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Mountain Strong: Uniting for Relief and Resilience · The SEANC View

• 0:00
  Music.
• 0:08
  Hello, welcome to another edition of the Scenic View podcast.
• 0:11
  We have a full house in here today. I'm going to maybe just let you guys introduce
• 0:16
  yourselves. I'll start with my co-host, as always, Artis Watkins,
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  Executive Director of Scenic. Hey, everyone.
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  And I'm joined by President Kurt Montgomery. Welcome.
• 0:27
  Hello, everyone. First Vice President Wendell Powell. I'm in here.
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  And Member Relations Director Lynn Cody. Welcome, Lynn.
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  Thank you, John. We got you back on your second episode here.
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  So obviously, it's a busy time right now for everyone.
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  We have the business of scenic to keep going, but we also have this major relief
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  effort going on. Kurt, what are you hearing from the membership?
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  So it's been a very devastating disaster that's happened in the West.
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  We have so many people that have lost their homes. But one of the things that
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  we really want to focus on is to ensure that our state employees and our scenic
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  members are taken care of.
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  So we're looking at we've had multiple meetings. I met with the Board of Governors
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  to discuss, you know, what can we do?
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  We have, you know, highlighted some things as far as having everyone bring their
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  supplies here and so that we can distribute it from this location,
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  as well as we're talking to the universities and things of that nature to see
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  if we can kind of partner with them as well to get have a common approach to
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  get everything to the areas that are needed,
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  especially like the Department of Corrections, look at the universities and things of that nature.
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  We also, you know, we're looking at how we can help fund this effort.
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  And so we'll have another meeting tonight to discuss those efforts as well to
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  ensure that we can have funding to get the vehicles and things that we need
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  to get those items to the people who are in need.
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  Yeah, I know our lobby is filled with donated goods and water folks are already showing up for us.
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  I know District 65 at ECU donated a bunch of water and 66 in Kinston.
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  Yeah, and then we've even had some people that are just non-members just drop
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  some things off for us, too.
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  So, Lynn, you're leading our efforts at collection through the Scenic Cares
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  Initiative. What's going on with that?
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  So currently we are accepting donations. We have shifted from water.
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  We've probably got about, I would say, 2,500 bottles of water.
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  So we're in good shape with water.
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  Now we're moving on to cold weather items such as hats, gloves,
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  blankets, portable heaters, sleeping bags, such as that as it becomes colder out west.
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  We will be taking donations probably for the next week or so.
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  We've got our Western Region Rep to the Executive Committee,
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  Cliff Johnson, and our Retiree Council Chair, J.B.
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  Robinson, doing some recon for us out west, trying to figure out what path we're
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  going to take with all the items we have to distribute.
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  We have been reaching out to agency leadership to see if there's anything specific
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  to their agency and their employees out west that they need.
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  We've heard back and we've been able to fulfill some of those needs.
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  I would encourage anybody that has a need, an immediate need or a long-term
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  need, to reach out to Scenic Cares and to just let us know.
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  And we'll take it from there and get it to the appropriate staff here at Scenic.
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  If you'd like to donate an item, the simplest thing to do is go to Amazon and
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  purchase items. We've had several people do that and get it to deliver to our headquarters.
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  And our address is 1621 Midtown Place.
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  You can look it up on our website, too. Or just Google us, right?
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  Just search Scenic, and it should pop up.
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  Right. Yeah. Just get it to us however you can. We'll accept it. Stop by from 8 to 5.
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  We're here. And it's like that tweet that I sent you earlier.
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  It's not a sprint. It's a marathon, right? So it's going to be a big need for many months to come.
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  Right. Right. When everybody, you know, is having to go back and maybe help
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  out with other natural disasters.
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  Hopefully that won't happen, but we'll be here ready to take care of our members.
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  Tell us about the work you're doing with our regional rep out that way.
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  And y'all are in constant contact. Right. We are in constant contact.
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  We speak about five or six times a day and we discuss what we've heard,
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  what has been delivered, what they're hearing the need is.
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  They did a tour around the western part of the state, one half of the western
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  part of the state yesterday.
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  And they were able to come back and tell us what route we would need to take
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  with our trucks that we're going to be taking. And we were hoping that we would
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  have a plan together to deliver some stuff by next week.
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  But we're finding that we're going to just wait and go where we're told to go
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  and when we're needed to go.
