{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.tillis.senate.gov/2024/10/tillis-statement-on-cooper-s-mishandling-of-disaster-recovery-funding", "Tillis Statement On Cooper\u2019s Mishandling of Disaster Recovery Funding", "2024-10-24", "2024", "2024-10", "Republican", "Senate", "NC", "Thom Tillis", "T000476", "www.tillis.senate.gov", "tillis", "https://www.tillis.senate.gov/press-releases", "scraper", "WASHINGTON, D.C. \u2013 Today, Senator Thom Tillis responded to Governor Roy Cooper\u2019s request for the N.C. General Assembly to cover a $175 million shortfall in the budget of the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency (NCORR) on recovery efforts for Hurricane Matthew (2016) and Hurricane Florence (2018). These funds were originally provided to the State of North Carolina by the federal government as part of disaster assistance packages funded and passed by Congress.\n\nFor the last six years, Tillis has pressed the Cooper Administration on the slow pace of spending on recovery and rebuilding efforts for Matthew and Florence. As recently as May of this year, Senator Tillis once again pressed NCORR Director Laura Hogshead for answers on the rebuilding process.\n\nNowhere in Hogshead\u2019s response from June 2024 did she indicate that NCORR was facing such a massive shortfall of the funding originally allocated by Congress. Instead, she stated: \u201cNCORR stands prepared to complete the homes of its current applicants and to respond quickly to any future disasters.\u201d\n\nIn 2022, the Office of Inspector General released a report finding that NCORR could not provide reasonable assurance that $2.5 million of the $5.4 million of federal assistance reviewed by the Inspector General was spent properly.\n\nIn response to the NCORR\u2019s fiscal mismanagement, Senator Thom Tillis issued the following statement:\n\n\u201cFor the last six years, I have been warning that Governor Cooper and NCORR were dropping the ball on distributing disaster relief to victims. NCORR's last-second announcement of a staggering $175 million shortfall for Matthew and Florence recovery confirms those concerns were justified. It is scandalous that the Cooper Administration has failed thousands of North Carolina families, many of whom are still living in hotel rooms and still have no relief from storms that hit our state as long as eight years ago. Instead of working to actually fix this problem, it seems the Governor's office has always been more focused on attacking anyone who drops a hint of criticism over their failure to get assistance to disaster victims.\n\n\u201cAll this makes it much more difficult for North Carolina's Congressional leaders to secure needed federal assistance for Helene victims when our colleagues look at the Cooper Administration\u2019s failure to get federal assistance in the hands of Matthew and Florence victims.\n\n\u201cThe next Governor must turn the page on the systemic incompetence and mismanagement of North Carolina's disaster rebuilding efforts: the thousands of families who lost their homes to Helene certainly deserve better. While the NCGA is right to provide NCORR with some funding to keep operations running, state and federal leaders need to hear directly from Director Hogshead and Governor Cooper on how this appalling failure occurred on their watch, and there must be serious systematic changes to ensure North Carolina has a disaster office that is able to properly take care of disaster victims.\u201d\n\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-07T21:57:20Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.tillis.senate.gov/2024/10/tillis-statement-on-cooper-s-mishandling-of-disaster-recovery-funding"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.0288190096616745, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}