Rising above the flood: Small towns fight for survival amid funding shortfalls
The tiny riverside town of Marshall was hit hard by Helene, but rebuilding business owners show they’re not without hope. Cory Vaillancourt photo
With billions in damages, limited state aid and considerable uncertainty surrounding federal funding, local officials are still pushing for streamlined disaster response to rebuild their communities months after Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina.
An innovative new partnership between federal, state and local leaders is looking to be that “squeaky wheel,” from Washington to Raleigh, especially in smaller rural communities that don’t have much of a voice.
“We’ve been working over the last few months since the tragedy of Hurricane Helene to be a resource to communities that have been impacted by Helene as well as to try and pull together leaders from across the region to come together and work on both recovery and resilience in a unified manner,” said Tony McEwen, Carolinas director at the American Flood Coalition.
The American Flood Coalition is a bipartisan group that works at the local, state and federal level to advocate for meaningful flood policy reform, boasting more than 400 members in 22 states. Locally, Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers, Haywood County Commissioner Brandon Rogers and Rep. Mark Pless (R-Haywood) have been involved with the organization since around the time Tropical Storm Fred killed six people and cut a half-billion dollar swath of damage through eastern Haywood County and parts of Buncombe County in 2021.
The AFC’s role in the partnership isn’t necessarily to lead, but rather to facilitate.
“We felt that it was really important that these local leaders come together and choose their path, both on priorities and what direction they want this partnership to go or not go,” McEwen said. “We stand ready to be supportive of that those decisions that they make.”
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Starting a month after the storm, AFC met with around 20 communities, large and small, affected by Helene. The meetings included municipal administrators, regional entities and elected officials who produced a set of priorities unique to their communities.
As the partnership’s name implies, those priorities include equal parts recovery, intended to return some semblance of normalcy to affected communities, and resiliency, intended to mitigate future flooding as much as possible.
Recent statements by President Donald Trump about FEMA’s ongoing role in disaster recovery, however, are gaining support and could change the way communities across the nation handle extreme emergencies like earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and wildfires in the future.
RECOVERY
One thread that unites hurricane-stricken communities in Western North Carolina is trepidation over small businesses left high and dry by the General Assembly and Congress.
For months, the business community has been sounding the alarm about direct financial assistance — grants, not loans — for affected businesses, many of which are still encumbered by COVID-era loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration. As decision time draws near for some business owners contemplating reopening, leaders are worried about the effect their absence could have on the region’s tourism-driven economy.
“There’s a really strong concern about how the tourism industry bounces back, how they attract visitors to this region after people have seen the stories on the national news,” said McEwen. “It is our hope that by getting these folks together, that we can amplify that need even more and very quickly.”
American Flood Coalition Carolinas Director Tony McEwen (center) speaks on the steps of the now-closed courthouse in Marshall, joined by Madison County Commission Chair Matt Wechtel (left) and Marshall Mayor Aaron Haynie (right). Cory Vaillancourt photo
Plenty of other concerns remain, which is why the partnership held a multi-level discussion on Jan. 30 in Asheville, leading up to a public unveiling of the partnership during a bus tour of hard-hit communities including Biltmore Village and Marshall, in Madison County, on Jan. 31.
More than two dozen local and regional leaders, including county commission chairs or vice chairs from Ashe, Avery, Buncombe, Haywood and Madison counties, mayors of Asheville, Banner Elk, Black Mountain, Burgaw, Canton, Chimney Rock, Lake Lure, Marshall and Old Fort, town managers from Burnsville and Saluda, an alderman from Hot Springs and Lake Lure Mayor Pro Tem Dave DiOrio, took part.
“All that water … came into [Hickory Nut Gorge] with a force never seen before, and it just didn’t damage things. It wiped everything off the face of the earth, most notably Chimney Rock. Of course, all that debris ended up in Lake Lure,” said DiOrio.
Lake Lure’s unique geography along the Blue Ridge escarpment played a critical role in the devastating floods that hit the area, and DiOrio’s government is still grappling with the loss of critical basic services.
