When you look at North Carolina’s financial crisis and the rapidly growing federal deficit, a million dollars doesn’t seem like much money.
My sympathies are with Gov. Mike Easley for his (and our) monumental fiscal woes, and I don’t blame him for looking at available money to balance a wobbly state budget.
What I don’t understand is why there is $300 million left in the Hurricane Floyd relief fund. Am I the only one to catch the irony that the governor has proposed taking $100 million from the relief fund and shifting it into the state’s rainy-day reserve fund?
As I recall, Hurricane Floyd delivered rainfall by dump truckload, not the bucket, in Eastern North Carolina almost four years ago. It flooded vast areas of the state’s Coastal Plain, bringing the worst flooding in more than 100 years.
Perhaps it is appropriate to place the money in the rainy day fund.
What puzzles me is the fact that the Hurricane Floyd recovery fund has not been spent. At last report, there were families still living in temporary housing in Eastern North Carolina, people who had not been helped by the relief money.
An Associated Press account reports that as of last summer, the relief fund contained about $300 million in unspent funds. Most counties in the eastern part of the state were declared a disaster area in 1999, resulting in a federal allocation of $1.5 billion in aid with the state providing an additional $836 million.
I don’t know the reason why the money did not reach the right people promptly.
Clearly there are reasons for delays. Providing assistance to such a large number of people is no simple matter. There are logistical limits, for one thing. Contractors — building, electrical, plumbing, heating, insulation — are limited in number, and even when they all work at the same time, as hard as possible, it takes time to get around to everybody.
Then there is the bureaucracy, something that is not really all that bad. In fact, the bureaucracy, while unwieldy and aggravating at times, is a good thing. It’s put there for valid reasons. Bureaucracy provides for an orderly handling of public needs. It also protects taxpayers from disbursement of public funds to ineligible people.
By now, I think the Hurricane Floyd relief fund should have been disbursed to the people who need help.
The federal money was designated for buyouts of homes in flood plain areas, as well as for small business loans. The federal buyout plan, although painful in many respects, made a lot of sense because it would not be practical to rebuild a house in a flood-prone area, subject to destruction if and when a Floyd look-alike passes through.
Few people affected by the hurricane flooding had insurance covering losses. Everybody needed help. The hurricane left almost one-half of North Carolina in dire economic condition. People who had lost their homes and belongings had also lost jobs because businesses and industries were flooded or damaged beyond repair. Agricultural facilities were also hard hit.
As soon as floodwater receded, work began at a frantic pace and continued for quite awhile. But when things slowed down, there were people out there who had not been helped. They either did not know where to turn, or the system let them down.
Now there is almost $300 million left in the fund set up to return these people to permanent homes and to boost a regional economy.
I don’t know what’s wrong, but I’m angry that the system works inadequately. Is there a chance that our economy statewide might be better if flood assistance funding had been distributed in a more orderly fashion and more fairly?
I’m not even sure where the blame lies. It may be a fault at the state or federal level, or it may be that some local governments were lax in taking care of the neediest among their constituents. I’ve known the latter to happen, especially in some communities where the racial divide remains as sharp as it was 40 years ago.
The state needs every cent it can find to balance its budget without cutting essential services and making layoffs so sharp that the economy plunges even deeper. Easley can and should take the money if it’s there and needed, provided funds are available to the remaining people eligible for assistance who have not thus far been assisted.
One thing I do know, however: The rich are better off when poor people have jobs and homes and can work for a living. It takes the poor and the middle-class to prop up the upper class.
Contact Florence Gilkeson at (910) 947-4962 or at florence@thepilot.com.
