Contractor set high salaries for NC Helene recovery site. There are few details why

Nearly two weeks after the state auditor’s office released a special report detailing the cost of a $27.4 million Helene care station, the question of how and why the site’s staff were paid $87.30 to $145.50 an hour remains unanswered.

The care station’s price tag has stirred debate over how disaster relief funding should be allocated. As Western North Carolina looks at a decade or more of Helene recovery — and braces for another hurricane season — residents and state leaders are advocating for continued aid at the same time calls for spending transparency escalate.

A Texas-based contractor, SLS, operated the site and set the salaries.

SLS did not provide staffing information to the state, as it wasn’t required to do so under an emergency purchase order the state used to contract with the company, according to North Carolina Emergency Management communications officer Brian Haines.

When reached for comment, SLS’s vice president for marketing communications, Kayla Orton, said in an email the company would “refer all inquiries to our client, North Carolina Emergency Management.”

Emergency Management Chief of External Affairs and Communications Justin Graney said the agency could not answer questions related to how staff salaries were set, how many workers were hired or what the total cost of site labor was.

“The purchase order was a holistic, package service,” Graney said in the email. “Additionally, SLS staff came from out of the area into austere conditions to run this site and to provide maintenance, security, medical care, and to serve as attendants.”

While he said he could not elaborate on further details, Graney said the site’s operation was paid for using state disaster funds and the site “is 100% FEMA reimbursable to the state.”

Debating disaster relief

The state auditor’s office, led by recently elected State Auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican, used the special report to ensure available state and federal dollars are maximized in recovery efforts, according to an email from a state auditor’s spokesperson, Randy Brechbiel.

“There has been tremendous progress made with Hurricane Helene recovery, including countless hours put in by volunteers and state agency employees, but there’s always room for improvement,” Brechbiel wrote in an email.

Staffing invoices were a separate cost from the site’s daily operations, Brechbiel added, so the special report was limited to providing hourly rates.

Democratic Rep. Eric Ager, whose district encompasses Swannanoa, said the staff pay “seems high” based on the special report, and does not reflect the average salary of a Swannanoa resident. But, Ager added, he does not know the extent of responsibilities these staffers were tasked with, nor how many staffers there were.

Although the state is always looking retroactively at how disaster funds could be better spent, there wasn’t much time in Helene’s immediate aftermath to deliberate over spending options, Ager said. Action was needed immediately, he added.

Western North Carolina was hit unevenly, Ager said, and Swannanoa is one of the regions that has the most need, whatever the cost.

“When you’re in a crisis, you’re trying to get people fed,” Ager said. “You’re trying to get people showers. And it was a pretty huge operation, because the community was decimated.”

But the Governor’s Recovery Office for Western North Carolina director, Matt Calabria, said the staffing costs were not exclusively for one site in Swannanoa, but rather for several across Western North Carolina. He made that comment during a meeting of the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Western North Carolina Recovery last week, according to the North Carolina Tribune.

GROW NC was established Jan. 2 under an executive order by Gov. Josh Stein. It’s meant to aid the governor’s office in overseeing and implementing disaster relief.

Because the special report is not an audit, the office was not required to review the report with Emergency Management before final findings were published. Calabria said at the meeting that because leadership did not work with the auditor’s office on the report, there was more room for inaccurate reporting, NC Tribune reported.

Putting people before the price

Stein attributed the steep cost of recovery to community need, citing residents who were without water or power for weeks after Hurricane Helene made landfall in September. Residents relied on care stations while much of Western North Carolina grieved over death and devastation from the remnants of the Category 4 hurricane.

The governor responded to questions about potential efforts to keep disaster recovery costs down during a June 5 press conference with emergency management officials.

“We are always prudent when it comes to spending government money — taxpayer money,” Stein said at the press conference.

Stein applauded a roughly 72-hour turnaround to set up the Owen Pool site after Helene passed. A large chunk of the operation’s costs was shower and laundry access, especially for communities that had no running water for weeks, he said. None of the water generated by care station sites were connected to water or sewer systems, so disposing of the water also cost money, Stein added.

“Understand, this was a catastrophic storm,” Stein said. “And our top priority is the health and safety of people.”

Advocacy group Swannanoa Communities Together said that after almost nine months of continued recovery, government funding is still critical.

“We are a small community organization and we can’t speak to the costs of these services paid by the state, but what we can speak to is the extreme need that existed for these services,” director and co-founder Mary Etheridge-Trigg said in a statement sent to The N&O. “Eight and a half months after Helene, people still are living in temporary shelters, sheds, RVs, and cars.”

Neighbors helping neighbors

Swannanoa resident Jeff Sparacino lives a little over a mile from Owen Pool. He passed by the site two to three times a day and always saw cars in the parking lot and people on the premises, whether it was early in the morning or late at night.

Even after the site’s closure, people are still living in campers by the river as they wait for houses to be rebuilt, Sparacino added. Some of his neighbors are even continuing to pay mortgages on a damaged or destroyed home.

Sparacino never used the Owen Pool site, and his house fared well with a furnace lost and few renovations needed in the storm’s aftermath. But many of Swannanoa’s residents continue to cope with losing businesses, homes and loved ones from the storm, he added. An unincorporated area without a mayor, Swannanoa has relied on local, state and federal government to cover recovery costs. The question, Sparacino said, is less about how much money is spent and more about how the money is spent.

“That’s a concern that we have as residents,” Sparacino said. “Even though you hear about millions of dollars coming into the area, we’re just kind of interested to see how that’s going to be spent, and what it’s going to be spent on.”

Sparacino, a sales manger, was not previously aware of the Owen Pool site’s cost, especially the money spent paying station workers.

Allison Casparian, a Swannanoa resident and founder of the nonprofit Bounty and Soul, which since 2014 has helped combat food insecurity across the region, said the Owen Pool care station site was packed all day, every day. She passed the area routinely on her way to and from her office in Black Mountain.

Some people were living out of their cars in the parking lot, she said, and as the winter months crept in, displaced people living in tents sought warmth from the facility.

She worries discourse about the station’s cost takes away from the big picture: Swannanoa is looking at a decade or more of recovery time, from a disaster she said no one was prepared for.

“It still looks like a war zone,” she said of the stretch of land along the stretch of U.S. 70 in Swannanoa.

Casparian meets regularly with other community members at a local fire station about three times a week to plan recovery efforts. The team, Swannanoa Grassroots Alliance, met seven days a week for almost two months following the storm. With state and federal funding slowly trickling in, Casparian said recovery is largely a local effort, with “neighbors helping neighbors.”

The government-funded site served its purpose and had a need, and it’s hard to put a price tag on that, she said.

“You’re just doing what you have to do to survive,” Casparian said. “It’s hard to think about the politics of it.”

Nonprofits, neighbors and churches banded together to grieve, repair and move forward together, she said. With Swannanoa’s sole grocery store destroyed and its lone food bank lost in a flood, the area is rendered a food desert. Bounty and Soul has partnered with World Central Kitchen to distribute about 2,000 meals per day and reach about 26,600 people per month, up from its pre-hurricane count of 11,000, according to Casparian.

Meanwhile, the town is bracing for the approaching hurricane season. People are traumatized, Casparian said, and even the arrival of heavy rain or winds sends the community into a panic.

“I’m petrified,” she said.

Sophia Bailly

The News & Observer

Sophia Bailly is an intern on The News & Observer’s politics team. She is a senior at the University of Florida studying journalism and Russian and has a passion for politics, history and international affairs.