North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper was at Cherry Point on Tuesday where he met with the Commander’s Council.
He was on base for several hours to discuss what is good and bad, and looking toward what changes need to be made.
Governor Cooper highlighted the importance of quality education for military families.
Cherry Point is home to about 6,000 active-duty Marines in the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing (MAW).
But it is not just them, it is also their families:
We need to do better. They hear it from their soldiers and their Marines and their sailors that—and their airmen, that they need quality education for their children. So, that investment is going to be critical.
Cooper says North Carolina is home to many military bases and veterans and that he’s grateful for each one of them.
This area of the state is so important because it has so many military families who are involved here. I remember coming down here, playing high school football down here in Havelock and remembering how good they always were because they were the kids of military families.
They have expanded Medicaid to give access to people in more rural areas like Havelock and are working to provide better childcare for those stationed here.
We’re trying to form bipartisan coalitions of people who will go to the legislature and say, we need you to invest in public schools. We need to pay our teachers more; we need to build more schools. And I think that coalition is growing, and I want to make sure that’s stronger and stronger as I run through the tape at the end of the year.
Cooper also addressed the changes made to the infrastructure since Hurricanes Matthew and Florence that made the base better prepared for Debby this past week.
I think we’ve already seen in this storm the fact that we did not rebuild in certain places, and we did make buildings that we did rebuild more resilient, we’ve seen the benefits of that.
Those changes mostly come from elevating certain buildings to protect them from flooding.
There is no clear time when these changes will be seen, but Cooper expressed the importance of supporting the military here in North Carolina.