Speaker 1: What's going on.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It
is heard live every day from noon to three on
WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content
like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily
show prep with all the links, become a patron, go
to dpeteclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button.
Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet.
And again, thank you so much for your support. You've
got cash, Bettel, You've got In front of the Senate
confirmation hearing, rfk Jr was back at at Tulsea.
Speaker 1: Gabbard was up there. We had the you know, the.
Speaker 2: Press conference from Donald Trump on the plane crash overnight.
And then we also have two legislative hearings up in
Raleigh yesterday and then another one today focusing on Hurricane
storm relief and specifically recovery. And I was watching on
Twitter as my co Nick Craig, the host of the
Carolina Journal News Hour that's heard right here on WBT
at five am week days, also the host of the
Nick Craig Show. I saw Nick tweeting through the meeting
and so I said, hey, Nick, why don't you come
on and talk about what you're watching, so I don't
have to Nick.
Speaker 1: Welcome Sarah, thank you for your service.
Speaker 3: Hey, it's a true honor and pleasure to be able
to post on X and for five books with the information.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, so where do you want to do? You want
to start with today? Is that freshest in your mind?
You want to do that and then backtrack to yesterday
and talk about what happened yesterday, or I'll just I'll
take your lead.
Speaker 3: Let's start with today. And it's pretty confusing because we've
got two different things that we're talking about here. There's
storm recovery for storms that hit the eastern half of
North Carolina in twenty sixteen and twenty eighteen. Those were
Hurricanes Matthew and Florence. And there's an agency in a
group known as ENCORE, the North Carolina Office of Recovery
and Resiliency also known as rebuild NC, that is responsible
for that situation in the east. And now we've got
a new group under the new governor, Josh Stein, the
former Democrat Attorney General, called a GROW and see that's
the Governor Recovery's Office for Western North Carolina.
Speaker 1: So Pete.
Speaker 3: I know you love acronyms so much, so a lot
of acronyms all over the place. But the committee meeting
that took place early this morning in Raleigh around eight
thirty focused on the storms from at this case almost
a decade ago in the eastern half of the state.
And this group en Corpete, really has had a huge
amount of issues since the start. As it stands right now,
we learned that they're needing about an additional two hundred
and sixteen million dollars if everything is supposed to go
as planned, two hundred and sixteen million additional dollars to
get more than twelve hundred individuals back into their homes
that have been waiting in some cases since twenty sixteen
to have their homes rebuilt by the state. The number
continues to rise for how much money they need. They
have a two hundred plus person staff, and the work
is not being done in a timely and efficient manner.
In law masers are incredibly frustrated with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so I said, Okay, So I lied, I
didn't Well, I didn't lie. I didn't have to watch it,
but I did watch some of it. So I started
I listened on the way in and I caught some
of the comments, and maybe you can correct the number,
but I heard somewhere around eleven hundred homes still to
be built, and they are promising Prior Gibson who's now
in charge, although I'm more respectful I call him Previous Gibson.
But Prior Gibson's in charge of this agency now because
the previous head, Laura hoggshead, she was shown the door
about a month or so ago because of the ineffectiveness
of the agency under her leadership. And I think he said,
like eleven hundred or so homes that they're trying to
get built before the end of the year.
Speaker 1: Is what is the promise that he would like to make.
Speaker 3: But you never know well, and that's part of the
issue here. There's so many different numbers that are being
thrown out of You look at certain set of screenshots
in the presentation, it shows that there are eleven one
and seventy and nine homes under construction or a waiting construction.
But then you add up numbers in a different slot,
it's closer to twelve hundred. So it's somewhere between eleven
and twelve hundred homes that need to be that still
need some level of construction, whether that's a complete and
total rebuild, which we found out costs the state about
the taxpayers more accurately to say about two hundred thousand
dollars or some sort of serious remediation, mold water, whatever
it might be. So somewhere between eleven and twelve one
hundred homes.
Speaker 2: Now, one of the things that they focused on towards
the end that I heard that I think is actually
overlooked in a lot of these discussions, and I think
Gibson is correct to hammer this, which is the essentially
the infrastructure of contractors, the vendors that the state is
using to do the work and in these types of trades,
like you got to keep the pipeline filled with work.
