The General Assembly created a pair of subcommittees Wednesday to take deep dives on a pair of problem areas for Gov. Roy Cooper's administration: The slow recovery from Hurricane Matthew and a fund his administration negotiated over the Atlantic Coast Pipeline natural gas project.

Republican legislative leaders created the new committees during a hearing on the two issues and said the subcommittees will have subpoena powers and can enlist investigators if needed.

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Cooper's spokesman called the meeting a sham and an "embarrassing use of the legislature's time." Other Democrats accused the GOP of political theater as North Carolina heads toward the November elections that will decide whether Republicans keep their super-majorities in the House and the Senate.

Over the two-hour hearing, state legislators didn't ask a single question of the three high-ranking administration officials in attendance, including Cooper's chief of staff, Kristi Jones. Instead, Republican members made presentations laying out the case for further investigation and asked questions of each other and legislative staff.

Several times that process ended without legislators knowing the answer. Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger said direct administration questioning will come during the smaller subcommittee meetings and that Wednesday's full Joint Legislative Commission on Governmental Operations meeting was too unwieldy a setting for that.

Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore co-chair the joint committee, which has nearly 50 members and had not met since 2015.

Hurricane Matthew recovery

Berger, R-Rockingham, said the administration has shown "gross incompetence" with its Hurricane Matthew relief efforts.

Moore, R-Cleveland, said there "are a lot of questions" nearly two years after the storm inundated much of eastern North Carolina.

The administration says more than $743 million has been spent in that recovery. The problem has been with a federal rebuilding fund dubbed CDBG-DR, which is typically some of the last money spent in a recovery. The administration has drawn down about $2 million of the $236 in federal CDBG-DR money available, officials said Wednesday.

That is about to change, Cooper spokeswoman Sadie Weiner said. The state recently won required federal approvals, and the spending pace will increase, she said. There's also more money expected, for a total topping $400 million in this program alone.

The federal government classifies North Carolina as a "slow spender," a designation it gave about 60 percent of the open CDBG-DR programs around the country in a July 31 report. South Carolina has moved quicker, though, and the rebuilt homes on that side of the border offer a stark comparison for North Carolinians frustrated by their state's pace.

"I still have a town without people," said Rep. Brenden Jones, R-Columbus. "I still have vacant homes. I have broken families, and I have a broken town – all because of a lack of any interest in taking care of these folks. ... We need answers from this administration as to why the citizens of this state are not as important as the citizens of South Carolina."

Part of the problem, according to the Cooper administration, is that the state shifted management of the program from the Department of Commerce to the Division of Emergency Management in 2016, the year before Cooper took office. Even today, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which manages the program at the federal level, deals with Commerce, and Emergency Management has to forward paperwork through the extra state department, Weiner said.

Jones, who addressed the joint committee for about five minutes Wednesday, said Emergency Management Director Mike Sprayberry "had to build the ship in the middle of the storm."

Jones declined to speak with WRAL News after the meeting, saying he had to go.

Sprayberry and his department have been praised by Republican legislators for their response in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Matthew. It's the long-term recovery that has been criticized, and Sprayberry has answered questions on the subject several times before at meetings of a House committee on disaster relief.

GOP legislators praised Sprayberry at that committee's last meeting, held a little more than two weeks ago. It was a stark change in tone from previous meetings.

Atlantic Coast Pipeline fund

The same day the state announced that the Atlantic Coast Pipeline had won a key environmental permit, the Cooper administration announced a $57.8 million mitigation fund the pipeline operators would pay into and the the Governor's Office would control.

Republican legislators and others questioned whether the fund was a shakedown and the permit was granted only once the money was promised.

They moved quickly to reroute the money. Instead of going into a grant fund to help communities and businesses hook into the pipeline, pay for solar energy projects, environmental mitigation and economic development as Cooper had promised, the money would go to public schools along the pipeline route.

The fund is similar to one promised in Virginia, which the pipeline will also cross. But the agreement there is with the state and lays out more details about how the money would be spent than North Carolina's memorandum of understanding does. North Carolina's agreement was with the Governor's Office, and it contemplated the money flowing into an escrow fund outside the state treasury.

Cooper later said he envisioned an appointed board of experts doling out grants from the fund to support job creation along the pipeline path. But that wasn't written into the memorandum. Berger said in a statement Wednesday that "serious and legitimate questions remain."

Other GOP legislators openly wondered whether businesses could feel comfortable in North Carolina, or whether they could expect Department of Environmental Quality permit decisions to be tied to payments.

"This is not an accusation, it is a perception," Sen. Paul Newton, R-Cabarrus, said. "The perception there is that he waited ... until he got his MOU, his $57.8 million, before he released DEQ to issue the permit. That's a perception."

Newton is a former North Carolina president for Duke Energy, which is one of the companies building the pipeline. He was the General Assembly's main presenter Wednesday on the issue, and he called for the subcommittee to investigate further.

House Minority Leader Darren Jackson suggested the process was political theater. He noted that Republican lawmakers complaining of unanswered questions from the administrations haven't pushed the pipeline issue for months

"You can understand why I'd be confused that we've done nothing about this for six months," Jackson, D-Wake, told Newton. "Now we're in late August. Campaign season's getting geared up."

Newton said the ball has been in the governor's court to fully answer questions initially posed in February.

"If it all makes sense, it's all legal, it all goes away," he said. "But you know what happens when people don't respond to questions."