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  Because right now, the effort is being handled by Red Cross,
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  Samaritan's Purse, local larger churches in the area. But we're standing by and ready.
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  So, you know, we have the folks who are helping. And then we've got the folks
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  whose daily job means that they're helping and taking on more.
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  And that's not just the folks who are out there in the West.
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  DOT trying to rebuild the roads, bless their hearts, inspect them to make sure
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  the ones that are left are even okay.
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  I can't even fathom that kind of effort. But our first vice president,
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  Wendell Powell, can tell us a little about the real life effects for state employees
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  who aren't even who don't live in the West, but whose work lives have been changed by this storm.
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  Well, at this time, there's a lot of relocation, relocation of staffing.
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  A lot of jobs are shut down, whether it's DHHS, DAC, any of the parks, all those are shut down.
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  All their staff is being rerouted. for the ones that haven't lost their homes
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  or just stuck at home, they're pretty much just helping out with the efforts.
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  Everyone else is being sent hours away. So that's a hardship right now trying
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  to figure out where they're going to stay, how they're going to sustain their
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  lives until they can get relief efforts to rebuild their lives for those that have lost their homes.
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  Well, then the prison department, I mean, we've probably moved hundreds of inmates
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  because due to several prisons being flooded.
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  They've been spread out across the state. This was all night.
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  We had driver, bus drivers driving, working 72 hours, transporting the fenders.
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  Even though the roads were crumbling.
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  They were still hazardous. They had to get police escort. We had a lot of displaced staff.
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  We've worked a lot of extra man hours trying to get heads or tails as far as just what are we doing.
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  Right now, we have a lot of staff that's not working because they've lost their
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  homes or their, like I said, their work site has been wiped off the map.
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  So right now we're doing all we can to support them and handle the influx of
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  inmates into other prisons that were already have had a lot of population.
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  So it's been a logistical nightmare.
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  Maybe I didn't prepare you for this question, but I know that it's probably
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  hard to know exactly how many prisons are affected.
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  But are there any that are really affected, destroyed?
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  There's six prisons that have been shut down.
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  Oh, okay. So how are y'all doing that then? If we've got staff rate vacancies
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  that are still really high in the prison system, how are you doing it?
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  Well, right now we're using PIRT team from other prisons or the prison emergency response team.
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  So we're pulling those emergency officers from other prisons that are not affected,
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  and we're pulling staff from other prisons that are not affected to help monitor the influx of inmates.
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  Let's say, for example, you have a prison that has 800 inmates.
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  Now they just received an additional two to 300 inmates.
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  So now you have to pull staff to watch those inmates because the officers can't
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  come from the West because they can't even get out.
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  So it's a lot of extra man hours, a lot of overtime, a lot of staff being rehoused
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  and trying to figure out working, you know, 24, 36 hour shifts just to cover the shortfalls.
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  And if you are experiencing a workplace issue like First Vice President Powell
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  just said, please reach out to Scenic Cares as well.
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  Like I said, we are working very closely with department leadership to get you
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  information and answers that you desperately need.
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  Yeah, I mean, our lobbyists are on the ground at the General Assembly today, as we said.
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  And in the meantime, they've been also reaching out to agency heads.
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  By the way, all the state agencies have been awesome.
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  Everyone in this town that's in politics is being collaborative right now,
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  it seemed. I think President Montgomery and First Vice President Powell,
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  y'all were down in the General Assembly today.
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  Didn't it seem like it was kind of a kumbaya today?
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  Everybody wants to help. They don't want to play politics. They just want to help the people.
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  And that's the case. I mean, everyone has open arms. They're ready to get things done.
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  So when we were down there, we went ready to ask for some specific things state
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  employees are going to need to get their jobs done and to be protected during this time.
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  We asked for extra leave time for staff. We asked for additional money for staff
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  because we know staff was already stretched.
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  Resources were stretched before the hurricane. And now they're really stretched
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  to the limit if they haven't run out.
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  So it's hard getting them to work, getting them food, getting them a place to
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  stay if they need places to stay. It's a nightmare.
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  And the bottom line is today, if you're wondering, all the General Assembly
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  did, I mean, it's not all, but as a first step out of a $4.75 billion,
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  almost a $5 billion rainy day fund, they spent $279 million as a first step.
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  That first step is very, very basic, obviously.
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  They don't even know. We haven't figured out everything that's happened yet.
