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your support. All righty, so came across this piece over
at Inside Climate News, which is a website that is
devoted to maintaining a comfortable temperature in your home. I
believe inside Climatenews dot org piece by Lisa Sorg about
the North Carolina officials who chose an outside firm to
run disaster relief efforts in west North Carolina. I have
some concerns. I have some questions. A company whose earlier
disaster recovery contract in North Carolina was marked with serious
communications problems will return to run North Carolina's disaster recovery
program in western counties flattened by Hurricane Helene. The North
Carolina Department of Commerce, which is a department under the
governor Josh Stein. On May ninth, Commerce Department awarded a
project management contract worth eighty one point five million dollars
over three years. It was awarded to Horny Horn Horn.
I think the he is silent there, horn LP. There
were four other companies that bid on the project, but
Horn was picked. Horn was the prime contractor for the
North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency or ENCORE. It
was later rebranded as Rebuild NC because it was not
actually doing anything really fantastically and so they were like, ooh,
this is bad. We got people down in eastern North
Carolina still not in their homes. And it's been you know, eight, nine,
ten years since Hurricane Matthew, Hurricane Florence. An ENCORE which
was taken over by Governor Roy Cooper when he won
the governorship. Because Hurricane Matthew hit right before the election,
McCrory lost, Cooper came in and the disaster response was
a mess. And to this day I maintained Pat McCrory
would have done a better job with the disaster recovery
because he was the former mayor of Charlotte for seven
straight terms fourteen years, and we went through many disasters.
You know snowstorms, ice storms and such, and so I'm
not sure. I don't think. I think he may have
been on council during Hurricane Hugo, but I think Sue
Myrick may have been mayor at the time, but I
don't recall. Yeah, because Hugo was eighty nine, so I
think McCrory got in after that, but he may have
been on council for it. So this Horn LLP organization
was doing case management and other services for Rebuild NC
for three years. The firm's contract was not renewed after
many disaster victims complained about poor case management, which is
what they were supposed to be doing. Last month, in
West Virginia, Horn agreed to pay one point two million
dollars as part of a settlement agreement with the federal
government over alleged improper billing for services related to disaster
recovery in that state. A Horn spokesperson named Meg Anderson
said that the company did not admit any wrongdoing as
part of the agreement, so therefore we did no wrongdoing obviously,
because we didn't admit to any wrongdoing as part of
the settlement. Horn has other connections to North Carolina as well. Oh,
and the Governor's office. Yeah, Jonathan Krebs, the Western North
Carolina disaster recovery advisor to Governor Josh Stein currently. Jonathan
Krebbs worked for Horn until about twenty minutes ago April
to April twenty twenty four. So he was there when
Josh Snein was, you know, was running for election in
the race against Mark Robinson. This guy Krebs was working for.
He was there until April twenty twenty four. Krebs was
on a team of six people who wrote the request
four proposals for the contract, according to Commerce Department officials,
But he was not involved in the review committee according
to a governor spokesperson, And he will not financially benefit
from it, not him personally. See, it's just his former
firm that got the big contract, even though they didn't
get their last contract with the state renewed because they
were failing so poorly with the case management in eastern
North Carolina. But I am sure they have learned their lessons.
North Carolina received a one point four billion dollar grant
from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development last
month for disaster recovery, including the repair or reconstruction of
single family homes, rental housing, as well as infrastructure and
economic revitalization and mitigation. Horn will be in charge of
implementing the one point four billion dollar grant, with oversight
by the State Division of Community Revitalization, which is under
the Commerce Department. State Representative Mark Plus is quoted in
this article again by Lisa soor Get inside Climate News,
State Representative Mark Plus, who represents Haywood and Madison Counties
in western North Carolina, said the awarding of this contract
quote causes me great concern. It would appear the executive
branch has not learned from the massive failures of Encore
or rebuild NC. With the funding appropriated to date, he says,
the legislature has given the new administration a great opportunity
to move western North Carolina in a positive direction. I
can assure the victims of Helene I will not sit
idle watching the same mistakes being repeat. Horn is a
well known accounting and professional services firm. Krebs was a
partner Jonathan Krebbs, now at the Governor's office. He was
a partner in Horn's Government Services Division, a position he
held for nearly nine years. In that role, Crebs oversaw
multiple disaster recovery projects, including hurricanes, floods, and pandemic response.
