NC lawmakers announce new Helene relief package as Cooper hammers legislative priorities

Republican legislative leaders announced Monday they plan to debate, and could potentially approve, another bill aimed at Helene storm damage relief for western North Carolina when they return to session on Tuesday. They didn't provide details of what the bill would include.

It comes after Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has hammered legislative leaders for not approving more in Helene aid, even as they plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on private school tuition vouchers. That vote could also come Tuesday; Cooper has already vetoed the voucher bill but GOP lawmakers have said they plan to vote Tuesday to override his veto.

Last week, Cooper said state legislators from the Helene-affected counties in western North Carolina — nearly all of whom are Republicans — should be pressuring Republican leadership to divert the voucher funding to Helene aid instead. Republicans may argue that, despite Cooper's claims of needing to pick between vouchers and Helene aid, they can afford to do both.

“I would encourage those western North Carolina legislators to talk to the leadership and say, ‘Let's not bring up this private school voucher bill right now, because you're going to cement these vouchers for the wealthiest among us into the future, and it's going to be very difficult to come up with the billions of dollars that are going to be needed for western North Carolina,’” Cooper told reporters last week.

Cooper calls for more Helene aid as NC lawmakers prepare to return to Raleigh

The legislature voted last year to allow all North Carolinians to qualify for tuition vouchers for the first time. That led to a spike in demand from wealthy families who didn't previously qualify for the program, which in turn created a waitlist to get the tuition payments.

The voucher bill Cooper vetoed would clear the waitlist by spending billions of dollars more than originally approved for vouchers over the next several years. The program has $191.5 million in state funding for the current 2024-25 school year. If the legislature votes to override Cooper's veto, voucher spending will grow to $625 million next year, increasing to $800 million annually by 2031.

Billions in damage

Meanwhile, the legislature has so far spent $877 million on Helene relief — a fraction of the $3.9 billion Cooper recommended the state spend on priorities such as rebuilding homes that lacked flood insurance, giving grants and loans to farmers and small businesses, plus increased funding for food banks, mental health services and other pieces of the recovery effort.

“The people of western North Carolina need our support right now to continue recovery and rebuilding their communities,” Cooper said in a news release Monday. “When legislators return to session, they must prioritize helping our neighbors in western North Carolina instead of sending hundreds of millions more in taxpayer dollars to private school vouchers.”

Cooper has said he based his $3.9 billion spending plan on an analysis from the state budget office that found Helene was by far the most damaging natural disaster in state history, doing $53 billion worth of damage. The next-most damaging storm, Hurricane Florence in 2018, did $17 billion in damage.

Lawmakers rejected that spending plan. And in the weeks since, they've sought to draw attention to the Cooper administration's past struggles with disaster recovery efforts.

In a legislative oversight committee hearing Monday, GOP leaders brought in two top state officials in charge of the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency and grilled them under oath on the state's slow and over-budget response to past storms including Florence.

New GOP leadership

Also on Tuesday, Republican lawmakers will meet in private to vote on who they'd like to formally nominate to be the next Speaker of the House.

Rep. Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, is the current speaker but will be heading to Washington in January; he just won election to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Several Republicans could seek to replace Moore in the top job, but many influential members of the House GOP caucus have already said they want Moore's replacement to be Rep. Destin Hall, R-Caldwell.