The lessons of Roy Cooper's disaster recovery record | Hour 3

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the Pete calendar show.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. It is the third hour on Monday, and so we chat with AP Dillon. She's a reporter for the North State Journal, and you can read her Substack newsletter called More to the Story. Subscribe as I do. Be cool like me. Hello, AP. Welcome to the show. How are you? Hi, Pete. Thanks for having me. How are you? Yes, ma'am. Absolutely. I'm doing all right. I'm doing okay. All righty. So let's start with– I was going over some of the– the Roy Cooper, Michael Watley campaign polling, which thought it was interesting. There was a piece at the Washington reporter about how Michael Watley is actually pulling ahead of Tom Tillis was at this same point six years ago. Now it's not completely analogous because as far as I know, there's no like a fair scandal about to erupt on Cooper or and there's no picture of him standing in front of a charcoal grill pretending to do barbecue. So it's not analogous. But it is interesting that Watley's above Tillis in the polling, at least at this point six years ago. And then there was also... Another piece at the Washington Reporter, a piece by Matthew Foldy or Foldy, Foldy, talking about, I guess, how Roy Cooper is talking about Michael Watley and his response to Hurricane Helene, which just the anniversary was, I think, yesterday, two years since Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina. And I'm not sure that the Roy Cooper campaign wants to actually talk about the disaster recovery relief efforts. I'm not sure this is solid ground for the Cooper campaign. What do you think? Definitely not. No. But, you know, every campaign has projection. Well, we've got some projection going on here. Right. The track record with recovery has been horrendous. Right. And I thought you did a really good job of walking through this North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, or NCOR, as it was called. And this was set up by Cooper to deal with Hurricanes Matthew and Florence and did not really deal too well with them. And you track from Hurricane Matthew from 2016 and Florence from 2018. And NCOR was such a failure that even Josh Stein, a.k.a. Mini Cooper, even Josh Stein basically dismantled this program. Yeah, when he came into office, he set up his own shop and basically discarded NCOR, which, you know, had been fizzling out for several years. I mean, there were hearings that I covered going over three years where they brought these folks in to talk about their progress. And it was, again, a snail's pace. I mean, for every time they brought them in, they maybe finished a couple dozen more houses, you know, when there were, you know, hundreds still outstanding and people were still living in hotels and other, other accommodations, they were in temporary stay. So, you know, they also, their, their money, you know, managing was a giant bust as well. Um, you know, and the state audit, uh, basically called them out over that. They found that they had, um, gotten temporary relocation assistance that exceeded $ 74 million with some households in temporary lodging for more than 1,400 days, which cost above $ 230K for a single family. That's ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, that's like you could buy a house. You could buy a house for that. Yeah. You could buy a house. They could have gone out and moved and gotten a house for that. They were given stewardship over a billion dollars in combined state and federal funding. So they had employed Salesforce.com as a platform to try to move the needle with their customer service, which had like eight different steps and took about a year and a half, I think is what the audit said. And that costed $ 25. 4 million. That's money that could have been going towards the actual rebuilding of things. Yet the 11,654 applications... Of those, thousands were withdrawn or ineligible, and the auditors found that more than 1,400 of the projects that Salesforce was regurgitating were duplicates. So that really didn't help them very much. And then, of course, it ran over budget. We found out in April 2024, after the application window closed, that commitments exceeded available funds and produced a shortfall. that rose to about $ 175 million and was included in a surprise line item to lawmakers from Governor Cooper's office. So you mentioned Salesforce, and you write in this piece, implementation of using Salesforce as a platform cost more than $ 25 million. Yep. Do you know who the CEO of Salesforce is? Um, off the top of my head, I can't remember his name, but I know that he's a donor. Uh-huh. Mark Benioff, Benioff, whatever. I don't know how to pronounce the last name. B-E-N-I-O-F-F. And you may recall he was one of the