NC Gov. Josh Stein outraged by attack on PA governor, focuses on Hurricane Helene recovery

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Gov. Josh Stein spoke one-on-one Tuesday with WRAL News to
discuss a man setting fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home, how he
said he’s helping with Hurricane Helene recovery and the proposed 2025 state budget.

Below is a transcript between WRAL anchor/reporter Lena Tillett
and Stein during their interview at the Executive Mansion in Raleigh.

Note: WRAL News’ questions are in bold and Stein’s
answers in regular font.

I don’t take it lightly that I’m here in a governor’s
residence, given what we saw in Pennsylvania with Gov. Josh Shapiro, he and his
family having to flee their home after someone set it on fire. What went
through your mind when you saw that? Well,

“Outrage. I’m friends with Josh Shapiro. He and I were
attorneys general together, and, of course, now are governors together, and
he’s a great guy. And I met [his wife] Lori. I’ve met some of their kids, and
to know that they had just celebrated this holiday Passover with many of their
family members and friends, and to have somebody come and try to light their
house on fire and kill them is just terrifying, and it’s upsetting, and I’m
just so grateful that the man is apprehended and locked up where he cannot harm
them anymore.

Have you spoken to Gov. Shapiro?

We’ve texted. Yep, and he’s justifiably angry and eager to
get on with the business of being governor.

What was your message to him?

Just how much I was thinking about him and that it was a
terrible thing for him and his family, and I was just so grateful that they
were healthy, safe and well.

You mentioned Passover right now. Authorities aren’t
giving a specific motivation, but they are saying that he did go to the home
with the intention of harming Gov. Shapiro. They had just hosted a Passover
dinner. Do you have any fear that you’ll be attacked for your faith?

I don’t. There’s, unfortunately, a lot of mental illness in
this country. And so, the sad reality is, is that anybody, anybody who’s on TV,
on social media, wherever someone can fixate on them … And so just because I
have impressions, I’m visible. There’s that. But you know, it could happen to
anybody, and so I’m not, I’m not personally worried. I’m certainly grateful for
the security detail and how professional they are and what a great job they do.
So, I just do my job.

Are you expecting maybe heightened security here as a
result of what happened?

If they are, they don’t tell me. They just do their jobs.
And I’m sure whatever security level they’re at, it’s the right one.

Let’s talk about an issue that I know you have said is
your number one priority, and that is the recovery for western North Carolina
after Helene devastated that community. We just saw the state Senate’s budget
proposal roughly $33 billion allocating another $700 million in Helene
recovery, in addition to the $1.5 billion that the state has already dedicated
to Helene aid. Is that enough?

Well, we have to be sure that that money is actually
allocated to actually help, as opposed to being moved to reserve account. Sometimes
they’ve appropriated money, but all they’ve done is put it into reserve
account. So, we’re still studying the budget to understand its implications.
But $700 million in and of itself, is not enough.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the budget, as it relates
to Helene, is a failure, because we can have many bites of this apple. There
are needs that we have today. There are going to be needs that we have a year
from now. They’re needs that we have from six months from now, and each one is
a little bit different.

I was appreciative of the General Assembly appropriating a $500
million. That was the first bill that I signed into law. It’s nowhere near
enough, but it is enough for us to get started. So we’re now launching our
housing reconstruction program. We’re launching our bridge repair and
renovation efforts. There’s money to help towns revitalize our infrastructure
so that businesses can succeed.

So … none of those dollar amounts are enough, but we can
start those programs, and hopefully we will augment them over time.

You tweeted that you’re working on a second recovery
budget proposal. What would that look like?

Yeah, it’ll include money for fire prevention out West. We
have these March was like twice as bad a fire month as is typical for March. We
want to have money to help local governments deal with their financial needs.
We desperately need support for small business grants. Small businesses are
hanging on by a thread. We’ve got to help them get through this tough time, so
that their doors are open to welcome tourists when they come this summer. We
need more money for housing construction. So, we need a little bit more of
everything and some new programs as well.

Were you hoping for more than $700 million in the budget
proposal?

Yeah, as I said, to me, I don’t care if it’s in this budget
or if it’s in a supplemental budget, like we did with the first hurricane
relief package, the key is, is that we commit to the programs that are going to
help western North Carolina recover.

So, let’s talk about the help coming from the federal
level. We’ve done a lot of reporting. We’ve spoken to a lot of families in
western North Carolina, as you can imagine, they’re saying that the money, they
understand, it’s been allocated, but it’s not getting to them, and they need to
rebuild now. How do you assess the help coming from the federal government?

Well, it’s not enough and it’s not fast enough, and that’s
always going to be the case.