And so this is what is jamming up the the legislature,
is that Gibson keeps coming back saying we need more money,
because if there's no money in the pipeline, then the vendors,
the contractors don't get paid or they're not going to
be able to do the work because they're scheduling their
jobs out into you know, months into the future. So
if you've got this sort of network, this infrastructure of
builders that you have compiled for this work, and then
the funding drives up, they're going to go and do
other stuff and then that delays it even further. But again,
like you heard, the legislators do not like being put
in the position where they basically have to say yes.
Speaker 3: Right well, and that was one thing that was brought
up and I don't remember. I think it may have
been Representative Plus brought this up right at the end,
is that you know you're going to start doing things
and then you're going to come to the General Assembly
and essentially force our hand into doing it. And you're
right on the whole pipeline issue. Unfortunately, for from the
General Assembly standpoint, they have over just the last couple
of months, they have given this age and see a
couple somewhere in the ballpark of like eighty or ninety
million dollars that was just for them to get their
shortfall dealt with where they were not paying employees and
contractors weren't getting invoices paid. They just gave them that
money in October and November of last year. And here
we are in the final week of January saying we
need another two hundred and sixteen million dollars for this
project to be completed. Oh and by the way, it's
going to take a whole year. And as you noted, Pete,
if you don't give us the money, none of the
contractors are going to want to work with us, and
all of these people in eastern North Carolina will never
get their houses rebuilt, is essentially what was said.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then the infrastructure that you have built collapses
if it hasn't already, and you got to start from
scratch and getting new vendors and everything else. So from there,
let me pivot to the west, because, as you mentioned,
it's a different recovery effort grow and see Governor's Recovery
Office for Western North Carolina that Josh Stein set up,
probably recognizing the political hit he would take if he
allowed end to manage this problem. And Senator Tim Moffatt
from Henderson County out west, he made a comment where
he said something like, if you did to Western North
Carolina what you have done to Eastern North Carolina, He's like,
we'd probably secede from the state. Like yes, And so
that is definitely in keeping with the Western North Carolina mindset.
Speaker 1: So let's shift over there.
Speaker 2: This was yesterday right that they took a presentation and
held a hearing on the Western effort.
Speaker 3: Yes, so, yes, the House and the Senate. We're back
in Raleigh for really the start of the twenty twenty
five session. At noon yesterday and around two o'clock, members
of Destin Hall's new Helleen Select Committee, which are members
of the House, sat down and got a presentation for
members of Grow and Scene. I've got to give Josh
Stein credit of which may be hard for many people
to do, but I got to give Josh Stein credit
for getting ahead of this. Yeah, Encore has been broken.
It's been broken for a year. Governor Roy Cooper was
essentially silent about ENCORE for the longest period of time.
He never got in front of any of the issues,
and to the to the new Governor's credit, within a
day of being in the Governor's mansion, he admitted that
this previous agency in group was not capable of doing
the work and has spawned his own. The question and
kind of the issue that is already arising with this
pete is now you are at training wheels again for
a new state agency. You are starting at the absolute
ground floor. While ENCORE has its issues. At least it
has six years plus worth of a track record that
it can't that it likely is not to repeat some
of those same mistakes over again, versus grow NC, which
is brand new and could be susceptible, not guaranteed, but
could be susceptible to creating causing some of the same
issues that we saw in the eastern half of the
state because it's a whole new group of people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Gibson mentioned some of this stuff where he
talked about like these exceptional cases where you know, you think, oh,
it's just a rebuild of a house, and then it
turns out well, actually, no, like you don't own the house.
It was your cousin's house, and they let you put
a trailer on it, and actually the lot lines were
drawn in correctly.
Speaker 1: Oh and you're not permitted for this.
Speaker 2: Oh and you owe back taxes and so all of
these other things start arising as you're going through these
rebuild efforts. And yeah, like this is a concern that
Grow and See is not going to be as prepared
to identify those pitfalls because they are building from the
ground up.
