Losing ground: Six months after Helene, local governments still haven’t been paid
More than six months after Hurricane Helene ravaged Western North Carolina, most local governments like Canton haven’t seen a nickel of promised recovery funding. Cory Vaillancourt photo
Most days, Brandon Rogers has dirt under his fingernails — a badge of honest labor. Owner of a small auto repair shop on the outskirts of Canton, Rogers usually wakes up, puts on some sturdy workwear and heads to the shop to support his family, one customer at a time. Last Tuesday, his day began not with the percussive whir of impact wrenches or the earthy aroma of motor oil, but instead with a crisp suit and a trip to the airport.
After meetings with senators, members of Congress and federal administrators, Rogers wound up hearing his name echo off the walls of one of America’s most hallowed residences.
“I never thought that I would ever be at the White House when I signed up to run for commissioner,” said Rogers.
For Rogers, vice chair of the Haywood County Board of Commissioners, it was his second White House visit in the past few months — a poignant return on the six-month anniversary of Hurricane Helene, which saddled his rugged Appalachian county with tens of millions of dollars in damages.
His first visit, along with a delegation of elected officials and administrators from other rural Western North Carolina communities, was to lobby for urgently needed disaster recovery funding. It was moderately successful, with a $110 billion aid package passing through Congress late last year, expected to send between $9 billion and $15 billion to the state against estimated needs of roughly $60 billion.
“As far as going up to Washington to fight for my county,” Rogers said, “that’s the whole reason I’ve done this deal anyway.”
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His second visit, however, was a fight that never needed to happen, a fight to get the money they’d already been promised.
Haywood County Commissioner Brandon Rogers (far right) looks on as Sen. Thom Tillis speaks to the American Flood Coalition’s Washington delegation. Tony McEwen photo
In the six months since Helene dropped nearly three feet of water on parts of the region, flooding homes and businesses, washing out bridges, destroying an interstate highway, causing landslides that erased entire neighborhoods and killing 106 people, most local governments still haven’t seen a nickel.
“When somebody pulls into my shop with a flat tire, we fix it right away,” said Rogers. “I don’t tell them to come back six months later. We fix it right away.”
PROMISES, PROMISES
Rogers and the delegation wouldn’t have been in Washington at all were it not for the American Flood Coalition, a nonpartisan nonprofit that promotes smart flood policy on both state and federal levels. The AFC, which has 470 members in 22 states, recently formed an advocacy group called the Western North Carolina Recovery and Resilience Partnership, a coalition of roughly 20 communities ravaged by what many call the most destructive extreme weather event in recent memory.
“We’re supporting the coalition, ensuring in particular that the smaller communities have an opportunity to be at the table in both Washington and in Raleigh and that they have access to the depth of knowledge that the American Flood Coalition has,” said Tony McEwen, Carolinas director for the AFC. “We’ve been trying to be helpful to them throughout this process.”
McEwen has maintained that the role of the AFC is not to lead these communities to specific conclusions, but rather to amplify their existing concerns and lived experiences at the highest levels of government. Over the three days of meetings with Sens. Thom Tillis and Ted Budd; North Carolina Reps. Chuck Edwards, Tim Moore and Deborah Ross; FEMA’s director of public assistance; and the White House intergovernmental affairs team, some startling problems were revealed.
“First off, there was an appreciation expressed for the $100-plus billion dollars that had been appropriated by Congress, but then there was a prompt to the elected officials that had traveled in from Western North Carolina to raise your hand if you hadn’t received any funds yet,” McEwen said. “It was a pretty eye-opening experience, I think, for the folks that weren’t intimately familiar with that situation. A vast majority of the hands went up.”
A Smoky Mountain News survey conducted March 25-31 paints a picture of assurances unkept, and the growing chasm between promises and performance. Out of 23 local governments units claiming more than $1.7 billion in damage, only nine had received any funding from FEMA — totaling just $67.2 million, or less than 4% of needs. Fourteen of those local governments have received nothing at all.
“I raised my hand every single time,” Rogers said. “None of the counties or municipalities that were represented there at our meeting from WNC has received any funding. That was one of the main purposes for us going on the trip to begin with.”