There was an appropriation made in late December for $100
billion nationally. We don’t know exactly what North Carolina share is. It
could be anywhere between $12 billion and $15 billion. And, some of the money
went to Department of Transportation, some went to the Environmental Protection
Agency [EPA], some went to the Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD].
So different monies went to agriculture, to different departments, some of them
have allocated their shares.

We know what our share is for EPA, we know what our share is
for HUD, but we don’t have access to those dollars yet. We have to submit a
plan, for instance, to HUD. HUD reviews that plan, approves it, and once it’s
approved, we can then start drawing the money down.

We submitted our action plan faster than any state that was
impacted by Helene. In fact, no state has submitted an action plan to HUD after
a major hurricane in the last decade faster than we did here in North Carolina.

And so, my mantra is urgency. It’s urgency, it’s focus, it’s
transparency and accountability, and that’s what I’m bringing. Those are the
values we bring to every bit of our work.

So now, the application is sitting with HUD. We’re waiting
for them to give us the approval. We asked our congressional delegation if they
would write a letter to HUD to urge it along.

[U.S.] Sen. [Tedd] Budd, [R-North Carolina] took the lead on
that effort, and the letter was submitted. So, we’re doing everything we can to
exercise every lever at our disposal to try to get funds to North Carolina
because money in an account doesn’t do anything for anybody. The money’s got to
be on the ground in communities in western North Carolina. That’s how we’re
going to make a difference and help people recover.

[On Tuesday, state] Sen. [Ralph] Hise, [R-Alleghany,
Ashe, Avery, Caldwell, Haywood, Madison, Mitchell, Watauga and Yancey counties]
said, “We must be prepared to fend for ourselves.” Can North Carolina fend for
itself?

No. I mean, we can do a lot ourselves, and we need the state
government to step up at a much higher level than it has done so far, but when
you have a storm of this magnitude, $60 billion in damage … It’s very typical,
if you look at the history of storms where the federal government will pay
about 50% of the damage and to help the communities recover, I can show you a
series of storms where that was the case, Katrina and others.

North Carolina, right now, is in the low 20% in terms of
what we’ve gotten from the federal government.

We need much more support from our federal delegation, from
Washington, from this administration, and I’ve submitted a $19 billion
appropriation request. Actually, it’s $11.5 billion in new appropriations. It’s
$7.5 billion in money that’s previously appropriated that we want allocated to
North Carolina. Essentially, so that we get our fair share of previously
appropriated funds. So, we will keep pushing the federal government, because we
need $19 billion from them, and we’re going to need more from the state.

If the federal government abandons us at this time, it could
be devastating in terms of slowing down our ability to help western North
Carolina recover.

You’re on the Council of Governors [as a] co-chair, a
Democrat and a Republican, and you’re tasked with looking at ways to improve
FEMA, correct? So, as part of that effort, have you been able to talk to
President [Donald] Trump directly and tell him about the immediate needs of
North Carolina?

I talked with the president when he came to Asheville. I’ve
talked with his administration on multiple occasions, and have a conversation
with the acting FEMA administrator [Wednesday], another one. We’ve had a series
of these calls.

There are things that FEMA can do better now, what I want to
explain is that FEMA, its imperfections, are a lot a result of laws that
Congress passed. Congress has said, “you have to do this, you can’t do this,
you can’t do this.” And it creates all these restrictions on how they can
operate that make it very difficult for them to be flexible and quick in
responding to disasters.

There are ideas that we have, that I’ve shared with Gov. [Glenn]
Youngkin, the co-chair, [the] Republican governor from Virginia, for his
consideration that … I want to send to Washington, to the administration about
ways that they can reform FEMA so that it is more agile in getting money on the
ground, quicker.

That’s the number one difficulty facing either state or
federal support is the money never comes quick enough, and the longer it takes
for money to come back to a community, the more businesses that will never open
their doors, the more people who will flee the community because they have no
housing or they have no employment, and they’ll go to who knows where. What we
don’t want is wholesale abandonment of western North Carolina. We want to get
the resources there as quickly as we can.

Is this a situation, though, that you’re helping to
improve things for the next storm? There are families right now in western
North Carolina who are out of their homes, who are staying in Airbnbs that,
frankly, they can’t stay there much longer. What do you say to people suffering
right now?

Yeah, the work, the help, is not coming quick enough, and I
recognize that. We all appreciate that.

We are going to start our home reconstruction and repair
program this summer. We anticipate, if we get the money approved from HUD, that
they will be granting us funds that we can expand that program this summer.

We’re starting with state money. We want to expand it with
the federal money. And if we do, we would have had home reconstruction
happening within a year of a storm, which, to you and me, sounds terrible, but
I don’t know of any federally funded housing reconstruction program that has
happened within a year of a storm.

It’s sort of the nature of the beast, and what I’m trying to
do is to speed up the beast, so we can help people as quickly as possible.

