Welcome. This is a weekly (or tries to be) feature of North Carolina Blue. The platform gives readers interested in North Carolina politics a place to share their knowledge, insight and inspiration as we take back our state from some of the most extreme Republicans in the nation.
Please stop by each week. You can also join the discussion in four other weekly State Open Threads. If you are interested in starting your own state blog, weekly to occasionally, I will list your work below.
Colorado: Mondays, 7:00 PM Mountain Michigan: Wednesdays, 6:00 PM Eastern North Carolina: Sundays Missouri: Wednesday Evenings Kansas: Monday Evenings
Governor Josh Stein has extended the State of Emergency for the Western North Carolina wildfires on April 26. According to a release, the State of Emergency remains in effect for 34 counties and will last for an additional 30 days.
NORTH CAROLINA WILDFIRES: USFS EXPLAINS STRATEGY BEHIND CONTAINMENT EFFORTS AND CHALLENGES
"I appreciate all of the first responders, emergency managers, state forest rangers, and state and local officials working hard to protect North Carolinians from wildfires," Stein said in the release. "I am extending this State of Emergency to ensure the State Emergency Response Team has every resource available to continue to respond to wildfires to protect people and property."
The release said that since March 2025, the State of Emergency Response Team has assisted counties with resource and personnel needs.
As many counties continue to experience dry conditions and the recurrence of wildfire activity, the State Emergency Response Team has also maintained "regular communication" with the North Carolina Forest Service (NCFS) and county emergency management offices to ensure the needs of first responders, state forest firefighters, and state forest rangers are met to protect WNC residents. <More>
White House says states must have an ‘appetite to own the problem.’
In the wake of recent natural disasters, state leaders across the country are finding that emergency support from the federal government is no longer a given.
Under President Donald Trump, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has denied federal assistance for tornadoes in Arkansas, flooding in West Virginia and a windstorm in Washington state. It also has refused North Carolina’s request for extended relief funding in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
While it’s not uncommon for the feds to turn down some requests for disaster declarations, which unlock federal aid, state leaders say the Trump administration’s denials have taken them by surprise. White House officials are signaling a new approach to federal emergency response, even as Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem threaten to shut down FEMA altogether.
“The Federal Government focuses its support on truly catastrophic disasters—massive hurricanes, devastating earthquakes, or wide-scale attacks on the homeland,” Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the National Security Council, which advises the president on issues of national security, said in a statement to Stateline. <More>
The Trump administration approved $1.4 billion in grants to help rebuild western North Carolina following Hurricane Helene, Gov. Josh Stein announced Friday.
The funding for the state’s Helene Action Plan is provided by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
“This is great news for western North Carolina,” Stein said in a statement. “I thank the Trump Administration for moving quickly to approve this plan so we can get busy rebuilding people’s homes.”
The governor’s office said compared to other states in the last decade, North Carolina submitted its Helene Action Plan to HUD in the shortest amount of time following a major hurricane. A team with the NC Department of Commerce submitted the final version of the Action Plan to HUD on March 26.
The move comes two weeks after the Federal Emergency Management Administration denied the state’s request for an extension on the 100 percent match for Helene disaster recovery. <More>
Flood insurance. It’s something that most people have heard of and that many probably have a notion they should look into as the climate warms and severe storms grow more frequent.
To their credit, some have done more than think about it. As NC Newsline’s Galen Bacharier reported this week, about 10 percent of businesses and five percent of homeowners in western North Carolina actually had flood insurance prior to Hurricane Helene and were, quite understandably, counting on their policies to help them rebuild in the aftermath of the disaster.
Unfortunately, as Bacharier also reported, that’s often not been the case. In numerous instances, it’s taken several months for the policyholders to collect and even then, many payments have been only partial. Many other claims have been denied outright based on technicalities and other questionable grounds. <More>
‘It is the governor, and no one else, who must have sufficient control’ of Board of Elections, a panel of judges ruled.
A panel of North Carolina judges struck down a new Republican-led law Wednesday that sought to move the state’s elections board under the control of the GOP state auditor — siding with Democratic Gov. Josh Stein and declaring the law unconstitutional.
Senate Bill 382, passed late last year, shifted a number of aspects of executive branch power within the state away from the incoming governor. Among those changes were steering control of the elections board — which is currently overseen by the governor and has a Democratic majority — to newly elected auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican.
Citing a series of prior rulings on executive power and elections board control, the Wake County Superior Court judges wrote that the law was unconstitutional and should be permanently enjoined. <More>
GOP effort to overturn the results of last November’s state Supreme Court election has left many voters frustrated and confused, while others remain unaware
Chris Marshall took care to cast a ballot last fall while in France tending to his business, and was surprised to find months after the 2024 election that Judge Jefferson Griffin wanted his vote thrown out.