After Krebs left Horn, he contributed twelve eight hundred dollars
to Stein's gubernatorial campaign another twenty nine thousand dollars to
the North Carolina Democratic Leadership Committee in in kind donations
in the twenty twenty four general election. Because that's what
I do. Whenever I lose my job, I donate like
forty k to politicians. It's very It yields a lot
of fruit, you know. As Rebuild nc's prime contractor, Horn
had many responsibilities, including communicating with hurricane survivors and guiding
them through the early steps of the application process. It
also hired subcontractors to do further work. She goes on
to report that while Horn was in charge of case management,
dozens of hurricane survivors complained they could not reach their
case managers for weeks or even months at a time.
Those problems continued even after Rebuild NC did not renew
Horn's contract in twenty twenty two and then went on
to hire its own case managers so the state. Just
to be clear, the state wasn't any better, okay. In
December twenty twenty two, Legal Aid of North Carolina sent
a letter to a state legislative oversight committee describing the
consistent communication breakdowns both under HORN and Rebuild NC. Applicants
sent emails to unmonitored addresses. That's always fun, Like, yeah,
if you got problems, questions, concerns, email here, and then
you send the email and you never hear back because
nobody's ever monitoring the email. They left messages on voicemails
that were apparently never checked. When applicants were able to
finally reach a case manager, they would often receive different
and even contradictory information. As case managers churned through the program,
Legal Aid wrote, the applicants did not know who to contact,
but were withdrawn for failure to communicate. So what does
that mean? You call a case manager, They're like, hey,
what's going on? I need some information. You can't get
a hold of anybody, You leave voicemails, you send emails,
and then you get kicked out of the system for
failure to communicate. In testimonies submitted to a state legislative
oversight committee, Horne attributed program failures to Rebuild NC. Rebuild
NC attributed the failures to Horn. So I say let's
try it again, shall we? Why not? All right? If
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my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they
make the media landscape more transparent. Back to the story
here inside climatenews dot org piece by Lisa Sorg on
the firm that the North Carolina Department of Commerce has
hired to run the disaster relief efforts in western North Carolina.
And it's a company that used to work for the
Encore or Rebuild NC that took and still hasn't even
finished all of the disaster relief down east from like
a decade ago. So yeah, we're going to give them
another shot. The company's name is Horny, Sorry, Horn the
e Asilent LLP, Horn LLP. And in this piece, Lisa
Sorg details some of the other, shall we say, issues
that Horn has run into in other states. For example,
in Louisiana, the state auditor investigated Horn back in twenty
twenty two after several company employees allegedly received COVID related
relief funds they were supposed to be administering earlier that
year twenty twenty two, the state of Alabama had to
return more than forty two million dollars in pandemic aid
back to the US Department of Treasury after Horn failed
to distribute emergency rental funds in a timely fashion. Horn
has successfully managed distributed. Oh, hang on a second, that's
their response. I'll give you their response in a minute.
More recent scrutiny of Horn came in West Virginia, which
dates to historic flooding that occurred there in twenty sixteen.
West Virginia investigators discovered that many of Horn's services provided
to the state were quote unquote problematic. Many of for example,
many of the personal consultations that Horn was billing nine
hundred and fifty dollars each for they were actually just
cold calls. You know what that is? A cold call.
I did some of this back in my youth when
I was, you know, even less employable than I am
right now. You would just you just get like people's
names and phone numbers, and you just call them and
you ask them, Hey, do you want to buy some service?
