South Carolina Office of Resilience presents statewide plan, staffing and audits to oversight committee

Ben Duncan, director of the South Carolina Office of Resilience, told the Legislative Oversight Committee that SCORE’s mission is to lessen the impact of disasters on South Carolinians by planning and coordinating statewide resilience, long-term recovery and hazard mitigation. He said the agency released the state’s first statewide strategic resilience and risk reduction plan in June 2023 and is now focused on implementation.

The plan sets watershed-based priorities and four lines of effort: watershed-based planning and coordination, improved data collection and coordination, pursuing all available funding sources, and coordinating land conservation to reduce flood risk. Alex Butler, SCORE’s resilience director, described how the agency has begun hiring watershed coordinators and is updating key datasets such as land-cover mapping and rainfall recurrence intervals to improve planning.

Butler said the state is already using outdated rainfall-frequency curves (Atlas 14) in many design decisions and that updated data show events formerly considered 100-year storms are occurring more frequently. "When we put in something designed for a 25-year storm, we're already missing the mark because we're using outdated numbers," Butler said.

SCORE described several data and partnership initiatives: a refined land-cover dataset (anticipated by year-end), a resilience indicator developed with the University of South Carolina to measure community capacity to respond, and regional coordination with neighboring states for shared basins such as the Catawba and Saluda. Butler said the office is also coordinating with federal and state agencies, universities and local governments to overlay flood risk with critical infrastructure such as roadways and solid-waste facilities.

On staffing and finances, Duncan said SCORE employs about 68 full-time staff and maintains roughly 50 temporary grant-funded staff for disaster response. He told the committee the agency has routed more than $1.2 billion through its programs since 2015 and that recent audits by the State Auditor’s Office and HUD’s Office of Inspector General produced no findings. "For the audits that we've had this year, there are no findings, sir," Duncan said.

Butler and Duncan emphasized implementation over planning. Butler said SCORE is filling watershed coordinator roles, beginning pilot watershed planning in the Sockahatchee Basin, and coordinating large federal grants and philanthropic awards—including a regional natural-lands grant and EPA funding for solar deployment targeted at low- and moderate-income communities.

The presentation drew questions from multiple senators about the basis for the office’s risk assessments and how resilience indicators reflect local capacity. Several lawmakers sought clarification on county- and neighborhood-level impacts that will inform future SCORE projects. The committee adjourned to a finance subcommittee meeting after the presentation.