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  We haven't gotten to every area yet to see what the damages really are there.
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  We don't even know how many people we've lost in this state.
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  Several lawmakers from the West were saying they're expecting the number of
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  folks we haven't, you know, who are not with us anymore out West to potentially
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  be double what it is right now.
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  I mean, it's that many people who are still missing out in those areas.
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  So the $279 million that's just the beginning is going to handle some state
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  board of elections funding.
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  I think $5 million of that to make sure the county's affected can help facilitate
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  that their citizens can actually vote. That's so important.
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  The governor's office had sent over an entire list of things,
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  including things like waiving DMV fees during this time, something that wouldn't
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  have even occurred to me, but is a huge deal. You don't have anything left, including your ID.
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  You need to go get everything replaced. And all of that is in this,
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  apparently, legislative leadership at the press conference they held this morning
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  said, yeah, a lot of stuff came over in the letter from the governor.
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  None of us are playing politics. We're getting the job done.
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  We're going to get the people what they need.
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  And so this $279 million is an initial kind of baby step.
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  And they're also, from what the conversations we were having with lawmakers, I know we split up.
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  First Vice President Powell went to the House side with some of our lobbyists
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  and President Montgomery and I stayed on the Senate side. And what we were hearing
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  is that they kind of wanted to see what the feds were going to come up with money-wise.
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  That's what I was hearing. Yeah, that's what I was hearing as well.
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  Yeah, I saw a statement from Katherine Truitt, the state superintendent,
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  that she was pleased with the first step because she had asked,
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  she had released kind of a wish list of what she needed. And a lot of those things were funded.
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  Senator Berger said this is not all of it, not by a long shot in the News and Observer here.
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  So you said they're coming back again in a couple weeks?
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  October 24th is the next time and then in November, sometime after the election. But yeah.
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  The October 24th is when Scenic will be working a lot in the next few weeks on this issue.
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  Our lobbyists are still there today. We left them over there working.
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  Trying to continue to make the points that we have, because you can imagine
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  legislative leadership has everything put in front of them as a need,
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  and they are all real needs.
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  So what do you do? But this is kind of what we all feared. We had such a huge vacancy rate.
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  If anything went wrong, we're at a disadvantage already.
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  And so the folks left working for the state to try to put the pieces back together.
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  There's far less of them than there need to be trying to put these pieces back together.
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  And Florence, Hurricane Florence, necessitated the legislature coming back a
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  couple of times for disaster relief.
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  So I think I think it's going to be more than twice this time that they have
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  to come back and figure out where to spend money.
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  And I posted a picture of you speaking with Senator Corbin.
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  I understand he's representative of seven of those counties right there. Right.
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  He was indicating Haywood and Transylvania were the ones he felt like we really needed to key in on.
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  Yeah. A lot of personal stories, I've met, from some folks up there at the legislature, right?
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  I mean, it affects everyone. To me, a lot of them seemed very emotional,
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  just very devastated. Yeah.
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  To see your hometown wiped off the face of the state.
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  And I mean, to see your friends and families, you know, in despair and not knowing
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  whether they're going to have power, whether they're going to have clean water,
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  they're running out of gas.
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  I mean, it's a very troublesome time right now. And I put an email out to our Western members.
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  Was it earlier this week or the end of last week? And I noticed that we have
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  more than 10,000 members in Western North Carolina affected, right?
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  Right. And also, I forgot to mention earlier, but this is very important.
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  We also have a member relations representative, Adam Weinberger,
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  who is assigned to that area.
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  And we have put him on standby to be ready to help out if and when you need him.
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  So also reach out to Scenic Cares for that because he is a resource that you
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  can definitely take advantage of.
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  Just a devastating time for all of us. But I was on a kind of webinar today
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  and there were people from all over the country and they heard that I was from
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  North Carolina and they asked me if I was OK and, you know, wanted more details.
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  And I was like, yeah, we're about three, probably three hours away.
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  But, yeah, we have a lot of members who are affected and it's it's a sad time.
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  One person was from New Orleans and they you kind of felt a little kinship with them, you know.
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  And we've had several members that have been in situations where they have lost
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  a tree or what have you in their yard, but they just want to talk to someone.
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  So what we're doing is if we have a district chair or a member in that area
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  that we can have reach out to them in addition to what we've already done. were doing that.