Wedged between the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway, Haywood County has just over 60,000 residents and a general fund budget of more than $122 million. County officials said they aren’t finished calculating the damage to county-owned infrastructure, but it could be around $15 million by this point.
The county has received exactly $0 from FEMA as of March 28.
That same day, Rogers had just emerged from a three-plus hour meeting with county administrators and other commissioners, part of the county’s routine annual budget planning process that for this year is anything but routine.
“Sure, it makes it tougher,” Rogers said. “Fortunately, our finances are in order, and the board’s done a great job along with our staff to create a good, healthy fund balance. If we didn’t have that, we’d be in trouble, especially in times like this when you have to front the money and then sit and wait on reimbursements. So again, that was the question that kept coming up time and time again — whose desk is it on, and what do we need to do to get the funding sent to us?”
Haywood County wasn’t hit nearly as hard by Helene as other counties in the region, but the damage was still substantial, especially for its four incorporated municipalities. Maggie Valley is looking at paying for $3.8 million in damages with a $4.3 million annual budget. Waynesville has $4.7 million in damage against a $19.7 million budget. Clyde, with a budget of $4.2 million, is the only Haywood municipality that thus far received FEMA money, $46,000 towards $1.7 million in damage. The payment came one day before the six-month anniversary of Helene.
Canton, in the eastern part of the county, was hit with deadly flooding from Tropical Storm Fred in August 2021, making Helene the town’s second extreme weather event in just over three years.
“The initial subtotal for Helene is $11,322,000,” said Natalie Walker, Canton’s assistant town manager and CFO. The town’s annual budget is $9.7 million.
But Walker has another problem. She says the town is still owed more than $1 million from Fred and that she submits invoices for payment every quarter but has only ever received two payments.
“People are hearing promises, especially about FEMA buyouts, while we’re still waiting for money from 2021,” said Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers, who like Rogers was part of the Washington delegation. “There are people that are counting on that buyout to make decisions. I took a letter from our school system — over a million dollars is still owed to our school system from 2021. Our people deserve better than promises and timelines. It’s exceptionally stressful for our businesses, our homeowners, our governments and our farmers.”
NEIGHBORS HELPING NEIGHBORS
One-third the population of Haywood County and just to the northeast, neighboring Madison County sits perched upon the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where 80-mile-per-hour wind gusts from Helene ripped over ridgetops as the French Broad River tore through municipalities far below, killing four people. Madison County’s government operates on an annual budget of $33 million but has an estimated $196 million in damage.
“The only funds we received so far is a $1.6 million cash flow loan that is zero interest for five years,” said Rod Honeycutt, Madison County’s manager. “Our hope is that that will be forgiven.”
The loan mirrors the approach taken by the North Carolina General Assembly, which has to date appropriated roughly $1.5 billion in recovery funding over the course of four relief bills. Two governors now, Roy Cooper and Josh Stein, have advocated for far more, but it’s beyond the capacity of a state with a $35 billion budget to bear another $60 billion.
While there are plenty of cheap loans available to local governments, direct support to counties, municipalities and small businesses that aren’t in a position to take on more debt has been nearly nonexistent — a major reason communities are looking to Washington.
Matt Wechtel, chair of the Madison County Board of Commissioners, said the lack of funding has left the county practically at a standstill in terms of recovery projects.
“I don’t know how many of them would be completed, but we definitely would be a lot further along,” Wechtel said. “You know, we’re the only county that I know of that lost a courthouse, lost two town halls, one in Marshall, one in Hot Springs, we lost the public library in Hot Springs, we’ve lost two sewage treatment plants, one in Marshall, one in Hot Springs. Obviously, in a perfect world, the sewage treatment plants probably would have been priority number one.”
Abigail Norton, mayor of Hot Springs in Madison County, said her small town estimates just over $700,000 in damages that will come from the town’s general fund and water/sewer fund that together operate annually on less than $1.1 million. Norton said Hot Springs had yet to receive any FEMA money.
Marshall Town Administrator Forest Gilliam said his town, with its $1.2 million general fund, has damages of between $15 million and $40 million, depending on the final design and placement of its new sewage treatment plant. But like other towns, Marshall has yet to receive any FEMA funding, leaving folks to do what these isolated communities have been doing for centuries — rely on each other.