guys on Roy Cooper's speed dial when it came to the HB2 boycotts. That I do recall. Uh-huh. Cooper was talking with Benioff, and Benioff was whipping other left-wing millionaires and billionaires and business leaders and stuff to boycott our state over the HB2 issue when Cooper was attorney general but trying to become governor and needed the HB2 issue. So the fact that Salesforce got that contract for this rebuild and did such an abysmal job at it, not shocking, to me at least. Um, no, but what's interesting though, there is some overlap too, between NCOR and, uh, the new, uh, system set up, uh, grow and see, which is Stein's outfit. The overlap is horn project manager company. Are you sure it's horn? I mean, there's an E at the end of that word. So like, I'm curious, are you sure it's horn? Uh, yes. Okay. All right. I'm just making sure. I just wanted to be sure I want to pronounce things correctly. Yes, I'm pretty sure that's how it's pronounced. But, yeah, there's overlap between the two there. And that was something that was lawmakers' questions last year or earlier this year, I think it was. They sat down and they were looking at, you know, they wanted to know if there's a pay-to-play situation going on here. And, you know, they kind of side-eyed the use of the same group, considering that Horn had issues in other states with delivering payments. Yeah, you're right here. Horn LLP, if that is how it's pronounced, won an $ 81 million project management contract to handle Helene Recovery. It's the same vendor that worked with Encore, and one of the officials that Josh Stein tapped to head up GrowNC is Jonathan Krebs. He is a former managing partner for, wait for it, Horn LLP. Yes. Yep. I capitalized horn initially because that's how it was in the language and presentations. And then I went on to spell it correctly. Obviously, I was being more sarcastic. Yes, I detected a little bit of that. So I also found it interesting, and you made this point here, Grow NC does not appear to be NCORE rebranded. So there are changes that have been implemented. And you say that's mainly due to a better coordination layer plus a commerce housing program that was stood up almost immediately under Josh Stein. But the recovery scars, you say, heading into six years after Matthew and Florence were significant. Grow NC has adopted some of the scar language, and the state may not know for another four years if the scars are healed. So, like, we're, I mean, and because Helene was such a massive storm, $ 60 billion price tag attached to this thing. Yeah, I mean, it was the worst we've probably ever seen going back, you know, decades to maybe Andrew. You know, it had its own challenges. You know, the terrain has made it extremely difficult for repairs and for infrastructure, you know, completion and that sort of thing. So, I mean, you have to give them some slack there. But, you know, on the housing side of things, though, it's moving kind of at the same trickle that NCORP was. They had 7,924 applications submitted according to Grow NC's own numbers. And as of June, their own numbers say that only 113 houses were completed. Meanwhile, private groups... are kicking their butts. The Baptist on Mission had 472 homes repaired. Habitat Humanity had 117 projects completed. And there's plans for permanent repairs of 160 homes total on that one. And then multi-family small rentals, active cases have gone down. They're down to 101 now, apparently. So that's a good sign. And, you know, private roads and bridges repaired. There's been 123 completed and 143 in progress, something like that. So, I mean, the Baptists on a Mission in Habitat for Humanity were great. And those are the ones that are listed in Garland C's actual report. They kind of left out the Amish. Yes. I was going to ask you about the Amish. Thank you. They came and built about 200 houses, and I didn't wrap that in there, but I probably should have. Absolutely they should have. I mean, you have people that came in at no cost to any of these victims. They rebuilt homes and such all over the place, all over western North Carolina. They're still there building. Yeah. Yeah, they're still working. All right. So speaking of other issues that Roy Cooper has been focusing on or bringing up on the campaign trail that I'm not quite sure they actually want to go down that path. But the other one is they're making a big deal about the Harvey West guy down east who was a registered sex offender who had a position in the Republican Party down there. And they're trying to tie him to Michael Watley, which. Like, of all of the issues, again, like, and you wrote about this here in your quick hits on the election cycle, because Breitbart, I think, was this another Matt Mercer piece that he posted up about this? I believe it was, yeah. And so, like, again, Roy Cooper probably