Hey do you want to you know, get some insurance
or whatever. It's just a cold call. So many of
what Horn was calling personal consultations with again victims of
a disaster, and they were billing nine hundred fifty dollars
each and they were cold calls in which homeowners would
tell Horn that they do not need services, and so
Horn would bill the state for that call nine hundred
and fifty dollars and call it a personal consultation. Horn
created an applicant file for every person, complete with fictitious
birth dates, social Security numbers, and fake signatures on legal documents.
This is all according to the US Attorney's Office. Investigators
also found that in some cases, these personal consultations were
actually performed by staff for voluntary organizations active in disaster.
That's the name of a group VOAD or VOAD as
I like to call it. So Horn wasn't even making
the cold calls, but they were billing as if they were.
Further investigation revealed that forty eight of the physical property
inspections where the Horn person apparently went out there to
personally inspect the property at a cost to the government
of almost nineteen hundred dollars a pop. That these inspections.
Forty eight of these property inspections were for vacant lots
where an inspection was not required. Also, Horn billed almost
seventeen hundred dollars for each of seventy two repair estimates
where there was actually nothing to repair, but seventeen hundred
dollars just to make sure. That's Horn Now. Horn says
that it has successfully managed, distributed, provided compliance, and overseen
more than one hundred and twenty two billion dollars in
funds related to natural disasters and COVID nineteen. We are
proud of our record of helping and supporting communities in
their recovery from these disasters. So if you look at
the amount of waste, fraud, and abuse, it's very, very
small when compared to the one hundred and twenty two
billion dollars that we have ethically and properly administered. See.
So it's so it's nothing to worry about. Okay, I
know it's a bit of a spotty record here in
North Carolina too, but nothing to worry about. We got
Jonathan Crabbs leading this show. Crabs with the governor's office,
who just happened to have been an employee of Horn
for like nine years before he went to the governor's office.
This is completely confidence inspiring, right, I am here for it.
I will say that the benefit of the previous governor
bricking the the response to hurricanes Matthew and Florence for
a decade, it has given the legislature more of an
incentive and more authority, more political capital to ride heard
on these efforts. Now they are intimately involved with these programs.
They have held hearings, they have been bringing people in
front of them, asking them questions. They forced out the
last Encore director. So I do have a little bit
more confidence because you've got a lot more people. These
are locally elected representatives from western North Carolina that are
actually providing real I hope oversight on the recovery efforts,
but we shall see. Oh speaking of recovery efforts, Congressman
Chuck Edwards went to a rotary club meeting in Asheville
to give an update on hurricane relief and stuff, and
then he was accused of hitting a guy. Here's a
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I'm not sure if this was out of the Charlotte
Observer or the News and Observer. Well, it's Danielle Battaglia,
so I think she is based in Raleigh. Had the
story the other day of an event that was held
by the Rotary Club, the Rotarians, and this was in Asheville,
but it was like a larger conference of all of
the various chapters of Rotarians in western North Carolina. It
was the Rotary District seventy six seventy Okay, So they
had their conference and Representative Chuck Edwards, Congressman Chuck Edwards
from Western North Carolina, was one of the scheduled speakers
where he talked to He was supposed to come in
and talk about Hurricane Helene relief efforts and such. I
you know, full disclosure, I have worked with the Charlotte
Rotary Club for you know, to raise money for childhood
literacy programs. And I actually I spoke to the Ashville
Rotary Club when I was When I was up there,
they were very nice. It went very well, if I
do say so myself. I mean, like I wasn't assaulted
or anything, which is always a plus when I would
go out in public in Ashville. If I could come
home unscathed, that was a win for me. Okay. So no,
they were all very nice. These are you know, civic leaders,
business people and stuff. And it is an apolitical, non
partisan type of an organization, and so they had their conference,
Chuck Edwards scheduled to appear. I think this was on
yes Saturday night, and a freakus occurred or fracas. I'm
not here to tell you how to pronounce the word.