“Water treatment, sewage collection, even things like our town hall, all that is just gone,” he said. “Our ability to remain as a town has ceased to exist, so we’re looking for public assistance here to get us back on our feet again so that people can stay here and get tourism going.”
Banner Elk Mayor Brenda Lyerly’s community remains in recovery mode as well, with many businesses — especially tourism-related businesses — still reeling from closures in the aftermath of Helene and struggling to stay afloat.
But Banner Elk has another, more serious underlying problem.
“The entire water and sewer system were wiped out in Banner Elk, as they were in many other areas,” Lyerly told The Smoky Mountain News.
The town’s annual budget is around $4 million. The cost of restoring the water and sewer system is approximately $1.2 million, but there aren’t many options to pay for it, other than taking out a loan.
“I think all of the communities are going to have a hard time in our area,” she said.
Madison County, with a population of just 22,000 people, has a much larger ask — $196 million.
“That’s just to maintain continuity of government, get our infrastructure back together and to start with some of our small businesses,” said County Manager Rod Honeycutt.
At the root of all recovery issues is one simple fact: the political will to disburse appropriate levels of grant funding that would make communities like Banner Elk, Lake Lure and Marshall whole again doesn’t yet exist.
Gov. Josh Stein’s recent introduction of a $30 million grant program for small businesses will help some, but not all.
State estimates of damages run in the $60 billion range. Late last year, North Carolina’s General Assembly allocated a meager $1 billion in three tranches. Shortly thereafter, Congress passed a $110 billion relief bill; however, North Carolina’s share is estimated to be only $9 to $15 billion.
Western North Carolina Congressman Chuck Edwards (R-Henderson) sits on the House Appropriations Committee and says he authored the relief bill, but he somehow failed to deliver the funding needed by his district for meaningful recovery. Edwards did not respond to an interview request from The Smoky Mountain News to explain.
During House Select Committee on Helene Recovery meeting in Raleigh last week, a common theme emerged during presentations from officials heading up the Governor’s Recovery Office for Western North Carolina (GROW-NC).
“We did not receive near enough money to support the needs in Western North Carolina,” said Jonathan Krebs, Stein’s Western North Carolina recovery advisor.
Worse, Trump’s sweeping freeze on federal grants, issued as an executive order on Jan. 27, temporarily affected the state’s ability to access the disaster relief funding that had been appropriated.
“So the FEMA dollars were reactivated today,” Krebs said during the Jan. 29 hearing. “Although there was the pause that impacted all grant funds, I believe yesterday … they did reactivate that portal today, so we have FEMA funds now that we are actively spending and reimbursing in real time every day.”
Dave DiOrio, mayor pro temp of Lake Lure, has to deal with some of the region’s most pressing post-hurricane needs. Cory Vaillancourt photo
Judges from Washington, D.C., and Providence, Rhode Island, blocked Trump’s funding freeze for the time being; however, the U.S. Department of Justice is fighting the rulings.
RESILIENCY
Although it wouldn’t immediately benefit Hurricane Helene survivors across Western North Carolina — or survivors of a 2021 tropical storm in Haywood County — substantial mitigation projects meant to ameliorate the more expensive aspects of storm recovery could bring costs down when future disasters strike, making contentious funding fights a thing of the past.
“Mitigation is a big deal,” said DiOrio.
According to the National Building Sciences Council, each dollar invested in mitigation can save up to $13 in recovery costs.
The only flood control instrument near DiOrio’s town is the Lake Lure dam, which he said performed admirably but was still “totally overwhelmed.”
“We’ve been looking for years to do modifications and even build a new dam that would have enough of a capacity to control the lake level and control dam operations to mitigate the flood. None of those were in place for a variety of reasons,” he said. “Simply no funds to do that.”
Engineering assessments for the new dam have been underway, but the completed project is still years away.
Banner Elk and Lake Lure, like other communities in the region, are also learning hard lessons about hardening critical infrastructure, just as the Haywood County town of Canton did in 2021 when Tropical Storm Fred destroyed the co-located town hall and police department while inundating the firehouse yards away.
