New grants boost Helene recovery efforts
The Town of Canton’s old fire station (left) and town hall were both flooded in 2021 and in 2024, shown here.
Cory Vaillancourt photo
The American Flood Coalition's Recovery and Resilience Partnership is barely six months old, but it’s already helping to deliver results in the form of a $20 million mitigation grant program aimed at helping communities in Western North Carolina recover from Hurricane Helene and prepare for the next storm.
On a humid August afternoon in Canton, Tony McEwen, Carolinas director of the American Flood Coalition, stood before a small group of local leaders with a message he said couldn’t wait.
“This 110% would not have happened were it not for Rep. Mark Pless,” McEwen told them, crediting the Haywood County Republican with shepherding the new $20 million Hurricane Helene Flood Mitigation Grant Program through the legislature. “We want to do everything we can as the American Flood Coalition to make sure that your constituents understood what you've done to help make this happen, and make sure that the communities here in your district understand the opportunity on the front end, so that you all can make use of these dollars.”
The stop in Canton, after a stop in Madison County and before a stop in Waynesville, wasn’t an accident. The town and the region have endured two deadly flooding events in just four years — Tropical Storm Fred in 2021, then Helene in 2024 — and McEwen wanted to make sure local officials understood both the opportunity, and the urgency.
The grant program, created through an appropriation in the Disaster Recovery Act of 2025 – Part II, will be administered by North Carolina Emergency Management and will fund project identification, design and implementation.
Eligible applicants include local and regional governments, as well as nonprofit organizations.
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Awards can be as much as $2 million for a single recipient or $4 million for a county. There’s no cost-share requirement, and eligible projects range from culvert and bridge retrofits or replacements to relocating at-risk infrastructure, improving stormwater and drainage systems or hardening critical facilities and utilities.
For McEwen, the timing matters as much as the money.
“North Carolina Emergency Management is moving these dollars really quick, which is why we’re here in person,” he said.
Applications will open within weeks, with decisions expected by mid-October.
“I would encourage y’all to very quickly think through what projects there are that Haywood County and Canton could apply for,” said McEwen.
Pless, who led the debate in the House and worked his caucus to support the measure, sees the grants as a way to go beyond simply replacing what was lost. Federal disaster aid, he noted, often just restores infrastructure to pre-storm condition — infrastructure that in many cases was old or wasn’t adequate to begin with. The state program, McEwen said, can add “that layer of resilience on top of a recovery project.”
Flood-prone farmland in the Bethel community is one example, according to Pless.
“Maybe this $2 million could go into a plan, and I know the TDA created this beautiful idea up there on Max Thompson Road for that tomato field; you're going to have to repair and replace all these things as time goes by,” he said. “Why could we not take the $2 million, harden up that area that you own to where when the water rises, the water gets to a level and it starts spilling into that for a containment. If we had three or four pockets … we can protect the town.”
Pless urged county leaders to share ideas and needs so he and his colleagues can adjust funding or program language as needed.
“Tell us what you need us to do. Tell us the language [in statues] you need us to change. Tell us how we can get you the money,” he said. “If you’re told no you don’t qualify, tell me why you don’t qualify so I can change the way we’re approaching it.”
That flexibility, McEwen said, is by design. The Helene Flood Mitigation Grant Program is the first state resilience-focused funding established after the storm, and it’s targeted directly at the 20 western counties hardest hit. It’s also the latest in a string of flood-resilience appropriations Pless has secured — $50 million over the last two budgets — and advocates hope to make such funding recurring.
For McEwen and the AFC, promoting responsible fiscal stewardship among entities that will ultimately receive the grants is critical.
“We want to have a conversation with folks from the western part of the state, the delegation here, but also eastern North Carolina, about the value in having a reliable recurring fund that communities can tap into,” he said. Flooding, he added, “is like no other issue … One community in and of itself can’t foot the bill. It takes resources from outside of local government coming in to help local governments do this.”