should not be trying to highlight affiliations with sex offenders, considering his own record, getting his picture taken and attending events put on by sex offenders. More than one. More than one. Right. So what is so what's this about? So we've got well, we have the LGBT Chamber of Commerce's registered sex offender, Chad Turner. He was he attended their gala and, you know, took photos with them and had to know that who he was because he was behind the Charlotte ordinance, which led to HB2. So I'd be hard-pressed to think that he didn't know who this person was. Well, and I can tell you during the HB2, when they were doing that at the city level, all of that background came out. Everybody started— people were reporting, media was reporting on his record during the HB2 issue. Right. And it got ignored mostly by the media that this little thing popped up. And it was interesting to watch that one unfold. Yeah. Turner is still on the sex offender registry. Uh, West is not, has not been for over a decade and has not repeat offended. I don't know if Turner has, I don't see anything in the charges for him for that, but, um, he's still on it. Um, meanwhile, you know, I said multiple because if you, if you go and you look, there's, there's evidence that a birthday party was thrown for former representative Cecil Brockman, who has been charged with multiple counts of inappropriate behavior with a minor. And that Roy Cooper actually was involved in throwing that birthday party. Right. And they're trying to tie Whatley to West by saying he hired West, but he didn't hire Harvey West. No, he didn't hire him. There was an appointment process. Like, the guy served on multiple committees after, you know, many years after these charges came to be. He got involved in politics, and he was involved in county-level politics served on committees there. And then the state organizational committee, it's one of those ones that goes over the rules every year and makes changes to policies and guidelines. He got put onto that before Whatley even got into the chair spot at the NCGOP. I believe Robin Hayes, the former chair, put him in there at one point. And those kind of positions, unless somebody else's name gets thrown in the hat or there's like a vying for the spot, they just get re-upped. Right. It's not a thing. So, you know, then that's how it works, you know, for the Democratic Party, too. Usually those folks, you know, the ones who have been in those positions stay in those positions unless it's an elected position or unless, you know, someone wants to move over and get in there. And then there's a shakeup, you know, that way and people's feelings get hurt and you see a bunch of nasty Facebook posts. But that's usually how it rolls. Yeah, and even Harvey West has been quoted in media reports as saying, Watley didn't like him. So again, these are the issues that the Cooper campaign is bringing up, and they're trying to make hay off of these things. It's like, guys, again, do you want to talk about this issue? Because you've got some even worse stuff that you're having to deal with. That's why I say it's a game of projection. Anything that we're doing, we're going to make sure that everyone thinks the other side is doing that. Yeah, what's it? Every accusation... Every accusation is a confession, if you will. Yeah, I know you are, but what am I? Yeah, yeah. All right. You can read more of A.P. Dillon's work over at More to the Story on Substack, as well as the North State Journal, nsjonline.com. A.P., thanks so much. We'll talk to you next week. 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Go to createavideo.com or visit them in Mint Hill just off I-485. Your photos and videos are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you. And they will tell others to come who you are. Visit createavideo.com. From Matthew Foldy's piece at the Washington Reporter, Two years ago, Hurricane Helene struck western North Carolina, killing over 100 people. It brought widespread devastation to over 20 counties, destroying homes, roads, water systems, and lives in the process. Within hours, North Carolinians mobilized to help. Michael Whatley, then serving as the chairman of the Republican National Committee— joined forces with Samaritan's Purse to help Watauga County, where Whatley grew up, to help deliver supplies to those in need. Whatley also called President Donald Trump during his 2024 campaign to assist those who were suffering. Whatley was the, quote, number one advocate for Helene recovery, according to Trump. Whatley managed to secure billions of dollars for Western North Carolina despite holding no federal office and having never run for office before. Bill Lapsley, who was serving on the Henderson County Board of Commissioners, explained how Whatley lined up millions of dollars for Henderson County