General Assembly should demand a robust, updated plan to address these problems before the next storm.

What is the state’s post-disaster communication plan?

Donald Trump’s social post claiming that Cooper and Democrats were blocking aid from the mountains was disgusting. The fact that Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson amplified it is even worse.

But that doesn’t mean that the state government’s communication has been good. Conspiracy theories abound in information vacuums, and the administration has not filled the void. North Carolina can and must do better the next time a natural disaster hits.

In the spring of 2020, Cooper appeared on TV every single day for months on end. His staff had plenty of color-coded county maps updating North Carolinians on the number of COVID infections and deaths, along with detailed plans and reams of publicly available data.

There was plenty to criticize in Cooper’s COVID response (and I have), but you can’t say he didn’t take the virus seriously.

Contrast that with how he’s handled the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Cooper has held a total of six press conferences since the storm hit on Sept. 26. Two of them occurred while the rain was still falling, and the third right after the storm had passed. That leaves just three updates on hurricane recovery, and it wasn’t until Oct. 15 that the administration attempted to quantify the number of people still missing.

The General Assembly should get answers from the administration about how it determined how and when to update the public.

Why wasn’t there a daily briefing that included a run-down of where we stand, what the state government is doing, and what is still needed — from the public, or from other public bodies.

Why no public dashboard updated every single day with the number of confirmed deceased, the number missing, the number of people without water, the number of people without power, and other metrics that I know I’m not thinking of?

Why no color-coded maps with status updates for each county, showing the areas where recovery operations are continuing, where water still needs to be restored, where power is still out, and where people can safely go?

This recovery in particular lends itself to that, since the damage and recovery progress is wildly uneven across the 27 counties in the disaster area. One county is back open for business, while another is still in dire need.

The General Assembly should demand a natural disaster communications playbook built well in advance of the next storm.

What is the point of ReadyNC.gov?

The digital response is another critical but overlooked facet of emergency management. So far, it seems to have been an afterthought. The Helene landing page from the Department of Public Safety is atrocious, and ReadyNC.gov isn’t any better.

Does the executive branch have the flexibility and talent on hand to quickly spin up landing pages and user interfaces needed to get people the information they need quickly?

When people were turning to Facebook for information or to get rescue messages out, why didn’t the emergency management department flood the zone with ads to make sure people saw the right resources?

I work in digital marketing, and the customer journey or marketing funnel is paramount in that world. The same approach should be applied to public administration. The General Assembly should demand answers about how the state plans to get lifesaving information into the hands of North Carolinians in future emergencies.

I mocked this up in about 4 minutes. It would take about that much time to set up live.

How can we better coordinate the philanthropic response?

The people of North Carolina were immediately ready and willing to help — but nobody was outlining what to do. The result: Some counties built up a glut of donations, while others were lacking.

We are blessed to have so many organizations that provide help in a disaster, with Samaritan’s Purse chief among them. But the state government can play a role in coordinating all of these efforts, and the General Assembly should demand answers about how we can better do so in the future.

Should evacuations have been called?

The severity of the storm appears to have caught North Carolina flat-footed, despite all of the warnings. According to the Washington Post:

Two days before the storm deluged Appalachian hillsides, dire forecasts warned it could bring “life-threatening” floods to the mountains around Asheville after making landfall in Florida. In hindsight, one local emergency manager called the predictions “spot on, terrifyingly so.”

Yet many said the torrential rains and flash floods — which have claimed an untold number of lives — caught them unprepared, and they had little chance for escape even if they had tried.

The General Assembly should demand answers about how the state decides when to issue an evacuation order, and whether these plans are tailored to every region of the state — not just the coast.

Are local governments prepared enough for emergencies?

Building on the last item, it seems like the state relies too heavily on local governments to develop emergency management plans and issue evacuation orders. But so many of these small local governments don’t have the manpower to do this effectively.

According to Axios:

In Spruce Pine, situated in rural Mitchell County northeast of Asheville, the downtown executive director, Spencer Bost, told Axios that a town of 2,000 just "doesn't necessarily have the resources to prepare for something like this."

