State Auditor Dave Boliek presented his report on the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency (NCORR) to the Joint Legislative Commission on Governmental Operations Subcommittee on Hurricane Response and Recovery on November 20. Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Hurricane Florence in 2016, he said, “are two disasters, and quite frankly, the third disaster that this state has experienced is NCORR itself.”

Boliek detailed NCORR’s flaws to the subcommittee for two hours in a hearing at East Carolina University. Audit staff, according to Boliek, said NCORR had the worst accounting they had ever seen and that the program presented a logistical nightmare. He did, however, acknowledge that NCORR had fixed many of its procedural flaws beginning in 2022, particularly after Pryor Gibson stepped in last year. Coincidentally, legislative leadership formed the subcommittee in summer 2022.

NCORR Director Pryor Gibson said in his testimony, “There’s no question, there’s no excuses, there’s no sugarcoating the mess that was the first two or three years of NCORR.”

Created in 2018 to facilitate the repair and rebuilding of homes with federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funding, NCORR came under scrutiny from the General Assembly in 2022 when the program was completing fewer than 10 homes per month.

As the subcommittee had heard in its five previous hearings: NCORR had problems managing its budget, data, and processes. NCORR received $982 million for disaster response and mitigation. The agency originally budgeted $534 million in grants for Matthew and Florence to the Homeowner Recovery Program (HRP). That amount eventually grew to $709 million before the General Assembly provided a $297 million bailout, bringing HRP alone to a sum greater than the federal money originally planned across all grant programs.

Subcommittee members questioned Boliek about the inconsistencies he documented across NCORR internal accounting, its reporting to the federal government through the Disaster Recovery Grant Reporting (DRGR) system, and the state’s consolidated accounting systems. One invoice had a 129% difference in the payment posted to each of the three systems.

Boliek and subcommittee members noted the marked improvement in outcomes once Gibson took over at NCORR. In turn, Gibson assured the subcommittee that all remaining projects would be underway before the end of the year and completed before October 2026.

Gibson shared that he has passed on the lessons he has learned from NCORR’s failures to the teams leading Hurricane Helene recovery efforts. Many of their processes so far correspond directly to the Auditor’s recommendations.

Co-chair Rep. Karl Gillespie (R-Macon) had one piece of advice for Gibson as NCORR works to get the final 328 families back home: “Don’t take your foot off the gas, and let’s get this thing done.”