We’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene, and yet again, North Carolina government has been painfully slow getting recovery help out the door.
So much for doing things differently this time.
We saw versions of this during COVID with unemployment benefits. We saw it after Hurricanes Matthew and Florence with ReBuild NC. And now we’re seeing some of the same problems with Renew NC.
Even after all of that, we’re still just not very good at walking lots of people through a complicated government process.
The Assembly published an excellent piece yesterday about the program. Nearly 8,000 people applied for Helene housing help. Just 157 families have made it back into completed homes. More applicants had been rejected or dropped — mostly for missing documents — than had been accepted.
Now, I do think you have to be a little skeptical of some of the individual complaints.
People miss emails. They forget forms. They swear they sent something that they didn’t. And disaster rec…
