After complaints, delays in benefits, NC unemployment office gets a new boss
There’s a new boss at North Carolina’s unemployment office, effective immediately, Gov. Roy Cooper announced Wednesday morning.
Cooper didn’t say why the old boss, Lockhart Taylor, moved to a different job in state government “with separate duties and responsibilities.”
But the move comes after numerous complaints about long waits that newly unemployed people having been facing — waits to get through to the office on the phone, or to get benefits at all.
Replacing Taylor as assistant secretary for the Division of Employment Security will be Pryor Gibson, a former state lawmaker and advisor to former Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue.
The News & Observer reported recently on people who had waited two months to get their benefits, even though state officials say the process shouldn’t take more than 14 days as long as there are no complications.
North Carolina also took longer than some other states to implement pieces of the federal unemployment benefits passed in the March stimulus package, including additional benefits for self-employed people and for people who had already exhausted their state benefits.
Last week, Taylor told state lawmakers that the unemployment office got only 24 hours of advance notice from Cooper in March before the governor ordered bars and restaurants to mostly shut down, which then led to historic levels of unemployment.
Rep. Julia Howard, a Davie County Republican who chairs the legislature’s oversight committee on unemployment insurance, questioned the move Wednesday.
“It’s surprising that we would change right now in the middle of the stream,” she said. “I guess somebody has to take the fall.”
Howard said Taylor had been doing “a phenomenal job for the last three months,” and she worries a new leader will take time to learn the agency’s operations.
As for the backlogs in claims, “I don’t think that it’s their fault, because I know they have worked seven days a week, because I’ve been on the phone with him many, many Sundays,” Howard said. “It was just overpowering when everything shut down, and they had no notice that all of these claims were coming, and they were doing the best they could.”
Gibson had previously been working for the Cooper administration leading the Hometown Strong program. Cooper created that program after becoming governor to help steer more economic development money and other such aid toward rural parts of the state.
“Pryor Gibson is a forceful presence to lead DES during this unprecedented economic stress,” N.C. Commerce Secretary Tony Copeland said in a news release Wednesday morning. The unemployment office is part of the Department of Commerce.
This story was originally published May 27, 2020 at 10:48 AM with the headline "After complaints, delays in benefits, NC unemployment office gets a new boss."