Griffin challenged Marshall and thousands of other military and overseas absentee voterswho did not provide photo ID with their ballots. The State Board of Elections did not require it. Most military and civilian overseas voters cast ballots using a special portal that does not provide a way to include a photo.
Griffin worked to have their votes in the Supreme Court race tossed, but the state Supreme Court said they should have a chance to submit IDs.
Now back home in Durham, Marshall and his wife Moira Smullen tried to address the problem by checking to see if they could submit photos using the same electronic portal they used to vote. They couldn’t.
“Right now, it’s just wait and see what happens,” he said. <More>
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services is asking people and providers to be on alert for mpox cases following the detection of mpox particles in multiple sewage samples found through routine wastewater testing. This year there have been two cases of mpox in North Carolina and the new wastewater detections were determined to be another type, clade I, not previously found in North Carolina. These detections indicate potential undiagnosed or unreported cases. At this time, the risk to the public remains low.
The mpox virus, formerly known as monkeypox, is primarily spread by prolonged close contact, typically skin-to-skin, often during sexual activity. There are two genetic types of the virus, known as clade I and clade II. The viral particles found in wastewater were determined to be clade I. To date, only four clade I cases have been reported in the U.S. Clade I mpox is responsible for a large outbreak in Central and Eastern Africa, which appears to be spreading mostly through heterosexual contact with some spread to household members, including children.
North Carolina’s detections were found in wastewater samples collected on March 25, March 28, and April 8 from a treatment plant in Greenville, NC. No clade I cases have been reported to date; however, these detections mean there was possibly at least one person with an undiagnosed or unreported clade I mpox infection present or traveling through the Greenville area around the time of these detections. <More>
Katie Bruno stood in a parking lot across the street from the North Carolina Executive Mansion Saturday holding a sign with a big color picture of Gov. Josh Stein surrounded by the words, “Be our Climate Champion.” Bruno, a Duke University freshman, and about 85 others gathered in the parking lot to pressure Stein to speak out against Duke Energy and push the state’s monopoly utility to embrace renewable energy.
“Stop Duke Energy, wrecking our planet,” the crowd chanted between speakers and then as they walked around the governor’s mansion. The protest was led by environmental nonprofit NC WARN, along with 13 other organizations, from the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity to a yoga studio in Durham, organizers said. <More>
Under a recently introduced bill, state regulators would only have five days to review and approve certifications for projects that discharge dredge or fill material into public water bodies. This would apply to activities including developments in wetlands and pipeline construction.
Under a recently introduced bill, state regulators would only have five days to review and approve certifications for projects that discharge dredge or fill material into public water bodies. This would apply to activities including developments in wetlands and pipeline construction.
Under the Clean Water Act, projects that discharge dredge or fill material into federally protected waterbodies must receive Section 404 permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Applicants in North Carolina also need to receive a 401 water quality certification from the Department of Environmental Quality. <More>
Jarrod Lowery remembers the frustration in his grandmother’s voice as they waited in line to receive her updated enrollment card from the Lumbee Tribe when he was a child.
The Lumbee people had been trying for more than a century to get full federal recognition from the government, a designation that would bring much-needed money for education, healthcare and other services to the tribe in southeastern North Carolina. Lumbee identification cards held sentimental value for many of the tribe’s 55,000 members, but they offered little in tangible benefits. “We get nothing out of this,” Lowery, now 36, recalled his grandmother saying.
Lowery, a Republican who was elected to the state House in 2022, said his late grandmother’s words have stuck with him. But he and his older brother, Tribal Chairman John Lowery, are confident that full federal recognition is closer than ever for the Lumbee people who make up the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River. <More>
Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the crown jewel of the Southern Appalachians, an ancient landscape teeming with life — including what naturalist and explorer William Bartram in 1791 called “insects of infinite variety,” many of them “admirably beautiful.” Some 200 years later, naturalist E.O. Wilson would describe them as the “little things that run the world.”
“Those six-legged ‘little things’ in the park form an essential part of the vast ecological web of interconnectedness that constitutes the pulse of the Smokies,” said Jim Costa, author of a forthcoming field guide from Smokies Life that will help park visitors better understand and appreciate these tiny lifeforms. It will be illustrated in part by Jim’s wife, Leslie Costa. The couple was chosen as this year’s Steve Kemp writer and illustrator in residence.
The Costas hail from Cullowhee and Highlands, North Carolina, where Jim is a professor and executive director of the Highlands Biological Station of Western Carolina University and Leslie is a freelance illustrator, editor, and transcriber for the London-based Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project. They met in graduate school at the University of Georgia in the fall of 1987. <More>
Thanks for the visit, I hope you found these stories useful. Wishing you a powerful week.