"Appalachia is so frequently forgotten ... Even if we did know, I mean, what could we do with a police force [of only so many people] ... We just don't have the bodies or the resources to prepare for something like this."

The General Assembly should demand answers as to how the state coordinates with local governments on emergency preparedness. Does the state review local emergency management plans? Do we have on-the-ground vulnerability assessments for each community?

Does North Carolina have enough basic needs staged across the state?

We now know that at least a handful of people died not from the storm itself, but from lack of food, water and other basic needs in the immediate aftermath.

It’s understandably difficult to get supplies to remote areas. But even the Asheville area struggled to get enough water post-Helene.

According to Anderson Alerts:

Buncombe County Manager Avril Pinder told reporters on Monday that her community was just beginning to receive water supplies from the state, despite making a request four days earlier.

“We’ve been asking for water and we’re just getting water, and it’s still in low quantities,” Pinder said. “There’s a large need in our community. And we would like to see a different response from our state partners. A better response from our state partners.”

The General Assembly should demand answers about where basic necessities are cached around the state in preparation for an emergency. Is there a minimum time-frame benchmark we should implement on how quickly we can get food and water to all corners of the state?

How can we protect the cell network?

With cell networks down, people couldn’t get calls for help to the right people, and first responders had difficulty coordinating with each other, too.

The General Assembly should demand a full plan for protecting the state’s wireless network during a disaster. How many mobile cell towers do we have, and where are they staged? Why did it fall to private citizens to set up Starlink systems in western North Carolina?

Again, the idea for all of these hearings should not to be to score political points. It should be to fix the problems that Hurricane Helene highlighted so the state can respond more effectively when the inevitable next disaster hits.

The people of North Carolina deserve that.

Important reads

• 'A piece of all of us': Children lost in the storm, mourned in Hurricane Helene aftermath (Asheville Citizen-Times)

• Bringing Home the Bacon (The Assembly): An eye-opening look at the growth in pork-barrel spending in the state budget over the past few decades. 

• No, there aren't 'armed militias' hunting FEMA in western NC(A.P. Dillon)

• 'Suspicious' donations to political campaigns might have another explanation (9News/Denver, Colo.)

Jeff Jackson says attack ad response got 1M views in first day

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: U.S. Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-Charlotte) is far and away the best communicator in North Carolina politics — and possibly in national politics as well. In his race for attorney general, he has plenty of money to get his ads on TV, but he took a slightly different approach last week in response to the “mannequin” ads run by his opponent, Dan Bishop (R-Charlotte).

He recorded and posted a two-minute, direct-to-camera video on his social media accounts to “set the record straight.”

In his email newsletter, Jackson reported that the video got more than 1 million views in the first day after posting it — and I think the real number could be even higher. In the first 24 hours, I saw:

• 7,000 views on YouTube

• 395,000 views on TikTok

• 85,000 likes on Instagram. An outstanding engagement rate is 10%, so conservatively, this translates to 850,000 or more views.

By now, it’s certainly gotten millions more views. How much did all this cost? Very, very little when compared to the cost of getting a 30-second spot with any sort of saturation. Zero dollars for production, and I can’t find a record of him spending a dime to promote it on Instagram, Facebook or Google. That’s the power of the organic network Jackson has spent years building.

Top spenders on social media last week

Readers predict Council of State results

Last week, we polled Longleaf Politics readers on how many of the 10 Council of State races will Republicans win in 2024. Here are the results:

• 8: 27%

• 6 (the current number): 22%

• 5 or fewer: 22%

• 7: 20%

• 9 or 10: 9%

Eight is certainly possible, but I cast my vote for 7. The most likely path there is for Dan Bishop to win the AG race, and for Republicans to pick up the state auditor role while losing the superintendent of public instruction race.

Getting to 8 would require Republicans to either hold on to the superintendent role (tough, as Michele Morrow is getting absolutely obliterated in the media and in advertising) or pick up the secretary of state position. That might be more likely: Elaine Marshall has won by slimmer and slimmer margins the last four cycles after claiming the seat over Richard Petty(!) in 1996.

Question of the Week: When do you plan to vote?

I’m a “first day of early voting” guy, and logged my ballot on Thursday.