Speaker 3: Well, I mentioned this on my podcast this morning. Not
to take anything away. I'm, by the way, in the
eastern half of the state, so not to take anything
away from Florence and Matthew I lived in Wilmington during Florence.
It was a nasty storm. But Pete, you can't compare
the flat, relatively low lying coastline of the eastern half
of the state to the geography out west. I mean,
it's not even an apple sta You're not even comparing
fruit to fruit. I mean, it's a completely different ballgame.
When you talk about septic sewer systems, piping all of
that stuff in the western half of the state, you
can't even draw an analogy to some of that in
the eastern half. So rightfully, so, I think there's a
lot of concern from lawmakers that we don't want and
we heard it today in the hearing, is we can't
keep doing the same thing over and over again. We
heard that from Representative Brandon Jones, who was irate over
what we had seen with encre and doesn't want similar
things to be done by grow and see in the
western half of the state.
Speaker 1: So finally, I'll just make one prediction.
Speaker 2: You're going to hear the term learning curve a lot
in the recovery efforts in the West.
Speaker 1: That's my fear.
Speaker 2: I suspect we're going to hear that term or something
similar as this thing gets underway.
Speaker 1: I hope not, but that's my suspicion.
Speaker 3: So well, yeah, Pete, it's a great point, I'll say
real quickly. To Laura Hogshead's credit, the former Encore director,
she said on her way out of the door, we
already made the mistakes. Don't let another group start up
and create and have the same issues that we did.
We made the mistakes, we learned our hard lesson and
we don't want to repeat. So there is some truth
to that as well.
Speaker 1: Well, that explains it.
Speaker 2: Then maybe she had a checklist of all the mistakes
to make and she was just going down a checklist.
Speaker 1: Did that one?
Speaker 4: Do that one?
Speaker 1: All right?
Speaker 2: Nick Craig, host of the Carolina Journal News Hour heard
right here on WBT every morning five am, and also
his own show, The Nick Craig Show.
Speaker 1: Where do people get that?
Speaker 3: You can get The Nick Craig Show over at nickcraig
dot com or give me a follow over on x
as well. Just search for the Nick Creig Show. Thanks
for the time, Pete, appreciate it, Yes.
Speaker 2: Sir, Thanks Nick, get some sleep. He'll be up with
you bright and early tomorrow. And that's Nick Craig. Here's
a great idea. How about making an escape to a
really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. Just
a quick drive up the mountain and Cabins of Asheville
is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon,
maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get
family and friends together for a big old reunion, Cabins
of Asheville has the ideal spot for you where you
can reconnect with your loved ones and the things that
truly matter. Nestled within the breath taking fourteen thousand acres
of the Pisga National Forest, their cabins offer a serene
escape in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Centrally
located between Ashville and the entrance of the Great Smoky
Mountain National Park. It's the perfect balance of seclusion and
proximity to all the local attractions, with hot tubs, fireplaces,
air conditioning, smart TVs, Wi Fi, grills, outdoor tables, and
your own private covered porch. Choose from thirteen cabins, six cottages,
two villas and a great lodge with eleven king sized bedrooms.
Cabins of Ashville has the ideal spot for you for
any occasion, and they have pet friendly accommodations. Call or
text eight two eight three six seven seventy sixty eight
or check out all there is to offer at cabins
Offashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime.
Thanks again to Nick Craig for hopping on and joining
me and giving us the low down on what happened
up in Raleigh yesterday.
Speaker 1: Obviously I was on.
Speaker 2: The air when the first hearing occurred. I did catch
some of it today, but not all of it, and
I know Nick was monitoring it. The thing went about, gosh,
I don't know, two two and a half, three hours
or something. So this piece appeared in the McClatchy papers,
Charlotte Observer, Raleigh News An Observer. North Carolina lawmakers opened
the business of the twenty twenty five legislative session Wednesday
with a hearing on Hurricane Helene recovery efforts, attempting to
sort out how much state funding is necessary and raising
concerns over the disbursement of federal aid. Testifying before the
House Committee on Helene Recovery. Mark Calabria, the Director of
the Governor's Recovery Office for Western North Carolina or GROW
and See, along with Jonathan Krebs, the Western North Carolina
Recovery Advisor, outlined recovery efforts and funding. Governor Josh Stein
created grow NC to focus on the western part of
the state. According to the Office of State Budgeted Management,
damages and needs in Western North Carolina are estimated at
just under sixty billion dollars. Sixty billion dollars by comparison
the state budget, Well, it used to be like twenty
Now I think it's like it maybe like thirty something.