I'm just saying that something like that happened. But we're
not really sure because the eyewitness wasn't really eyewitness at all.
So Chuck Edwards said he was the victim of a
drunken man's belligerence, which Check's notes Ashville right. Okay, so
that does that tracks. But a rotarian who helped to
organize the event where Edwards spoke, said the congressman was
the aggressor, striking a man in anger with a clipboard
or maybe a folder, or maybe it could have also
been a binder. We're not really sure. Not a binder
of women, but I think a binder. Nonetheless, after he
was done with his speech, this incident occurred. The rotarian
who is the quote witness, his name is Guy Gooder.
Guy Gooder. He says he heard, but did not see
Edwards hit the man, and he couldn't tell where the
blow landed because he didn't see it right, And the
reason he didn't see it was because Edwards' body was
between him and the other guy, so he because this
guy Gooder is sitting at a different table. Edwards comes
walking down the center aisle to leave after he's done
with his speech. He exchanges words with this unidentified third person,
the quote victim or the belligerent drunk guy not sure,
and Edwards, I guess, has his back turned towards Gooder.
So Gooder can't see what actually happened, but he's the
one that the observer is relying on for this ear
witness account. I guess you would call it. So. Guy Gooder,
the district's community service project chair and a corporate sponsor
of the event. I think he runs a company called
like Gooder Graphics or something, said that he had concerns
as soon as he learned that Edwards was a speaker. Ah, okay,
so you know this guy's politics. Gooder is a graphic
designer from Franklin, North Carolina who has a history of
sharing antifah posts on social media. I'm sure that has
nothing to do with his ear witness account, right, I'm
sure his loathing of Edwards and his concerns as soon
as he heard Edwards was going to be speaking, his
Antifah posts. I'm sure I have nothing to do with
his recollection of what occurred here, he said. Edwards was
invited to speak about Hurricane Helen relief and recovery, he said. Edwards, though,
used his speech to defend President Donald Trump's administration, including
on tariffs and cuts to federal agencies, Gooder said, while
Edwards said that he might try to rest or funding
to the State Department to help the Rotarian's cause of
polio eradication, he also spent his speech insulting his word,
insulting the federal agencies that the Rotarians work with most closely. Quote.
He spent thirty minutes basically insulting the Rotarian's intelligence in
his speech. Again, i am sure Guy Goodter's politics have
nothing at all to do with his interpretation of the
remarks that Chuck Edwards made. Although Gooder is described as
a critic of Trump, who is registered as an unaffiliated
voter and he serves on the Franklin Tourism Development Authority Board,
so a critic of Trump. When Edwards finished his speech,
he walks down the center aisle between the tables of
the Rotarians so he can exit the room out the
back and according to the ear witness, Gooder, this other
guy the drunk, belligerent or you know, the angel among us,
depending on your politics, I guess. The other rotarian basically
said that was a load of bs. Chuck stops and
kind of bends over, kind of in his face type stuff.
Who said he was at the next table over. Good
Er says, he was at the next table over, and
then it continues from there. Edwards, he said. Gooder says,
Edwards then hit the guy with his clipboard while the
man was seated, Gooder said. The two men then left
the room and continued arguing out of view of the rotarians.
All right, let's just stop for just one second. Let's
imagine you're sitting at the table and Chuck Edwards or
filling some other politician that you that you don't like.
They give a speech, they start walking out, and you
yell at the guy. You yell at the politician, and
the politician comes over and leans over, has some words
with you. And then when the politician hits you, do
you think it is a normal reaction? Do you think
you would react to such an action by standing up
and walking out with him into the lobby area to
continue having a conversation. Does that sound that? Yeah, that
doesn't sound that doesn't sound right. Some politician hits me
with a clipboard like it's on right, unless, of course,
maybe the guy isn't a he's a lover, not a fighter.
