State auditor launches Hurricane Helene dashboard to boost transparency
The Helene recovery dashboard provides a number of useful statistics. State Auditor's Office photo
North Carolina State Auditor Dave Boliek has unveiled a new Hurricane Helene dashboard, an online tool designed to track relief efforts and spending in the wake of the devastating storm.
The initiative aims to provide transparency regarding the allocation of funds and resources for recovery efforts in affected areas.
The dashboard, launched Feb. 11, was developed entirely in-house by the auditor’s office, meaning no additional taxpayer money was spent in its creation.
“It’s all internal. Our data analytics team built it and another person on our communications team helped with the layout,” said Randy Brechbiel, public information manager for the Office of the State Auditor.
Using publicly available FEMA data, the dashboard breaks down important statistics by county.
“We pull the data directly from FEMA. We don’t edit it. We don’t change it. We put it on the website for the people to see exactly what FEMA is putting together,” Brechbiel said. “We wanted to build transparency, and this is the best way to do it — by taking data and putting it online. We hope to build it out further and will keep updating it along the way.”
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The tool utilizes weekly data updates, helping policymakers and the public visualize and track relief efforts with greater ease. Brechbiel explained that while the dashboard currently lacks historical look-back capabilities for each dataset, that feature has been discussed internally.
“We don’t have it online right now, but I do believe that’s something we could pull the data for and respond if somebody asked for it,” he said.
The dashboard marks a departure from traditional retrospective auditing, shifting toward real-time financial oversight. Boliek, who assumed office in January, said this approach aligns with his intentions to enhance the oversight function of the auditor’s office.
“One of our focuses was how can we be most impactful in the State Auditor’s Office, and one of the ways that we felt like we could be really impactful is to use not only the auditing function of the office, but to act as a true watchdog in many instances,” Boliek told The Smoky Mountain News. “We felt like disaster response, particularly with Helene in the western part of the state, was a good place to start — not just as an auditor … but as a watchdog overseeing dollars spent in recovery.”
Boliek pointed to inefficiencies in prior hurricane recovery efforts, particularly in eastern North Carolina.
“The response to the previous two hurricanes through the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency had been, quite frankly, not so hot,” Boliek said. “The former director of NCORR recently appeared before the joint oversight committee requesting over $200 million to finish projects initially budgeted for much less. And they couldn’t answer a lot of questions about where the money had gone.”
With Hurricane Helene recovery still moving through the General Assembly, Boliek sees the dashboard as an opportunity to track key metrics, including total displaced, total housed, those still seeking assistance, those who have qualified for assistance but aren’t using it and the total number of state-supplied temporary housing units.
One of the early revelations from the data was the relatively low number of temporary housing units provided by the state, a total of six — one in Ashe County, one in Avery County, one in Haywood County, two in McDowell County and one in Watauga County.
As of the dashboard’s last update on March 1, more than 150 days after the storm, 427 people are still seeking assistance across the 28-county disaster area. In this case, “seeking assistance” means “Households that indicated a housing need but were not marked eligible for rental assistance or transitional sheltering assistance specifically.”
That figure alone stands in stark contrast to Governor Josh Stein’s Jan. 2 request for 1,000 additional units. The request came along with five executive orders from the newly-sworn governor meant to expedite recovery. The same day, Boliek’s office issued a press release vowing not only to account for “every dollar that is spent in fulfillment of these orders” but also to “report on the effectiveness and efficiency” of the initiative. Asked whether the dashboard data justifies scaling back Stein’s request, Boliek was careful not to speculate.
“I’m not really wanting to second guess the governor and the governor’s decision on the direction he’s taking in terms of recovery in Western North Carolina,” Boliek said. “Our focus right now is on tracking those dollars to shine a light of transparency on exactly what it is he is doing.”
Public reaction to the dashboard has been largely positive, according to Brechbiel.
“People think it’s heading in the right direction,” he said. “That’s what it’s about — people having access to something that can show them easily the progress being made.”
Boliek believes this project represents the future of accountability efforts in North Carolina.
“We didn’t want to wait to stand up the dashboard — we wanted to go ahead and stand it up and get our processes in place so that we could start somewhere,” he said. “As we get more data and the data stream becomes more consistent, I think that dashboard is going to be an excellent tool and it certainly will be something that we will be able to deploy in the future … and it may not be just for disaster response. It may be for other large-scale projects, for example, where taxpayers want transparency and accountability on a on a real time basis.”
While the dashboard is still a work in progress, Boliek remains committed to refining it.
“We’ve got to start somewhere,” he said, “And this was a good place to start.”
To use the Helene recovery dashboard, visit auditor.nc.gov/helene.