This is twice our annual budget, more than twice our
annual budget, if I recall. In December, Congress approved a
one hundred billion dollar disaster relief package, and a portion
of that is allocated to North Carolina. State lawmakers have
also allocated about nine hundred million dollars, so just under
a billion towards recovery efforts across three different relief bills,
which was news to me because I kept hearing that
the North Carolina Republican General Assembly hadn't given the West
any money. Oh wait, a minute, you're saying they have
allocated like a billion dollars.
Speaker 1: That's interesting.
Speaker 2: The General Assembly is in fact expected to do more.
There is the Rainy Day Fund, and if I recall correctly,
that's got like fifteen billion I think in it. But
even that's not enough. And there are all sorts of
rules when you're trying to get federal money, and so
if you spend the state money on stuff, the Feds
may look at that and say, oh, well, then we're
not going to give you reimbursement, basically because.
Speaker 1: You paid for it.
Speaker 2: So there's this whole game that gets played of Okay, yes,
we know you need this money, so yes, we'll pay
for this stuff. But if you already fixed it because
it was such a high priority, well then you you
know you paid for it already, so we'll just use
it for other stuff. That guy krabs outline the top priorities,
and right now their first priority is debris.
Speaker 1: Removal and then housing.
Speaker 2: Debris removal is really really important because it is fuel
for forest fires which have actually now broken out in
McDowell County. The Crooked Creek fire broke out, and I
heard in one of our newscasts that it is now
at like fifty percent contained. It's the downed trees, all
of that debris, all of the wood, everything that's that's
on the ground. It's dried out and it's awesome fuel
for forest fires. And two other fires then broke out
over the last twenty four hours, also in McDowell County.
They're much smaller, but the Crooked Creek fire, the first
one had burned more than two hundred and fifty acres.
Speaker 1: And hopefully, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, obviously they're out there fighting the fires and they're
trying to clear some of the debris and make fire
lines that kind of stuff. But that was predicted, by
the way, it was predicted that that would be a problem.
Back in October, foxweather dot Com did a story predicting
that this could occur because of all of the down trees,
and so now it has happened. Hopefully it'll be the last.
All Right, I hope you had a happy holiday season.
But tell me if something like this happened at your house,
your family and friends are gathered around, maybe y'all are
in the living room, you're laughing, swapping stories, reminiscing, and
then somebody says, hey, dad, remember those old VHS tapes
Did you ever get them transferred? And then the room
gets all quiet. All eyes are on Dad, who says, oh,
you know, well, I've been meaning to but I just
having gotten around to it. Look, don't let those priceless
memories sit in a box for another year, all right.
Create a Video has been helping families in the Charlotte
area preserve their history since nineteen ninety seven. Simply bring
in your old cam quarter tapes and Creative Video will
transfer them to a USB flash drive for just fourteen
ninety five per tape. You have a big collection, They've
got a discount for you. And next year, instead of
talking about those memories, imagine gathering the family to watch
them together. Talk about a memorable gift. So do what
I did. Trust the experts at creat a Video, conveniently
located in Minhill right off I four eighty five and
online at create a Video dot com. So the President
has named four North Carolinians to be part of a
panel evaluating FEMA President Donald Trump. According to ncnewsline dot com,
a piece by Christine ju President Donald Trump has designated
Republican National Committee Chair Michael Wattley and three other North
Carolinians to serve on a panel charged with reviewing the
work and the future of FEMA. Trump signed an executive
order Friday that created the Federal Emergency Management Agency Review Council,
or the FEARC or as I call it, the FEMARK.