to be able to rebuild following Helene. He said, quote, Michael got on the phone and told the Department of Homeland Security that on behalf of the president, we need to get this straightened out, not only for Henderson County, but for the others that are in the same shape. About five days later, he says, I get a phone call from the assistant secretary and says, check your bank account. So we checked the bank account, and they had wired us $ 15 million. State Representative Jake Johnson, in an interview, said Roy Cooper's failures with emergency response were not even limited to western North Carolina. He said, I think it's laughable if Cooper tries to make hurricane recovery an issue in this campaign after how badly he fumbled not only Helene, because he was governor when Hurricane Helene hit. but also eastern North Carolina. He's trying to run from anything that reminds anyone of how bad he has handled natural disasters in North Carolina. All right, real quick. Every government number gets revised, right? Every projection gets walked back. Gold does not file corrections like GovCo. Revelation Gold Group helps families hold physical gold and silver, including in a tax-advantaged gold IRA. It's real. It's in your name. And 10 minutes later, tells you if your retirement account qualifies. If you want to learn more, go to calendarmetals.com. That's calendarmetals.com. There is a link in the podcast description. Or if you want to talk to somebody, you can call 888-465-3049. From the piece here at the Washington Reporter, Jake Johnson, state representative. He's also the chair of the House Oversight Committee. He said, part of my job was bringing in the NCOR. This was the agency that was supposed to be rebuilding all of the homes that were devastated by Hurricanes Matthew and Florence, 2016-2018. And He says, I did not know how bad it was until we started going through the numbers. They lost hundreds of millions of dollars and people were still living in hotels six and even eight years after these events. I'm talking about families that were supposed to be in a rebuilt house, but the money was mismanaged so badly that they were going in and not only couldn't tell us where the money was, but couldn't even give us a real timeline on when this would be resolved. Who knows what would have happened if we had not really started digging into this and people reaching out to us and saying, hey, it's been six or eight years and there are still hundreds of families living in hotels. Johnson then experienced Cooper's physicality. closer to home, where he's from, the western part of the state, when Hurricane Helene hit, and he said Cooper was nowhere to be found. He said he took no action to get resources really where they needed to be. The Biden administration and the Cooper administration really dropped the ball. He said that Watley, by contrast, was on the ground. We have had multiple roundtables with him, with local elected officials, saying here's where the roadblocks are. And even though Watley's not an elected official, what he's done, such an effective job of doing, is keeping the pressure on the Department of Homeland Security, which is where FEMA's located. He said Watley kept the pressure on elected officials. We were just with him and Cameron Hamilton, the new FEMA director, who did a fantastic job of talking to elected officials. Hamilton said, where are those bottlenecks? I will clear them out. But that would have never happened without Michael Watley getting their eyes on it and getting them on the ground. Trump also joined local leaders in pointing to Watley's help in securing assistance and Starlink from Elon Musk in the wake of the hurricane. Musk gave free Starlinks so that North Carolinians could connect with the outside world to better receive assistance free of charge. And, uh, Trump made a mention of that at his recent, uh, stump speech at that, uh, quote unquote convention, the rally that he held over the Charlotte observer, nearly two years after hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina, hundreds of households still lack the kind of road or bridge access that allows an ambulance or fire truck to reach their homes. North Carolina has committed more than $ 200 million to repairing privately owned roads, bridges, and culverts. Um, But thousands of damaged sites still have outstanding needs, and the state acknowledges there's not enough money to fix them all. North Carolina Emergency Management identified more than 4,000 private roads and bridge locations damaged by Helene. The program that they're using hopes to address 371 out of 4,000. Other sites have since been repaired by property owners or nonprofits or other groups or withdrawn from consideration. Still, the state says more than 2,900 locations have remaining needs. They have completed, the state has completed 