“We’re talking about rebuilding these municipal services and actual physical structures like the fire department and police department, which washed away, and the town hall, which was totally devastated — to build them in areas that are more resilient and to make our services, particularly for water and sewer, more resilient,” DiOrio said. “Our challenge is working with FEMA to get approvals through the system. Very, very bureaucratic, whole bunch of red tape that we should be able to cut through in order to get money flowing so we can start to put those systems back together again.”
FEMA REFORM
On Jan. 24, Trump visited Western North Carolina and the wildfire-affected region of California on the same day he issued yet another in the steady stream of executive orders he’s promulgated since Jan. 20, calling for an assessment of FEMA’s disaster response over the past four years. A council of appointees will hold its initial public meeting within 90 days and then submit the assessment to the president no more than 180 days after that.
Abolishing the much-maligned agency is on the table, according to Trump. That would leave states responsible for disaster recovery, although Trump’s not been clear about whether federal assistance would still pour into states like it has in the past. Trump did, however, raise the concept of sending disaster funds directly to states rather than through FEMA.
“In my estimation, standing back to look at it now, I think that probably is a good idea,” said Banner Elk’s Lyerly. “What we’ve determined was some of the FEMA people that we worked with are sincere and they really wanted to help. FEMA is just so big and they don’t have answers, they have to ask somebody else for the answers. That answer doesn’t come today, doesn’t come tomorrow, and they have to get an answer from somebody else before they can do anything. So I just think even though they mean well, they’re just too big to be able to handle these huge disasters.”
DiOrio said that FEMA is holding up a number of projects in Lake Lure, and that minimizing FEMA’s role would be helpful.
“That whole process is so frustrating,” he said. “So the big idea now is to cut through that red tape, get pretty much block grants to the state and the state agencies that have been working with the local unit municipalities to facilitate that money flow to the people that know the area the best, and that’s all the way from us locally, through the state, to get that money flowing quicker and better and, frankly, less costly, because you don’t have this third party oversight that really adds no value.”
That’s not far off from what Smathers thinks would help his town of Canton recover more quickly from not one but two major flood events in the last three years.
“I have no doubt it is time for significant changes in FEMA,” he said. “This conversation has gone on since the start of our union. What does the federal branch do? What does the state branch do? But it is time to change the culture.”
That culture, Smathers said, involves a lack of communication on the part of FEMA, including last-minute extensions of hotel voucher expiration deadlines that leave survivors wondering where they’ll spend the night, seemingly arbitrary denials of applications for assistance, the slow rollout of temporary shelter assistance and even the reimbursements the town still hasn’t received from 2021.
Rogers, who serves as vice chair of the Haywood County Board of Commissioners, was unequivocal about getting federal dollars as close to the ground as possible.
“I support it 100%. I believe in direct funding. [Federal money] coming to the state would be wonderful, but I would even like to take it a step further and have it directly appropriated to the counties themselves,” he said. “I feel like we know what needs to be done on a local level and we can get the job done. I’ve said this before, you can hold us to certain regulations and restrictions. That’s fine. But give us the money and get it to us quicker, and we can get the job done right.”
At MANNA FoodBank in Mills River on Feb. 3, Stein unveiled a $1.07 billion budget request to aid Western North Carolina’s recovery from Hurricane Helene. His proposal includes support for economic recovery, housing repairs, infrastructure restoration and aid for farmers and schools. Important allocations would include $150 million for rebuilding homes, $100 million for local government support and $75 million for road and bridge repairs. Additional funds will help businesses, educational programs and food banks. Stein emphasized urgency, asking state leaders to act swiftly.
Congress is expected to take up another disaster relief bill in March, primarily focused on the wildfires in California. Rogers just wants the federal government to remember that there are still plenty of unmet needs right here in Western North Carolina.
“You know, we worry that the money will go toward California. That’s where all the superstars are —I think that’s been said today as well — and we’ll be forgotten,” he said. “I definitely don’t want that to happen. And we want to get all we can get.”