The group analyzes the federal response to Hurricane Helene and
other natural disasters. Later on in the piece, she writes
that it's unclear what Trump's plan to reform FEMA would entail,
asked by reporters to elaborate on the proposal. When he
came to western North Carolina last week, Trump said that
he would prefer for states to get direct payouts from
the federal government rather than coordinating with FEMA. By the way,
just as an aside on this idea where a lot
of our friends on the left don't understand how this
would even work.
Speaker 1: Well, just think of it in terms of, like, oh,
I don't know virtually every other.
Speaker 2: Federal program that you guys support, right, It's kind of
like this blind spot that a lot of leftists have
for school vouchers and.
Speaker 1: Like, oh my gosh, vouchers. Vouchers are bad, vouchers.
Speaker 2: Are terrible, and all this stuff, and it's like yeah, but
we use vouchers basically for Medicare and Medicaid. You guys
don't have any problem with that system, right, So how
is that different?
Speaker 1: Same thing here? Right?
Speaker 2: The federal government disperses all sorts of grants. I mean,
haven't we heard over the last forty eight hours, like
the meltdowns from the left and these NGOs.
Speaker 1: Like, oh, we can't survive that.
Speaker 2: People will die, you know, children will starve and all this.
If we don't get all of this grant money that
Trump tried to freeze for review, you can't possibly do that.
We rely on these grants. People will die. Well, why
wouldn't you just apply that same defense of the grant
making process over to the emergency response? Just as like
these NGOs, I think you would argue, do this great
work and probably do it better than Gov.
Speaker 1: Co does. Why wouldn't you just apply that same logic
to FEMA? Right now?
Speaker 2: It does rely admittedly so on states being competent, and
what we saw in North Carolina with Hurricanes Matthew and Florence,
our governor was not very competent in disaster relief. Governor
Roy Cooper was not good at statewide or even regional disasters.
He wasn't Matthew Florence Covid, Right, he wasn't good at this.
And it makes sense because he never had really any
executive leadership, right. He was in the attorney general's position
for sixteen years. And while you could say, yes, that's
executive branch, but remember he never did email, remember that, lie,
I'm sorry that story. He would only deal with people
in person and on the phone. And that's so this way,
there's no public record of anything that he says or does,
except for like, like, hey, it's you know, your coworker
Joe's birthday today. Everybody was Joe, happy birthday, you know,
something like that. He had, Yeah, he had like it
was it like thirty emails that he had sent over
sixteen years. Then that was all they could find when
they did the foyer request for his office. It was ridiculous,
like guys totally using a burner account. I do not
believe that he does not use emails.
Speaker 1: Anyway.
Speaker 2: If we had a press corps that was interested in
this up in Raleigh, I suspect there could have been
a lot more pressure brought to bear to get the
problems fixed down in eastern North Carolina and So if
you are going to do the block grant thing with
FEMA going to the you know, send money to the
states and let the states handle it, it's going to
require governors to be better at disaster response. And when
you elect a governor who is not good at disaster response,
you end up.
Speaker 1: With what we saw.
Speaker 2: And we're going to find out if Governor Josh Stein
is good at disaster response. Now, we're going to find out, right,
and a lot of people will either benefit or suffer.
Speaker 1: All right, let me jump over and get Steve. Hello, Steve,
welcome to the show.
Speaker 5: Thank you. Yeah. The reason they don't want to have
money go directly to the states and they'd rather have
it through an organization like FEMA is so they can
launder it. They need to launder the money back to
their whoever. That's why the Democrats don't ever like to
have direct payments or vouchers. They want to be in control.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean theoretically the states would then be able
to do the laundering too.
Speaker 1: If that's the true motive, Well, I think is.
Speaker 5: Trying to take one corrupt organization out of the equation completely,
which would be FEMA, and hoping that the States will
do a little bit of a better job.
Speaker 2: But yeah, well there, So I have heard this argument
that that FEMA you know, funnels the money to their
to their friends or whatever. Now this goes to an
aspect of the of the recovery efforts that they touched
on in these hearings up in Raleigh, which is the
infrastructure of your vendors, of your your service providers, basically
your contractors. And if they are if they're not given
a sustained amount of work, they will go and get
that work someplace else. And then when something happens and
you've got to call them back, they're going to be busy.
