News

Legislature adds $604 million for Helene recovery

By NC Tribune, Published: October 25, 2024

Legislators on Thursday added another $604.2 million in disaster aid money to the state’s response to Hurricane Helene, to go with the $273 million they allotted to the cause earlier this month. The new package cleared the Senate on a 46-0 vote and the House on a 108-0 vote.

At least on the Senate side, however, the day’s unanimity papered over emerging differences of opinion about how to go about funding the recovery effort for western North Carolina.

To no one’s surprise, Thursday’s package was considerably smaller than the $3.9 billion Gov. Roy Cooper recommended the day before.

Legislative leaders signaled that they expect they’ll be addressing the issue in next year’s deliberations on the state budget for 2025-27 biennium, and that they haven’t closed the door on any of the ideas in the governor’s proposal.

But they clearly intend to address Helene-related spending at a measured pace, a key difference from the governor’s approach, which is to go big now so money can get to the west more quickly.

The key source of funding, for now, is the state’s rainy day fund — which, more accurately, is the multiple reserves embedded in the budget.

As of Oct. 18, the state had a bit less than $4.5 billion in savings and $732.6 million in an emergency response reserve, plus another $1 billion set aside for “stabilization and inflation.”

Given the executive branch’s estimate that Helene’s recovery will eventually burn up $53.6 billion in government and private funding, one might expect all those reserves to be on the table.

But that’s not necessarily the case.

“We want to make sure that we don’t, when all is said and done, fully deplete the rainy day fund,” Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, told reporters after Thursday’s vote.

While Helene’s damage “is much more severe than most, it is a fact that we regularly have tornadoes in the spring, and we regularly have hurricanes in the summer and the fall,” he said, adding that “we don’t want to go into next year where we we are without resources to deal with” new storms. “So in some respects, quite frankly, I think it would be irresponsible for us to deploy that amount this quickly in response to this hurricane."

In approving $877.2 million in new spending in less than a month, “we’ve put more dollars out there faster than [has] been done in the past” after other hurricanes, he added.