“We did not have a lot of Helene damage,” said Nathan Bennett, Mars Hill’s town manager. “We didn’t get the [heavy] rainfall, which left us in a place to respond. We sent public works crews to Marshall and Hot Springs to help them stabilize their water systems. We also sent Weaverville about 700,000 gallons of water and another million gallons by tanker to community drop points in Asheville, Swannanoa and Burnsville.”
Bennett said a damaged fence in the watershed might cost about $20,000, but he hopes to get much of that reimbursed through insurance. Extra payroll costs probably total around $50,000. Mars Hill hasn’t yet received any money from FEMA reimbursements, but the costs likely won’t have an outsized impact on the town’s $3.2 million budget.
As in Haywood County, civic leadership in Madison County had to step up to support the small business community, absent meaningful help from state and local governments; Wechtel said that the county seeded a grant program for businesses in Hot Springs and Marshall with $100,000 from its economic development budget. In conjunction with nonprofit small business lender Mountain BizWorks, that figure grew to more than $300,000.
“It’s nowhere near what they need,” Wechtel said. “But it was a way for us to try to help jump start the process and let them know that they’re not being forgotten. At least by local government, they’re not being forgotten.”
PUT IN A CORNER
Nearly 35 miles to the southeast, Rutherford County and its municipalities experienced what can only be called catastrophic damage. County Manager Steve Garrison said the county, with a budget of almost $81 million, had at least $23 million in damages but had only received $7.7 million from FEMA thus far.
That’s far better than in Lake Lure, a picturesque lakeside community probably best known as the setting for the 1987 blockbuster film, “Dirty Dancing.”
Including the town’s hydroelectric fund and water/sewer fund, it operates on about $9 million a year, but the staggering amount of devastation from Helene almost defies tabulation.
“I don’t know exactly because we’re still working on our damage inventory, but I would say it’s probably right around $370 million,” said Mayor Carol Pritchett.
Pritchett has much to be thankful for, especially that no one was killed in Lake Lure. Damage to homes was relatively minor, as the steep slopes necessitate building on higher ground. Businesses were likewise relatively unscathed, mostly because there aren’t many.
“Our major damages here from Hurricane Helene were infrastructure damages,” she said. “Damage to our dam, damage to our wastewater treatment plant, damage to our sewer collection system and also to our lake. The town right above us on the Rocky Broad River, Chimney Rock village — all of Chimney Rock village, almost, is in Lake Lure.”
Like others, Lake Lure hasn’t received any money from FEMA. In fact, Pritchett said, the town had to spend its own money to clear a 20-foot debris pile on the Memorial Highway Bridge.
“To be sure that people in our town actually had an entrance and exit from the town if they needed health care or whatever they needed, we hired local contractors,” Pritchett said. “Clearly, small contractors like that have to be paid, they can’t wait for reimbursements, and so we did. We paid them $1.5 million out of our general fund.”
The receipts for the work were submitted in October, but the lack of federal response has put Lake Lure in a corner, so to speak.
“When you have a town this small — we have 1,400 residents here — so with that sort of tax base, you have a limitation as to how much you could say, ‘Well, let’s just raise the taxes.’ We can’t,” Pritchett said. “So we really cannot commence any other projects until we are obligated by FEMA, because honestly, if they decided that they were not going to obligate us, we couldn’t pay for it.”
Chimney Rock Village Administrator Stephen Duncan said his town lost more than a third of its businesses and homes. The town recently welcomed its first residents back. On an annual budget of just under $650,000, Chimney Rock has roughly $4 million in damage and has only received about $300,000 from FEMA.
Buncombe County, with a $411 million general fund, has submitted $82 million in FEMA projects and received $34 million. Other Buncombe County municipalities have fared about as well.
Asheville, the largest population center in the region, has a large property tax base but much larger needs. A spokesperson for the city said it had incurred about $1 billion in damage, with a general fund of not quite $180 million. To date, the city has received $17.6 million.