They've got other work that they're doing, you know, six
seven months planned out into the future. So it's hard
to mobilize that. And so the idea was that, well, FEMA,
with all of its money, they can mobilize that because
they'll be able to send these people, these agents or
these vendors rather, you know, to all different areas of
the country that need it.
Speaker 1: That was the idea.
Speaker 2: And if a state doesn't have a lot of disasters
all the time, then maybe they can't mobilize quickly.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I mean, I feel like that's a concern. It's I
feel like it's a reasonable concern and that needs to
be addressed. Now, the flip side of that is that
you end up with these companies that rely on that
FEMA gravy train, right, and so are they doing the
best work If they get there first and they show
up whenever FEMA calls, that's great, But maybe they're not
doing the best job, and so FEMA then gives them
like a preference for this work because they show up fast,
but maybe the work isn't great. So, I mean, it's
a very complex problem when you're trying to rebuild homes
for people.
Speaker 1: Steve, I do appreciate the call. It is it's tough.
Speaker 2: It's tough to figure it out if you're in a
state that doesn't see a lot of massive natural disasters.
But I would point out if you are of the
mind that climate change is calling causing all sorts of
massive natural disasters more and more frequently, then I kind
of feel like you should have a system then put
in place, right, I mean, if you believe that this
was really happening, then you should stand up this kind
of operation like an official state builder.
Speaker 1: Oh crap, did I just give somebody a bad idea.
I apologize, that's a terrible idea. Don't do it all right.
Speaker 2: If you're listening to this show, you know I try
to keep up with all sorts of current events, and
I know you do too, And you've probably heard me
say get your news from multiple sources. Why well, because
it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've
been so impressed with ground News. It's an app, and
it's a website, and it combines news from around the
world in one place so you can compare coverage and
verify information. You could check it out at check dot ground,
dot news, slash pete. I put the link in the
podcast description too. I started using ground News a few
months ago and more recently chose to work with them
as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how
stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature
shows you which stories get ignored by the left and
the right.
Speaker 1: See for yourself.
Speaker 2: Check dot ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that
link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I
use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature.
Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports ground news as they make the media landscape
more transparent. So I mentioned Donald Trump said or Donald
Trump named Ford North Carolinians to this panel. I mentioned one,
that's Michael Wattley, former head of the North Carolina Republican
Party and then he went over and ran the National
Republican Party and he still is. He's the chairman of
the RNC. Also on the committee or on the council,
I should say, are members of Congress representing North Carolina
Republican representatives Virginia Fox of Banner Elk, Chuck Edwards from
Flat Rock, and Tim Moore of King's Mountain. The panel
will contain no more than twenty members and for one
year to create a quote, full scale review by individuals
highly experienced that effective disaster responsor recovery, who shall recommend
to the President improvements or structural changes to promote the
national interest and enable national resilience. Homeland Security Secretary Christy
Nome and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will oversee the committee.
And again that is from Ncnewsline dot Com.
Speaker 1: Got a message here from John.
Speaker 5: Oh.
Speaker 1: I love emails. Let's start.
Speaker 2: This is a touchy question, John, are you stirring the
pot here. Okay, it's a touchy question, not to sound
cold hearted, but how much responsibility does the government have
to make individuals hold for their loss? At what point
does the government pick up the responsibility over the individuals?
If I have a fire at my house and the
insurance company does not cover all of the losses, government
does not step in to make up the difference. Is
there a limit to the losses? For instance, in California,
those are multimillion dollar homes filled with probably a million
dollars of personal items. Let's say, is that the responsibility
of the government to replace I understand the urgency and
need to get people into temporary housing, but is it
the role of government to provide permanent housing to be
in charge of the rebuilding process. We know government is
probably the least efficient management out there, so well, this
raises the question too. Then why not cut the check
to the individual people rather than wash it through the
state government and have them deal with all of.
Speaker 1: The permits and all that stuff.
