18 months after Helene, this western NC lawmaker is still fighting for funding to rebuild

Western North Carolina has received less than 20% of the $60 billion needed to recover from Hurricane Helene. 

On the morning of Sept. 27, 2024, Lindsey Prather was at home in Candler as rain began to fall.

Prather has called western North Carolina home for nearly 20 years and represents part of Buncombe County in the General Assembly. She knew Hurricane Helene would be a big storm, so she spent the morning checking in on her elderly neighbors. 

“I had one that lived just two streets past me. I called him to check on him,” Prather said. “I called the daughter of an older woman that lived next door to see how they were doing.”

But Prather couldn’t have imagined just what Helene would unleash. 

“I didn’t have a great sense of what this much rain was going to look like in the mountains,” Prather told Cardinal & Pine. “It felt like floods we had gone through in the past seemed pretty isolated…it didn’t quite hit me how serious it was going to be for the entire region.”

The Asheville area received over 14 inches of rainfall, while communities like Spruce Pine received as much as 24 inches, leading to flooding and mudslides across the region. At least 108 people died in the storm and around 73,000 homes were damaged. 

In the days after the storm, Prather toured the damage with the local fire chief. It was beyond what she could have imagined.

“That’s when it really started to sink in. Just how much time it was going to take to recover from all of this,” she said.

She was concerned about her community, especially the elderly and homebound.

“It’s a pretty rural district where I am. My next thought was all the people that live alone. All the people that get served by Meals on Wheels, that attend church on Zoom, that don’t get out of their house, that now aren’t going to be able to leave their house, and who’s going to be able to go reach them?” Prather said.

In total, Helene inflicted $60 billion in damage to the state. The road to recovery from such a tragedy was never going to be easy, or fast. But to date, the region has received just a fraction of the funding needed to fully recover.

The North Carolina General Assembly has provided only $1.1 billion in funds for Helene recovery. Congress has provided another $9 billion to North Carolina, but even that money—far less than what is needed to rebuild—has been slow to reach the state. 

“A lot of people I speak with are really concerned. The folks that live in western North Carolina, a lot of people are losing hope,” Prather said. 

A long road to recovery

Immediately after Helene hit, Prather and her Democratic colleagues called on the Republican leadership of the General Assembly to be proactive in its recovery efforts and not wait for federal support—advice she and other lawmakers received from communities that had previously endured similar tragedies.

“I was on a virtual meeting less than a week after the storm that one of our state councilors had pulled together where I was talking with people from Montpelier, Vermont, Boulder, Colorado, and New Orleans. And to a person, they all said ‘you cannot wait for federal funds. You’ve got to start spending money immediately,’” Prather said.

Prather feels that the people of western North Carolina were failed by a lack of support in the wake of the storm. 

“We have a tiny percentage of the funds needed to rebuild after the storm. There are many, many people who are never going to have their house rebuilt, and it breaks my heart to say that,” Prather said.

Small businesses are a staple in western North Carolina, and make up 99% of companies in the region. They too have not received sufficient support, Prather said.

“There are businesses that have closed that will never come back. That should not have happened,” she said. “It is too late for the people who had to move, leave the area, that are never going to come back. That should not have happened.”

One factor that slowed the movement of federal funds to North Carolina was a decision by former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to require any expense over $100,000 to be personally approved by her. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) falls under the umbrella of DHS.

“When you’re talking about recovery funds from FEMA, everything is over $100,000,” Prather said.

Noem was fired by President Trump in March and newly appointed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin reversed Noem’s approval policy earlier this month. 

“Money that is appropriated but not available for use is the most frustrating kind. I hope we see Mullin continue to reduce unnecessary barriers so North Carolinians get their much needed and deserved relief,” Prather told Cardinal & Pine.

Some communities still haven’t been made whole

In McDowell County, Anna Caldwell says many people remain displaced from permanent housing in the area.

“There are several new, what I would call neighborhoods, that now exist that are motor homes— collective groups of motor homes that are set up—and that’s where people live full-time,” she said. 

Having worked for the American Red Cross, Caldwell was familiar with the disaster relief process. Those skills came in handy as she navigated the aftermath of Helene and filed reimbursement claims with FEMA. In Caldwell’s neighborhood, near the town of Marion, a private bridge that connected her neighborhood and others to the main road was only just rebuilt in late March.

The estimate to build a new bridge was around $120,000. FEMA provided the community with around $90,000, and the remainder of the cost was covered by homeowners like Caldwell.

Private roads and bridges like the one Caldwell’s community relies on are common throughout the region. But many other localities have yet to receive the funds needed to repair the thousands of private roads and bridges damaged by Helene.

If a family or community cannot get support from FEMA to repair their private road or bridge, there is a state fund available. But it only has enough funds to complete around 300 projects, roughly 10% of the thousands of projects yet to be completed. 

As part of a broader $13.5 billion funding request to Congress last fall, Gov. Josh Stein asked for an additional $1.6 billion specifically for private and municipal road and bridge repair. That request has gone unmet.

Another avenue for communities to get funds for hurricane relief is through a state budget. But Republicans in the General Assembly have been unable to agree on a budget and are more than nine months overdue on passing one, making North Carolina the only state in the country without a budget.

“That [budget] would almost certainly include more hurricane recovery funding, but would also mean that all the institutions and the governments out in western North Carolina now at least have a sense of what they next year is going to look like so they can start to make their plans.” Prather said.  

Despite the uncertainty and the long road ahead, Prather is still optimistic about the region’s future. Communities across the region, from Chimney Rock to Marshall, are back open for business and Prather wants people in North Carolina and beyond to support them.

“There are hotels ready to welcome you and there are amazing restaurants that are back open,” she said.“It is not too late for western North Carolina.”