Laura Hogshead, director of ReBuild NC, which mismanaged millions of dollars in hurricane recovery spending, is no longer employed with the agency, Inside Climate News has confirmed.
Eddie Buffaloe Jr., secretary of the Department of Public Safety, announced Hogshead’s departure in a memo Wednesday afternoon. ReBuild NC, also known as the N.C. Office of Recovery and Resiliency, is under DPS.
Pryor Gibson, a senior adviser to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, will lead the agency in the interim, according to an internal memo sent to ReBuild NC staff.
Hogshead appeared before a legislative oversight committee on Monday, where she revealed that the agency had incurred a $221 million shortfall in Hurricane Matthew and Florence recovery programs. As a result, the agency was not paying contractors on time; stipends for displaced homeowners who are living in temporary housing have also been late.
ReBuild NC had received nearly a billion dollars from the federal government for multiple hurricane recovery initiatives, including reconstruction and repair of storm-damaged homes.
“We weren’t watching [the budget] carefully enough,” Hogshead testified. “We took for granted that we could move money around within the program.”
The oversight committee had summoned Hogshead and Gibson, who had been dispatched by the governor’s office to assist ReBuild NC, to testify about the agency’s financial straits after an Inside Climate News report last month.
Hogshead had led ReBuild NC since 2019. During that time, the agency mismanaged several aspects of its programs, state records show.
- ReBuild NC has spent $76 million housing hurricane survivors in motels or apartments, some for as long as four years, while their houses were rebuilt or rehabbed; at least a dozen people died before returning home.
- Some contractors ignored construction deadlines, creating backlogs of thousands of homes.
- Slipshod workmanship resulted in more than 830 warranty claims homeowners filed against construction companies.
The timing of the hearing dovetailed with state and federal funding decisions for western North Carolina, which was devastated by Hurricane Helene in late September. Several lawmakers said at Monday’s hearing that, given ReBuild NC’s record of mismanagement, they could not entrust the agency with managing disaster recovery in western North Carolina.
This week, Gov. Cooper is leading a delegation of state and local leaders and officials to Washington to present a request for $25.57 billion in federal aid to support the recovery process from Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina, according to a press release from the governor’s office. While in Washington, the governor will meet with President Biden, Senator Thom Tillis, Senator Ted Budd, Congressman Chuck Edwards and other federal officials.
Tillis, Budd and Edwards were among eight members of North Carolina’s congressional delegation who, after learning of ReBuild’s overspending, recently asked the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general to investigate the agency.
In the summer of 2022, legislative leadership formed the oversight committee to investigate problems at the agency. Since then, Hogshead and other top agency officials have appeared before the committee five times to explain the reasons for construction delays and other programmatic problems.
Displaced homeowners also testified at some of the hearings and told lawmakers of long delays in returning home. Geraldine Williams’ family had lived in a motel without a kitchen for four years. She told lawmakers that she had been self-administering kidney dialysis in the motel all of that time.
In early 2023, Richard Trumper, a general contractor who had led a successful state-funded recovery program at a different agency, began advising ReBuild NC. The pace of home repairs and construction picked up, from roughly a dozen per month to 115.
While those numbers were an improvement, the agency failed to manage the costs associated with the construction, Gibson told the legislative committee.
At Monday’s hearing, Rep. Brenden Jones, a Columbus County Republican, asked Hogshead, “Will you resign?”
“No sir, I will not,” she replied.
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Lisa Sorg is the North Carolina reporter for Inside Climate News. A journalist for 30 years, Sorg covers energy, climate environment and agriculture, as well as the social justice impacts of pollution and corporate malfeasance.
She has won dozens of awards for her news, public service and investigative reporting. In 2022, she received the Stokes Award from the National Press Foundation for her two-part story about the environmental damage from a former missile plant on a Black and Latinx neighborhood in Burlington. Sorg was previously an environmental investigative reporter at NC Newsline, a nonprofit media outlet based in Raleigh. She has also worked at alt-weeklies, dailies and magazines. Originally from rural Indiana, she lives in Durham, N.C.
