HT: Carolina Plott Hound
Ironically, it is reporting from the Washington Post that uncovers the critical error Governor Cooper made:
North Carolina never appointed a “disaster recovery coordinator” to take charge of communicating with federal agencies, as FEMA recommends, according to a former top emergency management official. William Ray, the state’s director of the agency, confirmed that, saying officials decided to take a different approach.
Natalie Simpson, an emergency management expert with the University at Buffalo, said she was shocked the state did not appoint a disaster response czar and said this could help explain the uneven response.
“If there were genuine problems with FEMA’s response, like not penetrating fast enough into the affected areas, somebody that the state appointed as czar would have been sounding the alarm earlier,” she said.
“If FEMA was guilty of anything, the state of North Carolina is equally guilty of it,” Simpson added.
State lawmakers are pushing for a whole new approach to disaster recovery in North Carolina — as they also seek accountability for previous hurricane recovery efforts they see as failures.
On Tuesday the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would pay millions of dollars more for years-old recovery projects that are still lingering, then audit the agency in charge and shut it down. And the bill’s sponsors are hiding nothing when it comes to who they think is to blame. House Bill 222 is called the “C.O.O.P.E.R. Accountability Act.”
Former Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, has been heavily criticized for years by Republican state lawmakers for his administration’s over-budget and behind-schedule work on recovery work after 2016’s Hurricane Matthew and 2018’s Hurricane Florence.
“Somebody has got to answer to the people of North Carolina,” bill sponsor Rep. Brenden Jones, R-Columbus, said in an interview.
Cooper, in a written statement to WRAL, questioned who the blame really belongs to. He was in charge of the state-level response, but most disaster relief money comes from the federal government.
The initial years after both storms were during Republican President Donald Trump’s first term in office, and Cooper said North Carolina never got all the money it needed from the federal government.
“After Matthew and Florence, our state helped repair or rebuild more than 14,000 homes along with roads, bridges and public buildings, even though the Trump administration only sent about half of what the state needed for housing,” Cooper said. “More was invested to build these homes stronger than they were before, and many have survived severe flooding that occurred after the rebuild.”
Cooper left office without fully completing disaster recovery efforts for Florence or Matthew. At the start of 2025 about 1,000 families in eastern North Carolina were still waiting on their homes to be repaired or rebuilt following the damage they suffered in those storms nearly a decade ago.
Fred, Cooper is celebrated as a hero by the media/left complex, but in fact he is a dog. The Plott Hound website is floating the premise that this revelation will sink any potential US Senate candidacy for 2026. Failing to appoint a coordinator is a major screw-up, and many people in western North Carolina suffered because of it.