After a long stretch of stability, North Carolina’s political scene is undergoing some big changes in 2025, with a new governor and new House speaker succeeding incumbents who’d been in place for almost a decade.
Incoming Gov. Josh Stein is taking over from Roy Cooper, who was term-limited after eight years in office, and incoming House Speaker Destin Hall replaces Tim Moore, who led his chamber of the General Assembly since 2015.
At least initially, any differences are likely to be stylistic. Stein, a Democrat, succeeded Cooper as attorney general in 2017 after serving as a state senator for eight years. Hall, a Republican, had been Moore’s Rules committee chair since 2020. He quips the job is “like being a speaker on training wheels” with “all of the work of the speaker but none of
the glory.”
Still, the changes are likely to at least bend the state government’s direction, even if Stein and Hall agree with their respective predecessors far more than they disagree.
Elsewhere in the capital, there’s continuity. Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger is back for another term at the head of the Senate’s Republican supermajority, a post he’s held since 2011. The Rockingham County lawyer has followed the paradigm for his office established by the late Marc Basnight, a Democrat who had led the Senate during the previous 16 years.
Berger is perhaps North Carolina’s most powerful elected official. His 2022 flip on the merits of expanding Medicaid insurance for low-income residents, for example, went a long way toward ensuring Cooper’s longtime top legislative priority became law the following year.
The Democratic leaders are House Minority Leader Robert Reives, a Chatham County lawyer, and Senate counterpart Sydney Batch. In a post-Thanksgiving coup, Batch ousted fellow Wake County lawmaker Dan Blue, who has served in the legislature since 1981, minus a four-year hiatus.
Party labels aside, the leaders agree that three topics are likely to command the majority of legislators’ attention when the new session starts on Jan. 8: Hurricane recovery, housing and childcare. While those issues would seem to involve nonpartisan matters, it’s common for divisive policies to enter the fray. That was the case in December, when a hurricane relief bill morphed into a successful Republican effort to wrest appointment powers from incoming Democratic Gov. Stein.
HELENE: How much?
State lawmakers have earmarked about $1 billion in state money to help western North Carolina cope with Hurricane Helene. Officials are waiting on Congress to come through with massive federal aid.
“This is going to be probably a $50 billion problem, and that’s the kind of problem that the federal government is going to have to help fund,” says Hall, a lawyer from Lenoir in Caldwell County.
Cooper asked Congress for a $25.6 billion aid package, including $17.6 billion that wouldn’t otherwise flow through established programs at age
ncies such as FEMA or the Small Business Administration. As of mid-December, approval remained pending, though state and federal leaders were hopeful that Congress would provide major aid by Christmas.
The recovery cost exceeds Cooper’s request significantly. State budget director Kristin Walker has warned
that it’s a $53.6 billion problem — and that even support of that magnitude would not make western North Carolina whole. She forecasts about $17.8 billion in additional unmet needs.
“Some of it is gone and is gone forever,” she says, referring to homes, businesses and other resources destroyed in September. A tiny fraction of propertie
s in the West region have flood insurance, leaving many owners reliant on government and nonprofit support for rebuilding assistance.
Money aside, there are questions about how the state should address the recovery. Many Republicans believe former Gov. Cooper’s administration botched the aftermath of 2016’s Hurricane Matthew and 2018’s Hurricane Florence. They point to the home replacements financed with money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Cooper tasked the N.C. Office of Recovery and Resiliency with handling that work. Years later, 1,454 families displaced by the storms are waiting for the completion of promised new homes
Hall suggests officials need to rethink how the state handles storm recovery. Like Berger, he wants North Carolina to look to South Carolina, Florida and others for examples of effectiveness.
“I’m a big believer in copying what other folks have done if it’s successful, so I think that’s where you start,” Berger says.
Reives and other Democrats emphasize the need to not just respond to Helene, but to seize an opportunity to harden the state’s infrastructure and communities against damage from future storms.
“We’ve got to revamp the way that we do it [so] it’s not about just throwing money at problems,” Reives says. “It’s not a matter of if it’s going to happen again, it’s a matter of when. And it’s not a matter of is it going to be ferocious; it’s going to be.”
State leaders have to make sure that “for every dollar we invest, that dollar actually gets to the people who are hurting and doesn’t become 10 cents on the dollar,” Reives adds.
HOUSING: Stops and starts
North Carolina isn’t producing enough new housing, not just to replace the undetermined numberof homes destroyed by Hurricane Helene, but in the state’s most economically prosperous markets. In Charlotte alone, there’s a need for 25,000 additional housing units for lower-income residents, city leaders say.
The problem is there’s a lack of consensus on how to promote more building of homes and apartments for those priced out of the state’s robust housing market. Star line, the progressive-leaning advocacy group Carolina Forward urged lawmakers to provide state backing for more project development loans to reduce risk for investors and developers. The group is also promoting streamlining zoning regulations to enable more housing targeted to middle-income workers.
A majority of lawmakers have yet to fully embrace those positions. Everyone has ideas about housing, however. Hall argues for eliminating delays in building permits; Reives is skeptical of deregulation that might limit local input. Berger sees a need for a balancing act, with state intervention reserved mainly for curbing regulatory abuses.
“It’s just something I don’t know that there’s a one-size-fits-all solution,” Berger says.
“It’s an issue that is statewide, really, but it really shows itself differently in different parts of the state,” Hall adds. “And I think that’s been part of the problem with coming up [with] a solution.”
Republicans’ favored approach has been to establish “shot clock” deadlines for city and county governments to act on builders’ permit requests. The House is also likely to consider what Hall terms “statewide inspectors,” or some other attempt with local government to speed the pace from planning to completion.
“That’s one thing that I think we need to pinpoint and deal with very quickly,” Hall says. “You have folks who are ready to build. They’ve got the capital, they’ve got contractors ready to roll [and] start building, but we’re waiting on a government bureaucrat to come out and inspect and issue the permit.”
That begs the question whether cities and counties are allowing enough development, even before permits are handed out. Many real estate industry executives say officials in the state’s fast-growing areas are putting up too many hurdles, largely in response to resident pressure for slower growth. Berger has been heavily involved in a prolonged, publicized debate over development density in the Summerfield community near Greensboro. He says state and local governments need to understand that it’s a mutual balancing act.
“Two things come to mind,” he said. “One is we need to be real careful if we’re going to step in. And two, the local governments need to be real careful about how much they regulate.”
CHILDCARE: A search for partnerships
Berger, Hall and Reives agree with the NC Chamber and other groups that argue the limited availability and high cost of slots for children is keeping too many parents out of the workforce.
There’s a dispute over strategy, however. Berger argues the solution isn’t just about shoveling money into the existing system of childcare centers.
“When I first got elected to my position, my thought was, childcare is something that’s best left to mom and dad,” Berger says. “Things have changed significantly since then. To me, the way we need to look at this is, it’s a problem for mom and dad, it’s a problem for the employer and, increasingly, it’s a problem for the state. And so I think whatever you do, you’ve got to have all three of those interest groups involved in whatever the solution is going to be. It can’t be something that’s just the government creating a program and funding the program.”
Reives agrees that officials and advocates need to “look first for structural changes” and ways to “help people help themselves.” The solution most likely lies in facilitating more public-practice partnerships that expand access at affordable rates, he says.
That means “finding ways to empower maybe local chambers of commerce or local nonprofits of some sort to assist in providing childcare, or maybe a larger employer to create a capacity, not just for their employees, but for other folks to participate,” Berger says.
“I do think one thing is clear,” he adds. “We’re going to have to spend more money at the state level in order to make any of those things work.” ■