Speaker 2: One of the things that came out I mentioned this
when I was chatting with Nick Craig at the beginning
of the hour, trying to remember the word that the
guy in charge of Encore used guy's name is prior
Gibson or previous Gibson, if you will, And he was
saying that like there are like these unusual cases. It's
one thing if like, Okay, you know, you bought your
home and it's in some subdivision and you've got everything
properly platted, and the deed is correct and the lot
lines are drawn correctly, and you're up to date on
your taxes all.
Speaker 1: Of that stuff.
Speaker 2: But when you and and he warned Tim Moffatt, state
senator from Henderson County, he said, somebody's like the case
the number of these unusual cases or something, And that's
not the word that he used for it, but it's
a classific classification that they use.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have way more of these out west, up
in the mountains.
Speaker 2: You are gonna have way more because up there you
have a lot of people that are land rich, cash poor,
a lot of people that have land that's been in
their family for generations, and they build additional homes on
that land. They'll bring in modular trailers or modular units
or trailers, mobile units, whatever, and they will take, you know,
a fourteen fifteen acre piece of property, and maybe you
could only actually build on half of it, and then
they will keep putting houses, and a lot of places
out there don't even have zoning rules, and so just
over the years, over generations, more and more houses get
put on that buildable acreage. But who actually owns that land?
Well maybe it was it was Papa and he's been
dead for fifty years. Okay, So who owns the house? Okay,
well it was my you know aunt, I'll use the
names he used, like Aunt Susie. Aunt Susie owned the house,
but she's she hadn't lived there. It's you know, another cousin, Mary,
who lives in the house and has been for a
long time, and she's the one that's out of the house. Okay,
So who are you dealing with? Like, when you're having
to do all of the paperwork and stuff, who signs
that paperwork? Is it Aunt Susie? You can't get PayPal
to do it?
Speaker 1: Papa?
Speaker 2: I don't want to say Papa, Papa. It's like papal
like the Pope. The Pope ain't signing it. Papa can't
because he's long gone, never been transferred over. She got
to clean up those records okay. And then you go
in you're like, okay, so now out of the fourteen acres,
you got seven buildable lakers. Okay, you got you know,
let's say four houses on the acreage. Where are the
property lines? Oh, we don't have any property property lines.
We didn't need any, right, we're all family.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: So when you're doing a map for the build right,
you need you need the map. And then it's like, okay,
well let's look at then what where the lot lines
are or where the property lines are. And it's like, well,
we just know it goes down to like that creek
down there?
Speaker 1: Does it? When you go have you.
Speaker 2: Ever read through how they designate property lines, even in
Meckelberg County, it's nuts. It's nuts. Like it's like three
or four pages. You go pull your property, go look
at your deed or whatever. You'll see like where they
describe what the lot lines are and it takes like
three pages. And some of this stuff like old school stuff,
some of the older documents. They'll say things like there's
this tree.
Speaker 4: You know, it's like you go sixty feet to the
tree and then you make a left, like so it's
not just like the coordinates on a map.
Speaker 2: A lot of it is now the modern day stuff is.
But so there's all that that you got to sift
through all that, So who is doing all of that work?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And now you've got state agents coming in and they're
having to track all of this stuff down before they
can even start the rebuilding because they got to get
the permits and which permits from which entity all of it.
It's a lot, I mean, it's a huge undertaking. And
that's what he was describing, and so that's why they
have their case management mechanism and all that they've been
using down East. But obviously that hasn't been working very
well for a lot of people. And to their credit
over the last eight to six to eight years, because
eight years ago was Matthew and then six years ago
was Florence, they have put back into their homes like
thirty I think it was thirty four hundred families. They
have rebuilt thirty four hundred over eight years. That still
seems kind of slow, but yeah, they're neither going to
knock out eleven hundred or twelve hundred in a year
less than a year, and it took him eight years
to build three times as many I'm not supremely confident,
let me just say it that way. And what he
is saying is out West, it's going to be an
even bigger challenge. I think we need to get a
whole bunch of experts and a bunch of builders together
on this.
Speaker 1: All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you
so much for listening.
Speaker 2: I could not do the show without your support and
the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast,
so if you'd like, please support them too and tell
them you heard it here. You can also become a
patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.