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  And we actually had Jamie Robinson and his family go over and sit with a woman
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  for a couple hours who had just reached out to us and said she just wanted to talk to somebody.
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  Glenn, also, haven't you been working with DHHS as far as the mental health
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  side of things, dealing with the workers and stuff that are in that area who,
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  I hate to say this, but, you know,
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  they're cleaning the roads, they're doing things, and they're finding bodies
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  and things out there and the effect that it's having on them?
• 15:16
  That's a good point, Kirk.
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  We spoke with a lot of the agency heads, and they are very worried about their
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  state employees after this, what they're seeing, what they've not been prepared
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  for, what they're not used to.
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  And I can tell you that when I spoke with the Secretary of Transportation,
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  Secretary Hopkins, he mentioned that he's got crew up there,
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  you know, working on the roads and that type of thing, and that he does have
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  mental health professionals coming in available to talk to his staff.
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  So it's going to be a problem now, and it's going to be a problem for a while,
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  but I can, well, probably forever for these folks, but I can tell you that they are committed.
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  The agency heads are committed and very concerned about their employees' well-being.
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  And I'll put in another plug for our website because we do have some resources
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  on our website, you know, just for members who are affected.
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  But also if you want to give some ways to give through that,
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  it's just you go to acedic.org and it's the first thing on the homepage there.
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  And one of the things in that list is a disaster hotline where you can call
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  if you're stressed out or if, I mean, just mental health in general.
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  And that's from the federal government. So that's an interesting.
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  And if there's something that we need to know, we had a member reach out and
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  tell us there was a particular community that they couldn't reach anybody in.
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  They wanted somebody to check on.
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  And one of our members made their way there. Oh, really?
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  Yeah. I hadn't got an update on that. Oh, sorry. Yes.
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  Wow. That's awesome. And so if there's anything you know of that you just don't
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  know where else to find help, the members of Scenic are an amazing resource.
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  And they seem to be willing to go to the ends of the earth for their fellow
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  citizens that they serve.
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  It's really amazing. So we want to facilitate those.
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  So send us anything, even if it doesn't seem directly related to scenic.
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  And that was about the Celo or Celo community south of Burnsville.
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  Between Burnsville and Bankersville.
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  Yeah. And I think it's like an artisan community, like an artist.
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  And that member had not received much update from that area.
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  And so that's awesome that we were able to help. We have a huge community.
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  We're a huge family, right? So President Montgomery, so you have a board meeting tonight.
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  It's a large task to get a group like that together on such short notice,
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  but it seems like they're stepping up. What do you think is coming out tonight?
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  So the members here, the board, they're very dedicated.
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  They know we have a disaster that we have to take care of. And so they're willing
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  to come online and for us to discuss items.
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  You know, one of the things that we, the main focus is to make sure that we
• 17:56
  have the capacity to be able to get the supplies of things that we need to get
• 18:00
  to the state employees and to our members.
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  And so tonight the meeting will be discussing that process as far as,
• 18:07
  you know, funding this type of effort.
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  And, you know, it's not a small task.
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  It's a great task, but CENIC has always been here for state employees and have
• 18:16
  always been here for their members, and they will continuously be that way because
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  that's what we're here for.
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  And I got to say, and thank y'all to y'all as leaders, we have our number one
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  and number two leaders in this organization who both have demanding full-time jobs, and you're here.
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  You've been at the legislature. You've been here dealing with items that have been donated.
• 18:37
  You've been doing different kinds of outreach to the members. Yeah. So that is huge.
• 18:42
  And I just wanted to say thank you. We are blessed as an organization to be
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  able to have dedicated leadership.
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  Thank you, Lynn and your team working with this Scenic Cares effort.
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  We had no idea when y'all formed this during COVID that we'd ever face a disaster like this.
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  But Scenic is one of many cogs in a giant wheel of North Carolinians trying
• 19:03
  to trying to get through this together. And I'd like to say a special thank
• 19:06
  you to our retirees from all across the East, the Central and the Piedmont area.
• 19:13
  You've been stepping up and helping out in every way that you can.
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  And we appreciate it because you've got a little more time, obviously,
• 19:21
  than those that are in the workplace that are stretched in right now.
• 19:24
  So thank you to all of you. Okay, I think a good episode, maybe a short one, but informative one.
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  Thanks to everybody for listening and to everyone in the mountains,
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  we love you and keep on staying mountain strong.
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  Music.