148 projects. Those repairs restored emergency access to about 854 households. But the agency estimates, or estimates, At least 727 households still lack emergency service access while awaiting repairs. I think it goes on to say, yeah, lawmakers appropriated $ 205 million for the private road and bridge program. Although the newest $ 30 million has been transferred to the program as of this week, of the $ 175 currently available, about half of it has already been spent. This is, again, under the new program, Grow NC, because Cooper's program, NCOR, that he implemented, was so terrible, responding to Matthew and Florence. In fact, Annie Dance, writing over, she's a journalist, writing on a Substack podcast, Publication, she writes that nearly two years after Hurricane Helene struck western North Carolina, Democratic Governor Josh Stein says the state should have developed recovery programs faster and delivered more help to small businesses in the months when they needed it the most. Roy Cooper was governor when Helene hit in September 2024. Stein took office in January of 25. That would be four months later. He made recovery a focus of his first executive orders. In an interview ahead of the storm's second anniversary, Stein criticized the pace of the state's recovery during that four-month period. He said, quote, I wish we could have gone faster. This was in response when he was asked what the state had done right and what it had done wrong. He said, every time I would ask my staff, why are we not doing this faster? There usually was a reason. And sometimes it had to do with federal bureaucracy. Sometimes it had to do with state bureaucracy. Sometimes it had to do with just human capacity. I think we could do better. What we could do better is to develop these programs quicker and get them on the ground quicker. So what's he saying? That this was a failure of the Cooper administration. Because you're in charge of the state bureaucracy. You're the executive. Cooper was, and then Stein is. He said there are people out there whose homes have not yet been rebuilt, people whose bridges that they need to access their property have not been rebuilt. He said, I have 100% sympathy for people who are impatient and frustrated because if it were my property, I would be really upset. But he pointed to the state's launch of Renew NC, a federally funded housing recovery program through HUD, and a state-funded roads and bridges program that I just talked about as examples of work completed since he took office. So he's citing these as examples of all of the stuff that we've gotten done. But as I mentioned, 4,000 private roads and bridges identified as in need of repair or replacement. And the state program is only hoping to address 371 of them. So this is, I guess what he is citing as success 371 out of 4,000. I mean, I guess that's a level of success. Also, um, Josh Stein and his wife, Anna, uh, they were up in chimney rock this weekend. for the second anniversary of Hurricane Helene. And they did some tours while they were there. And they were touting a $ 5. 5 million grant for small businesses and such. Most shops, according to WLOS-TV, most shops in Chimney Rock have been rebuilt and reopened, including new ones like Whistle Hop Brewing Company. That's expected to open on Main Street this year. Stein and his wife took time to shop while in Chimney Rock on Saturday. Most roads and bridges have been repaired or replaced there. The two and a half mile section of US 64 linking the village with Batcave reopened in March, but there is still major reconstruction needed for that corridor expected to be finished sometime around 2029. Now what's interesting here is that whilst they were in Chimney Rock, they visited the Chimney Rock Smokehouse. And we know this because the First Lady, Anna Stein, posted a photo of her and her husband, the governor, at the restaurant. The timing, a little weird, they're sitting on a deck, and the deck, according to Annie Dance, was built by the Amish. Not the state. The Amish rebuilt that deck. and along with the nonprofit Spokes of Hope, which apparently did not receive a state grant for volunteers. The photo, though, was deleted by the governor's account or the first lady's account. They deleted it after somebody in the comments section noted that it was built by the Amish. I also know, Annie Dan says, they built it because I've been documenting the work there for two years. The restaurant is also owned by a Republican running for town council. So you can't be showing any kind of progress that's been done unless it's been done by the state program. We can't be giving any kind of credit to the Amish who are still in Western North Carolina, still building homes, still building decks and barns and all sorts of stuff. The Amish have been out there for two years building this