I want to talk about tariffs because I’ve also spoken to
people in western North Carolina who are really concerned about tariffs. I
spoke to two farmers and a brewery owner who are already seeing higher costs as
a result of the tariffs, steel and aluminum really impacting brewery owners.
One telling me that, on the high end, bigger breweries are seeing upward of
$100,000 in unexpected costs. On the lower end, $10,000 [to] $20,000. This [is]
on top of … trying to recover from Helene. What is your message to them about
these tariffs?

Well, I’m gravely concerned about the impact of tariffs on
business, in terms of the cost of inputs. You talked about the brewers. These
are brewers that actually had to pay for water trucks for a series of weeks
just to keep brewing beer because there was no water in Asheville, so they’ve
already incurred crazy expenses.

At the same time, the revenues are down because people
haven’t been up there visiting like they should. And by the way, I was just up
there this last weekend. Asheville, much of western North Carolina, is wide
open for business, and so if folks are looking for a great summer vacation,
please find a town in western North Carolina and go visit.

Tariffs, if a country puts on tariffs to the outside world,
the outside world will reciprocate and put tariffs on our products, creating a
trade war.

Agriculture is the number one industry in North Carolina. Twenty-five
percent of our product sales go outside this country. So, we do a ton of
exporting of agriculture, of sweet potatoes, of pigs. So, we are playing with
fire, playing with this economy.

And, what I do not want is for these tariffs to lead to
higher costs for people who are already experiencing too high cost, higher
costs for business who then have to pass it on to their customers when they’re
trying to get back on their feet, particularly in western North Carolina [and]
higher costs to rebuild all these homes.

If we If housing construction costs go up 20%, we’re not
getting any more money from the federal government beyond whatever they’re
going to give us, it would just mean that we can produce 20% fewer houses. That
means certain families who otherwise would have gotten support will not get
support. So, there is an incredibly real consequence to these rising prices,
not to mention skirting on the edge of a recession.

So, I have urged the administration to step back from these
trade wars. We do not need to be playing with fire.

Back to the budget. Senate Republicans proposing modest
raises for teachers and state workers as well as raises for law enforcement. [State]
Sen. Sydney Batch, [D-Wake], described the raises as pathetic. Do you share
that view?

We need to do much better by the people who educate our
children and who keep us safe.

I called for substantial raises for our educators. North
Carolina is the second-lowest in the Southeast in what we pay starting teachers,
lower than every state that borders us.

So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a lot of our graduates
from college who want to teach end up going to Virginia, going to South
Carolina, going to Georgia or Tennessee, not to mention other states around the
country.

My budget would have us be No. 1in teacher pay for starting
teachers in the entire Southeast. There’s no reason why we can’t do that.

We have too many vacancies in law enforcement across the
state. I want to give a hiring bonus to every person graduating [from] Basic
Law Enforcement Training or officers coming from other states to move to North
Carolina. At the same time, I want to give a raise to our state law enforcement
that’s bigger than what the budget of the Senate has proposed.

So, my challenge the [state] Senate is we can do better, and
this is the start of the process. It will now go to the House. My hope is that
the House substantially improves what we pay teachers and law enforcement, and
then we can have a three-part negotiation.

I want to get us to a place where there’s a budget we can
all be excited about.

You don’t like to use the word pathetic, right? We’ve
done a lot of reporting our NC Capitol team on what Republicans say about you
and what appears to be sincere efforts to work across the aisle, they have said
that they have been able to reach you and have discussions with you and try to
come to some consensus about how to get aid to Helene and other big issues.
Talk about your style of governing. Why are you deciding that it’s so important
to extend that olive branch to Republicans?

We are going to be much more effective, we will always be
more effective when we can work together across the aisle. We are stronger.
We’re more effective when we partner.

So, I have an open hand at all times to all people,
Democrats, Republicans, unaffiliated, I don’t care.

And, the issues that truly matter to people, helping western
North Carolina recover, improving our public schools, making sure that our
workers have the skills to succeed in this challenging, ever changing economy,
making sure that our neighborhoods are safe, none of these issues are partisan
issues. They’re not Republican and they’re not Democratic. They are core North
Carolina issues.

So, I want to work with the legislature in good faith to
address these issues because when we can get things done, we can help people
have better lives, and that’s what it’s all about.

Sometimes people say that, but it sounds like from
Republican legislators that you’re actually doing it. Do you think you’re going
to be able to make headway on something like child tax credit?

I don’t know. I mean, it remains to be seen.

The Senate Republicans did not put the Child Tax Credit into
their proposal. I sincerely wish they had, so there are going to be issues
where we disagree. I think on some issues, I hope I can persuade them.

I’m open to their persuading me, and we’ll see what we can
get done together.

If you keep your eye on the North Star of what’s going to
help people in North Carolina, you can really get things done for people.