CANTON, N.C.—This resilient mountain town of 4,400 people west of Asheville has endured more hardship in the last four years than seems fair: Tropical Storm Fred in 2021. The closure of a 115-year-old paper mill, the town’s biggest employer, in 2023.
And last September, Hurricane Helene, which lashed Canton and large swaths of western North Carolina, caused $60 billion in damage and killed 100 people in the region.
More than $1 billion in federal disaster recovery money is headed to western North Carolina, but now there could be too few people to quickly disperse it. The Trump administration is cutting 84 percent of staff at the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Community Planning and Development, The New York Times reported earlier this week, leaving just 150 people to manage a nationwide disaster recovery program.
That office distributes Community Development Block Grants for disaster recovery. This money helps rebuild or repair homes destroyed or damaged by hurricanes, floods, wildfires and other disasters, which are becoming more intense and frequent because of climate change. These grants are a last resort for survivors, often the poorest and most vulnerable, who don’t qualify for other assistance.
After Hurricanes Matthew and Florence, HUD distributed nearly a billion dollars in these grants to the N.C. Office of Recovery and Resiliency to help homeowners, renters, small businesses and local governments in eastern North Carolina.
The recent personnel cuts should not affect funding, which is appropriated by Congress. However, it could take much longer to deliver that money because there are fewer people to oversee a complex program, including providing technical assistance to states.
“I understand the importance and the necessity of making better financial decisions in Washington,” said Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers, a Democrat. “But anything that takes money, people, resources and respect away from the people of western North Carolina, I’m against. These people have waited too long. They’ve gone through too much.”
Congress appropriated $16 billion for disaster recovery in North Carolina, of which $1.4 billion will go to homeowner recovery in western North Carolina. That money would be funneled through HUD, which must approve the state’s “action plan” to spend the funds.
The city of Asheville, in Buncombe County, received a separate appropriation of $225 million in disaster recovery block grants, also part of the action plan.
“HUD is critical to getting people back in homes, rebuilding private roads and bridges and investing in our local business revitalization, so we are extremely hopeful that will be taken into account,” said Lillian Govus, Buncombe County’s communications and public engagement director. “There’s not a blueprint for doing this disaster recovery work without federal and state partners and specifically HUD and the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery funds.”
The North Carolina Department of Commerce, with support from the governor’s office, is holding a series of public meetings to receive feedback on the draft action plan. Once HUD approves the plan, a process that could be protracted because of the lack of staff, then the state can begin drawing down the funds.
“While the reports of these cuts to HUD are concerning,” said Kate Frauenfelder, communications director for Democratic Gov. Josh Stein, “the Governor has had a number of productive conversations this week on recovery efforts and will continue to engage with the administration and our federal partners to ensure there are no delays in this critical funding.”
This week, Stein met with North Carolina’s senators, Thom Tillis and Ted Budd, both Republicans, and asked the Trump administration for $19 billion for disaster recovery related to Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina: assistance for small businesses, roads and bridges, local governments and homeowners.
Yet with the state’s existing $1 billion appropriation, that would cover only about a third of the cost of $60 billion in damages caused by the historic storm. Roughly 185,000 homes were damaged in this mountainous part of the state, and an estimated 96 percent of flooded homes did not have flood insurance, Stein wrote.
A spokesman for Tillis said in a statement, “We are $34 trillion in debt, and Senator Tillis supports President Trump’s desire to cut fraud and wasteful spending and make the government more efficient. As this effort proceeds, we also need to make sure there are no unintended cuts to vital positions, especially workers who are providing critical functions like helping Western North Carolina recover from the devastation of Helene.”
Western North Carolina will require not only money, but also people who are committed to what could be a decade-long recovery, Smathers said.
“There are so many issues because of our topography, our varying economies, our location. It is not a straightforward recovery,” he said. “It will take more time, more money, more people to figure things out.”
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Lisa Sorg
Reporter, North Carolina
Lisa Sorg is the North Carolina reporter for Inside Climate News. A journalist for 30 years, Sorg covers energy, climate environment and agriculture, as well as the social justice impacts of pollution and corporate malfeasance.
She has won dozens of awards for her news, public service and investigative reporting. In 2022, she received the Stokes Award from the National Press Foundation for her two-part story about the environmental damage from a former missile plant on a Black and Latinx neighborhood in Burlington. Sorg was previously an environmental investigative reporter at NC Newsline, a nonprofit media outlet based in Raleigh. She has also worked at alt-weeklies, dailies and magazines. Originally from rural Indiana, she lives in Durham, N.C.
