North Carolina lawmakers have reached an agreement to pass a fourth round of funding for Helene recovery, allocating $524 million toward relief efforts.

In a near-unanimous vote, the state House passed the measure on Tuesday as part of a deal with the Senate, which is expected to take up the bill this week.

“We are proud to have worked alongside the Senate to craft and approve this vital relief legislation that continues Western North Carolina’s recovery from Hurricane Helene,” said Republican Rep. Dudley Greene, the bill’s sponsor and a former McDowell County sheriff.

Included in the funding package is $200 million for farm restoration for Western North Carolina, $120 million for rebuilding homes and $100 million for repairing private roads and bridges. The bill also expands school calendar flexibility for counties where students had to miss school days due to the storm.

Once enacted, this package will bring the total amount spent in recovery from Helene to over $1.4 billion.

Democratic Gov. Josh Stein has said he would sign the bill.

Following the vote, House Speaker Destin Hall said lawmakers would soon get to work on a fifth round of relief for Helene victims.

“We really see this as a process — it’s going to go on for some time,” said Hall. “We’re trying to pass a number of bills, while also monitoring the spending, making sure progress is being made, obviously in an effort to avoid what happened in Eastern North Carolina, where we’re almost a decade out and still not rebuilt.”

Money for Eastern NC

The compromise bill agreed upon by both chambers also includes two other priorities the House had wanted to add to this legislation: funding for Eastern North Carolina recovery efforts, and additional money to assist farmers with non-Helene related crop losses.

Republicans who control the General Assembly have long criticized former Gov. Roy Cooper for his handling of the disasters in Eastern North Carolina.

House Republicans, demanding accountability from Rebuild NC, the state’s disaster recovery program launched under Cooper, filed separate legislation last month allocating the program $217 million it had requested to finish repairing and rebuilding homes destroyed by Hurricanes Matthew and Florence.

That funding has been added to the compromise Helene bill along with oversight and reporting requirements that seek to ensure the program (also known as the North Carolina Office of Resiliency and Recovery, or NCORR) completes recovery work in the eastern part of the state and is subsequently shut down.

House Majority Leader Brenden Jones, who filed that bill last month and named it the C.O.O.P.E.R. Accountability Act, said Tuesday that Stein “told me himself that he’s going to make sure this is taken care of.”

“This is his figure,” Jones said, referring to the $217 million that Rebuild NC requested in January. “So, we’re going to use his figure to wrap this up, and the catastrophic thing known as NCORR will go away.”

The bill also includes $110 million in relief for farmers who were affected by crop losses suffered outside of the damage done by Helene. That’s on top of the $200 million in the bill for Helene-specific crop loss and farm restoration.

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