Madison County Manager Rod Honeycutt has felt the past year in slow motion. Frustration reigned as he — and all of Western North Carolina — waited and waited and waited some more for federal and state recovery money to relieve them after Tropical Storm Helene.
The county lost a post office and two town halls, while experiencing significant damage to county infrastructure. The county has to rebuild a dam and two wastewater plants, destroyed in the storm.
Madison County’s entire budget is $34 million, in addition to a $10 million rainy day fund. Debris removal alone after Helene, without the state’s help, would have cost $45 million.
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Thankfully, the state did help. It took over all but $5 million of the debris removal cost. In June, legislators appropriated $20 million directly to Madison County to pay for infrastructure needs, which Honeycutt said the county will use as seed recovery money for a replacement government complex.
And then there’s the three rounds of local government cashflow bridge loans, offered to buoy Western North Carolina while everyone waits for federal funding. Honeycutt expects that when all is said and done, Madison County gets $3.6 million. That’s the only thing saving the county from halving its rainy day fund, he said.
But all that only scratches the surface of the need.
“This was a generational storm,” Honeycutt said. “This will be generational recovery.”
Natural disaster recovery is a team sport. The federal government is the captain, taking on the lion’s share of financial responsibility. Local governments are on offense, addressing needs as they arise, hoping their defense, the state legislature, backs them up.
While overall, local leaders and legislators agree the state has done pretty much the best it can with what it has, some think the General Assembly needs to address some blind spots going forward.
One year, five recovery money bills
Thus far, state lawmakers have found more than $2 billion in their coffers to help Western North Carolina recover from Helene, which had been a hurricane when it came ashore in Florida a year ago but had weakened to a rain-heavy tropical storm by the time it struck North Carolina on Sept. 27, 2024.
The first package, signed into law 13 days after Helene hit, established the Hurricane Helene Disaster Recovery Fund. It appropriated $275 million, most for North Carolina’s Emergency Management’s state match of federal disaster assistance program funding.
A second, unanimously passed $721 million recovery bill came later that month. Recovery money was divided across state agencies, including $100 million to the state treasurer’s office to provide cashflow bridge loans to local governments and $139 million to the Department of Environmental Quality to fund emergency drinking water, wastewater and underground storage tank system repairs.
In December, lawmakers returned to Raleigh to pass a third Helene recovery bill. However, while the 132-page bill shifted $227 million into the Helene Fund, it only appropriated $2 million. It did shift election appointment power from the Democratic governor to the recently elected Republican auditor, effectively switching North Carolina’s election boards from a Democratic to a Republican majority.
It also took away one of the governor’s Utilities Commission appointments and transferred it to the Republican state treasurer.
Outgoing Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the bill, calling it a “sham” that was disaster recovery in name only. Republicans overrode Cooper’s veto along party lines. Republicans actually lost their veto-proof NC House majority in the November 2024 elections, but acted on these rule changes in December before the newly elected legislators could take office.
In the new year, lawmakers again tackled Helene recovery. In March, they made a $524 million investment, including $200 million for farmers’ crop losses, $120 million for home reconstruction, $100 million for private roads and bridges repairs, $55 million to repair public infrastructure that might inhibit small businesses operations, $20 million for debris removal, $10 million each to volunteer groups and fire departments, $9 million for a summer learning recovery program and $4 million for tourism marketing.
Democrats voted for the package while raising concerns about the exclusion of several items requested by Gov. Josh Stein: $50 million for affordable housing development, $10 million for a homeless housing stabilization program and $25 million for immediate minor repairs and non-FEMA eligible needs.
Most recently, legislators unanimously passed a fifth recovery package after some political drama.
The state Senate wanted to include Helene recovery as part of budget negotiations; the state House wanted separate bills. The House passed its bill in late May and for about a month, the Senate let it sit without action.
As lawmakers approached their self-imposed July 1 budget deadline with little progress, and Senate Democrats tried their hand at a rare legislative maneuver to get Senate Republicans to act on the bill, leadership acquiesced.
However, the chambers still disagreed on the content of the recovery package. The Senate’s version removed small business grants, among other disputed changes.
Top lawmakers in both chambers ended up having to enter a special legislative procedure called a conference committee to negotiate a final agreement by late June.
The final bill appropriated $500 million, and stowed another $200 million in the Helene Fund for future use.