stuff. So did they delete the post because the Amish built the deck upon which the governor and the first lady were sitting? Or was it because the restaurant is owned by a Republican who is running for town council? And heaven forbid, heaven forbid, you be spotted at a restaurant owned by a Republican. This is, it's so petty. Why would you delete it? Why not just say, thank you to the Amish government Thank you for the people who helped come here and rebuild our devastated state and help these people. But apparently, no, we must delete that post as well. All right, I promised I would passack you back to the text line. So I am a man of my word sometimes. Let's see here. 704 number says... Trump takes more tough questions in a day than Cooper has taken in 40 years. He is a radical leftist cosplaying as Andy Griffith. He is indeed. Yes, he is. That is the, uh, the caricature that, um, that the press loves to just, uh, promulgate. Uh, Philip says, if you love the freedom you have in America, uh, then you can only vote Republican. Democrats will destroy everything about our Constitution that has kept us a free nation. Everything has a cost, and freedom has a high one. And here's the thing. This isn't even a high cost. It's just going out and casting a vote, you know? It doesn't, like, of all the things to be asked to do to be an American and to preserve the American republic, I don't think this is a big ask, you know? Tim Oteo says voting Democrat will not lower prices. Democrats need Trump to deal with Iran so they won't have to deal with Iran if they take power in 2028. Yeah, this is going to be a tough spot for Democrats because they've been railing against the Iran action, the Iran war, all of this stuff, right? But if, like I just saw, the Iranian economy is crashing right now. The headline I just saw was like their Rial is worth nothing. And the only oil not getting out of the Persian Gulf is the Iranians' oil. And Trump just had a chat with Winnie the Pooh, a.k.a. Xi Jinping, from China, which was like the biggest buyer of all of the Iranian oil. They're shutting down all of the banks, all of the air traffic. Like, the Iranian regime is, they are cut off. So now it's just like, I mean, you think about it, like just Trump's got his hands around the necks of the IRGC and it's just strangling them slowly. And it's like, you can either cry uncle and agree to our terms or all of this collapses. And the Iranians are just trying to hang on. The regime is trying to hang on. in order to maybe launch another offensive close to the midterms in order to get people to vote for Democrats. That's literally what they have planned. They've said this, like, this is well known. They publicize this. They talk about it. So, um, Anyway, back to Timoteo's text. He says, that requires more bombing, which will keep gas prices high or drive them even higher. All the while, Democrats will be decrying the war in Iran and the high gas prices it causes, all the while quietly celebrating that he's doing it and hoping he gets the job done. Yeah, they will benefit. Everybody will benefit, right? Trump's actions may risk him being impeached may risk, because the Democrats are going to impeach him if they take control of the Congress. They're going to do that regardless. They'll find something to do it, right? They've already done it twice. They're going to keep doing it, right? At the cost of losing the Republican majorities, he has determined that this is worth that cost to him and to the Republicans. Will he be rewarded? Will Republicans be rewarded for that calculation, for that effort? I don't know. History would say no. But fast forward, looking back, if the Iranian regime does topple and you do have a pacified Middle East to a large extent, then that is quite, I mean, that was quite the sacrifice to make. Let me see here. Skippy says, you're correct about your boy Roy, cut him loose, Cooper. He tries to come off as a modern day Andy Taylor. Uh, Ed says, unfortunately you are preaching to the choir. The folks that need to hear all this are listening to NPR. Uh, well look, they bounce over. They come over and listen to us when NPR is doing that segment on some stupid book, you know, that nobody wants to hear about or some, you know, off Broadway opera about the mating rituals of the bumblebee. They bounce over here and listen. Um, Alan says, is it just me or is the Watley Senate run the worst campaign since Michael Dukakis? I think that's you, Alan. Dukakis' campaign was pretty terrible. Paul says, I am out on Cooper, but I don't see a Duke Energy lobbyist Trump yes man being a good solution either. Again, in comparison to what? A yes vote on all the radical leftism? I'm a no on that, dog. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete Kaliner show dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.