More than nine years after Hurricane Matthew devastated eastern North Carolina, the finish line is in sight for the agency tasked with rebuilding homes damaged by that storm and Hurricane Florence.
Thursday, N.C. Office of Recovery and Resiliency Director Pryor Gibson told a Joint Legislative Commission on Government Operations subcommittee tasked with tracking hurricane recovery that there are 328 homes left to finish.
NCORR hopes to start construction on all of those homes by the end of this year, Gibson testified, and expects it will finish repairs "well before" an October 2026 completion date the General Assembly set as part of legislation that shifted $217 million in unanticipated state funds to the rebuilding program.
"We're on target, on budget. The legislation that y'all passed told us to be done by October of next year. We will be done by then and we will have enough money," Gibson said.
NCORR was created in late 2018, in the wake of Hurricane Florence's widespread devastation across eastern North Carolina. The agency was meant to handle the rebuilding process for that storm and Matthew, which caused widespread flooding across the same region only two years earlier.
Ultimately, it received more than $708 million in federal dollars to repair and rebuild homes for low-income residents across the region.
But that wasn't enough funding, with the agency requesting additional money from the N.C. General Assembly late last year to complete rebuilding.
A report released by State Auditor Dave Boliek this week showed that widespread financial mismanagement at NCORR contributed to the shortfall and also forced homeowners to wait years for repairs or reconstruction.
The agency did not know how much money it would need until after the application period had closed in April 2023, the report said. And it did not know how much money it actually had left because there were three different accounting systems, with figures varying dramatically between them.
Beyond that, the report said, the agency became wrapped up in a drawn-out bureaucratic process that took homeowners through eight steps before their house could be rebuilt, with each averaging at least 100 days. The longest of those, called grant determination, averaged about two-and-a-half years.
NCORR has now finished repairing or rebuilding 3,924 homes after receiving 10,348 applications.
After receiving funds from HUD, Boliek reported, NCORR never established a timeline or created a budget detailing how it would spend the money.
"Budgeting decisions were driven by available federal funds and preliminary applicant data, not by comprehensive needs assessment or performance-based targets. Critically, no defined end-state was established to ensure all affected homes would be served before funding was exhausted," the report said.
And it issued contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to contractors and other vendors without establishing performance metrics for those contractors to hit. The agency also did not adequately track how those vendors spent the funds it received from NCORR.
"We did bring in outside experts, and they say it's the worst government accounting system they had ever run into," said Boliek, a Republican. He added that his team hopes to work with vendors to determine how they spent NCORR's funds.
Still, the tone of Thursday's hearing was markedly different than past times that NCORR leadership has appeared before legislative committees. There were no calls for leadership's resignations, and lawmakers appeared cautiously optimistic about what they had heard from Gibson.
"I just can't thank the people enough who have patiently endured what they've endured waiting on assistance from the government," Rep. Karl Gillespie, R-Macon, said Thursday.
Directing his remarks at Gibson, Gillespie continued, "I just would encourage you to take back one simple message: Don't take your foot off the gas, and let's get this thing done."