Some of the top items included $75 million for private road and bridge repairs, $70 million in state matching funds for FEMA disaster recovery programs, $51 million for local government cashflow loans, $20 million for flood mitigation, $20 million for local government infrastructure repairs, $25 million for agricultural disaster crop loss and $15 million for streamflow rehabilitation assistance.
The recovery money strategy
Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers said the most targeted, efficient recovery money has come from the state. But that’s not much of a contest.
The state’s budget, some thirty-odd billion dollars, is dwarfed by the estimated $60 billion in damage Helene caused. Math dictates that the federal government be a key part of the conversation.
That’s one reason for the legislature’s smaller, more frequent bills, as opposed to offering a greater slice of funding at the outset. The legislature is hyper-focused on maximizing limited state dollars by only paying for needs that the federal government won’t cover. The problem is, learning what the federal government will or won’t cover is often an unpredictable — and timely – affair.
Rep. Lindsey Prather, D-Buncombe, said the hyperfixation on only spending reimbursable recovery money came at the detriment of Western North Carolinians. They always knew that the federal government wasn’t going to reimburse some needs, like small business grants or private roads and bridges (typically; the federal government made an exception for Helene).
“There are businesses that are gone and are never going to come back because we didn’t help them in time,” Prather said. “There are people who left Western North Carolina that are never going to come back because we didn’t help them in time, and that makes me upset.”
Rep. Jake Johnson, R-Polk, said Republicans are also frustrated that recovery isn’t moving quicker.
“But we don’t want to spend money now on something that, in three months, could be reimbursable and would be paid for by the federal government who has access to way more resources than we do,” Johnson said. “That would delay projects that we could fund here.”
Another factor in the legislature’s recovery strategy is the “ghosts of storms past,” as Smathers put it.
Eight and six years after Hurricanes Florence and Matthew respectively struck North Carolina’s eastern seaboard, recovery is not complete. Republican lawmakers have blamed Cooper’s “failed” oversight of the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency (NCORR).
In June, House Speaker Destin Hall cited the NCORR drama, and the need to conduct “heightened oversight,” as a reason for passing smaller recovery packages intermittently
Avery County Manager Phillip Barrier Jr. understands the strategy, but wishes the legislature could have acted just a bit faster. So far, they’ve removed more than a million cubic yards — picture a million refrigerators, Barrier said — of debris, and would have liked to be reimbursed sooner.
Many of Avery County’s recovery projects are in the final stages of being approved, and they’re also involved in the bridge loan program, which is now picking up steam, he said. While they’ve been waiting, nonprofits have stepped up and helped get families back into new homes, and the county has held back on planned projects like cleaning up its Little League field and building a new senior center.
“We’ve got to be ready to respond quicker,” Barrier said. “The bridge program, private roads and bridges, culverts, roads — we need that to happen quicker. We need to have these programs ready to go.”
Emoluments clause: constitutional ban or excuse?
The French Broad River lies in the center of Madison County, geographically and economically.
Each day, about 2,500 people are on the river, Honeycutt said. Surrounding it are small businesses, with around 15 to 20 employees, who can’t afford to take on more debt, he added.
“(The French Broad River) drives our tourism,” Honeycutt said. “That drives our economy, which drives downtown Marshall. If we don’t invest in those small businesses, downtown Marshall could go away.”
But the state legislature hasn’t invested in small businesses — at least not in the way they would like.
Rep. Mark Pless, R-Haywood, said most small businesses didn’t take offered zero-interest loans. They don’t want loans, or strings. They want grants.
But lawmakers disagree over whether that’s allowed.
In the most recent bill, the House wanted to dedicate $60 million to a small business recovery grant program, but the Senate insisted that the state Constitution’s “emoluments clause” prohibited them from doing so. The constitutional provision states that nobody is entitled to “exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges from the community but in consideration of public services.”
Senate leaders argue that this means that the state cannot “pick winners and losers” or support small businesses unless they operate for the public good.
Pless used agriculture as an example. Farmers raise cattle or grow vegetables, which provide food for people. Not every business owner making a living can offer a comparable public service, he said.
Others disagree with that interpretation.
The emoluments clause is just one in a line of excuses, Prather said. First, the excuse was that there wasn’t enough money. Then, the reason to not offer small businesses grants was because legislators didn’t do it for past storms in the east. Now, the emoluments clause is in the way.
“Forgive me if I don’t necessarily put a lot of faith into that argument,” she said.