That watershed-level approach underpins another major initiative in motion, the North Carolina Flood Resiliency Blueprint. Stewart Brown, a state official working on the project, joined the Canton meeting to explain how the blueprint will guide long-term investment in flood mitigation.
Funded with $20 million in 2021 after Hurricane Florence, the blueprint compiles data, builds new flood models and develops decision support tools to help especially small or under-resourced communities identify and pursue resilience projects.
While the initial focus was on eastern North Carolina, the French Broad River Basin — encompassing much of the Helene-damaged region — was added early this year. Work there will incorporate data collected after Helene, calibrated to actual high-water marks.
“The high-minded goal is, we want to make this state more resilient to flooding,” Brown said.
That means thinking beyond recovery to proactive investments in infrastructure and land use planning that reduce exposure, costs and disruption. It also means looking to examples from other states and countries — including the Netherlands, which Pless visited last year — for strategies to slow and redirect water.
In Western North Carolina, that could mean elevating or fortifying essential facilities, moving vulnerable infrastructure out of floodplains or creating upstream retention areas to ease downstream flows like Pless mentioned. While such retention areas would help protect Canton, if they’re successful they’ll also protect Clyde — and everything else downstream.
It could also mean hardening critical bridges and culverts, projects squarely in line with the Helene grant program’s eligible uses.
Pless and McEwen both stressed that speed is essential, especially with the 2025 hurricane season approaching peak. Helene’s impact remains fresh, but with the North Carolina General Assembly’s crowded agenda, attention can shift quickly to other issues.
“We need to capitalize right now before something takes the distraction of the legislature and the Senate and the governor’s office to the coast,” Pless said.
Part of that push includes addressing bottlenecks in federal disaster relief, which local officials across the mountains have criticized as slow and overly complex.
McEwen said a recent survey of Helene-impacted local governments found that only about 6% of eligible expenses had been reimbursed so far — a slower pace than in previous storms. That figure tracks with an April story in The Smoky Mountain News near the six-month anniversary of Helene the storm that showed most local governments still hadn’t been paid and only 4% of needs had been met.
McEwen and other coalition leaders plan to take Western North Carolina leaders to Washington, D.C. next month to press for FEMA reforms.
Pless said the state has money for “unmet needs” that could be tapped if FEMA denies reimbursement, but local governments need to speak up.
“It is the intent for us to pay for this storm. We have the money. We don’t want anybody saddled with it,” he said. “It’s not fair for something that’s outside your control.”
For Canton and other hard-hit towns, the Helene Flood Mitigation Grant Program represents a rare chance to act on ideas that might otherwise remain on the drawing board for lack of funding. With no local match required and grants of up to $2 million for a single project, officials can think bigger — and longer term.
The eligible project list is broad. Relocating at-risk infrastructure, something Canton has been in the process of doing after Fred, can take entire facilities out of harm’s way. Stormwater and drainage improvements can handle heavier downpours. Hardening utilities and critical facilities can keep essential services running during and after a flood.
The AFC’s message in Canton was clear — the money is there, but only for a short window, and the communities that move fastest will benefit most.
“This stuff is moving pretty quick,” McEwen said. “I hope everyone makes use of this. But in particular, what y’all dealt with the last few years, I hope … you and your constituents can make good use of this.”
For Pless, the stakes are personal. He grew up fishing and as a paramedic has even rescued people from the Pigeon River, and has seen floodwaters surround homes in Canton as far back as the late 1970s.
“This isn’t the first time,” he said. “We’re learning from it. We’re getting better. We got to figure out a way to make it to where we protect the town.”
That, he said, will take coordination between local visionaries, state resources and outside experts — the kind the Recovery and Resilience partnership aims to provide.
“The conception of how we protect Canton and how we protect Haywood County is going to have to begin with you,” Pless told local leaders. “And then when you share that with us, we’ll run with it.”