Maybe he doesn't know how to fight. I don't know,
but like of all the guys that if you had
to pick, like, hey, I might need to go toe
to toe with a congressman, Like, there are definitely a
bunch of congress people that I would not want to
I don't think Chuck Edwards is in that category. You know.
I think if the Chuck Edwards hits me with a clipboard,
he might be eating the clipboard, you know, like that's
just me. But I don't know. I think I'm about
like fifteen years younger than him, Gooder says. The two
men leave the room, continuing arguing out of view of
the rotarians, which why wouldn't you go out then? If
you saw this assault happen, Why wouldn't you go out
into the lobby. Wouldn't you be afraid that Chuck Edwards
would just start, like, you know, pounding the bejeebus out
of the rotarian. Why wouldn't you go defend your fellow rotarian. Now,
Gooder identified this guy, but that guy who told McClatchy
that he couldn't answer any questions, but that he had
just got off the phone with the police detective and
that they're trying to come to a resolution. So they're
not identifying the guy. So everybody else gets identified except
the potentially drunk belligerent or the angel among us, whoever,
however you choose to describe him. Good Or defended the man,
saying he was not belligerent. He says he's never seen
anybody be belief and that that would be shut down
quickly if a member did something like that. I don't know.
It kind of sounds like the guy started it, right,
wouldn't you say it's belligerent to as good Or claims,
He says, there's a load of bs. He starts, you know,
cussing at the congressman. That's kind of belligerenty, don't you think?
Seems like it to me? So I'm not sure I
believe this guy Gooder's story APD. The Asheville Police Department.
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Ashville Police Department declined to file charges on anybody regarding
the incident non incident between Congressman Chuck Edwards and a drunk,
belligerent or angelic Rotary club member in Nashville. In a
statement released this this week, the department confirmed that yes,
APD responded to a call from quote an individual who
reported having been assaulted by Congressman Chuck Edwards. The caller
was not identified in the statement, nor were the allegations
details made public, which I feel is kind of odd.
The initial report does not contain any narrative written by
the responding police officers, nor does it mention Edwards or
contain the name of the caller. I don't know how
many police reports you have read in your lifetime. I
have read quite a few. And in fact, when I
was a reporter here at WBT, I would head on
down to CMPD headquarters every day at the beginning of
the shift and I would do what we called cop shop,
where you go when you look around to purchase a
police officer. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, No cop shop was.
It was the beat and you would go and they
would print out all of the police reports from overnight
and they would be sitting in a tray on the
desk in this little office, and reporters would go in
there and look through the police reports and if anything
jumps out, you're looking at you know, famous people, You're
trying to find, you know, names of famous people. And
this is before the days of cell phone, so like
I'd have to write everything down off of a police
report because you were not allowed to take them out
of the room. Although I have always suspected that some
reporters would swipe some of them. I cannot prove this,
but that was a suspicion. But the police would always
write out what happened in their report, so obviously you
know what happened in the report, there's a record of it.
The statement that was issued by Astville Police characterized the
encounter as a quote disturbance, and said the department conducted
a thorough investigation, which included interviews with the reporting party
and multiple witnesses. After reviewing the findings and consulting with
the Buncom County DA's office, who was a Democrat, it
was mutually determined that no criminal charges against any party
involved in the incident will be initiated. A statement released
by Edwards' congressional office said, immediately following a speaking event,
I refused to engage with an intoxicated man that was cursing.
He became more belligerent and later called the police. His
behavior was embarrassing to the people at the event and
was duly noted by the police. The congressman had been invited,
as I mentioned earlier, to talk about helene relief efforts.
One rotary member told the Asheville Watchdog the AVL Watchdog group,
which is what I'm reading from now, that the speech
did not go well from the outset, and it was
a partisan tone that may have triggered the angry outburst
that Edwards faced. So in other words, he totally deserved it.
You should have seen how short his skirt was. All right,
that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much
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