Sen. Julie Mayfield, D-Buncombe, doesn’t buy it either. The state directly allocated recovery money to the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad and the Blue Ridge Southern Railroad, private businesses that boost tourism, she said. She argued that public service includes a lot more than farmers.
“Agriculture is a big industry,” Mayfield said. “So is tourism in Asheville in Western North Carolina. That railroad that got a direct allocation has a huge impact on the economy of the far western counties. So does the Biltmore Estate in Asheville.”
The real reason for abandoning small business grants, in Mayfield’s opinion, is that state legislators don’t want to set a precedent of paying for lost business revenue every time there’s a big storm. She thinks they could draft a relief bill in such a way to avoid that.
Rep. Eric Ager, D-Buncombe, thinks Republicans are reluctant to spend recovery money in the first place, and an east-west divide in the legislature — where the eastern lawmakers tend to hold more power — may stress that.
“The majority party is in what I’m calling a scarcity mindset, where they don’t want to spend any money at all because they’ve created this unnecessary financial cliff that they all know is there, but they don’t really want to admit it,” Ager said.
Johnson isn’t opposed to amending the Constitution in the future, but said it would require including insurance companies in the conversation and a stringent vetting process to ensure the state wasn’t bailing out already failing businesses.
Smathers is a big believer in “finding a way,” he said.
“As we look forward to preparing North Carolina for that next storm, we’ve got to create a system that allows small businesses the ability to survive, get back on their feet,” he said.
What’s left, and what’s next?
What’s next is “open for discussion,” Greene said.
But it won’t be in the budget. Lawmakers want to keep Helene recovery money separate.
Mayfield doesn’t see anything “big or new” on the horizon. Future relief bills will likely send recovery money to the same places, tailored to who needs more resources than initially expected. For example, fire station equipment replacement money didn’t stretch as far as anticipated, so there may be another round of that, she said.
In addition to small business grants, Mayfield would like to see funding for arts organizations, museums and nonprofits dependent on tourism as the region approaches another October.
So far, the state legislature has helped Boone rebuild roads, repair bridges and support emergency management. While those steps are important, they feel more like down payments than full investments in the Boone community, Mayor Tim Futrelle said.
“Just patching roads and culverts is not necessarily going to help us withstand the next storm,” he said.
Futrelle wants the legislature to trust that Boone residents know their community best, and they don’t make a habit of squandering funds, so more flexibility and predictability would be a boost.
“We need to be able to plan and budget responsibility, so we need to know what state support is going to look like moving forward,” Futrelle said.
Smathers doesn’t just want to build back; he wants to build back stronger. He said he would support regulations that make it easier for people to rebuild homes and businesses with an added layer of resiliency for the next storm.
Pless anticipates relief bills with direct appropriations for specific projects, as the need becomes clear and the recovery money becomes available.
Pless and Johnson also want to look at loosening the permit process, particularly in disasters, to speed things up next time around.
Everything’s political
Many people probably wouldn’t want Republican Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger, one of the most powerful politicians in the state, to be seen with Mayfield in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Helene.
That’s exactly why they should, Berger told Mayfield in a phone call a week after the storm hit Asheville. Twice, the pair, alongside other Western North Carolina lawmakers, toured the disaster zone.
“We drove around to several spots, and there was a very strong sense of camaraderie, and we’re all in this together,” Mayfield said. “Early on, I felt like my input on the bills was sought and my ideas and my suggestions were reflected in those early bills.”
But around the new year, the mood shifted. Democrats were never at the same table as Republicans in the recovery process, but they felt somewhat included. Now, she’s told to send Republican leadership her wish list, but doesn’t feel like a real part of the conversation.
Why the exclusion?
“They’ve just gotten in the habit of it,” Ager said.
The absence of the five Buncombe County Democrats at the table has led to a few issues.
First, Warren Wilson College, which is in Swannanoa, was left out of a list of colleges and universities receiving infrastructure repair grants. This week, lawmakers added them back in. Then, UNC-Asheville got half the funding other colleges did because Republicans divided their appropriation between the college and the North Carolina Arboretum, which they mistakenly thought was part of the campus.
Futrelle thinks lawmakers can learn something from Boone, where everyone came together in the past year for the betterment of the town.
“Before we mark two years. I hope the legislature is able to find a way to match the spirit of what we’re doing here ourselves, and the scale of the investment that is truly required,” he said.
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