Biltmore Forest has a budget of $6.8 million, $9.7 million in damages and has received $4 million. Black Mountain has a budget of $13 million, approximately $30 million in damages and has received $861,000. Weaverville has a budget of $9.3 million, $2.5 million in damages and has received $1.8 million. Woodfin has a budget of $10.8 million, $12.6 million in damages and has received $824,000. Montreat has a budget of $2.2 million, $12-15 million in damages and has received nothing.
“I think what we accomplished [in Washington],” Wechtel said, “was we made them understand that what they think they have accomplished in getting us the help that we need has not made it to the boots on the ground. I think they were very satisfied in their minds with what they had done to help us, but I don’t think they realized that what they had done hasn’t actually made it to the end user yet.”
RETHINKING RESPONSE
Although the focus of the Washington trip was recovery — immediate money for pressing needs — the glaring disconnect between rhetoric and reality has plenty of people wondering aloud if the country’s entire disaster response system needs to be rethought. Chief among them is President Donald Trump.
But like a lot of things Trump says, there’s a significant amount of ambiguity and conflicting messaging coming from other administration figures.
On Jan. 24, at Asheville Regional Airport, Trump said he thought FEMA was “not good,” a “disaster,” a “very big disappointment” and that he thought it might “go away.”
In an executive order issued that day, Trump said the federal response to Helene and other disasters “demonstrate the need to drastically improve the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s efficacy, priorities and competence.” The order goes on to establish a review council of no more than 20 members, chaired by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. In a subsequent executive order March 19, Trump said, “preparedness is most effectively owned and managed at the state, local and even individual levels, supported by a competent, accessible and efficient federal government.” Seven days later, Tillis told NOTUS that abolishing FEMA was “stupid,” right around the time Noem said she would abolish it.
While the elimination of FEMA may or may not be on the table, members of the AFC’s Washington delegation who spoke with SMN didn’t seem overly supportive of the agency simply “going away.” All, however, strongly support the idea of sending federal recovery funds directly to lower levels of government.
“The Stafford Act [which enables federal disaster recovery] was enacted at a time where there were no electronic funds transfers and we didn’t have the capability to share information like we do today,” said Honeycutt, a retired Army colonel specializing in logistics. “I think that the Act needs to be rewritten, and I would very much advocate for moving the funds and the recovery to the tip of the spear at the state level. Six months in, and we have received zero federal dollars from FEMA. That speaks for itself.”
Honeycutt, who continues to wait on Madison County’s $196 million, still sees a need for federal oversight of the process, as does Pritchett, who is waiting on Lake Lure’s $370 million. Pritchett, though, has significant concerns about state control.
“I think we need to recognize the fact that the states are probably not as well equipped as they need to be, because they haven’t needed to be the sole distributors of this money,” she said.
The North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, a disaster management agency conceived after Hurricane Matthew in 2016, has faced intense criticism over massive budget overruns and claims of mismanagement dating back to Hurricane Florence in 2018.
Both Smathers and Rogers — a Democrat and a Republican, respectively — seem to agree that county government would be the best place for recovery monies to be handled. More local know-how. Less red tape. Fewer quick trips to the airport.
Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers (left, facing away) makes a point with Sen. Ted Budd. Tony McEwen photo
“I think I have reached the point with it now being my second storm that I agree FEMA needs major, major changes,” said Smathers, still waiting on $1 million from 2021, still waiting on $1 million for local schools from 2021, still waiting on $9.7 million from six months ago. “Do I think that FEMA needs to cease to exist? No, I do not. I think they have a major role to play at the federal level. I think Brandon [Rogers] said this, and I agree with him — you give the people of Western North Carolina the resources, we’ll do our job. You can hold us accountable, but get us the money that we were promised. It’s just sitting there.”
Rogers says he told FEMA Director of Public Assistance Robert Pesapane that the entire disaster recovery process could, and should, and must, be simpler.
“Hold us accountable. We’re held accountable every day for federal and state dollars. This is no different. I feel like direct funding is what needs to happen. Each county knows what they need to do with that funding. We’ll prove that we can do the job. I’m not saying you have to totally do away with FEMA,” said Rogers, who’s presumably keeping that crisp suit pressed, “but it definitely needs to be reformed and restructured.”
