Local homeowners who lost their homes or sustained serious damage in Helene’s floodwaters can begin applying next week to a federal program that may buy the home outright, or pay to have it elevated or rebuilt at a higher level.
Steve McGugan, the state of North Carolina’s Hazard Mitigations section chief, explained at the Buncombe County Tropical Storm Helene briefing Friday how the FEMA program works.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency provides the funding for the program, called the Hazard Mitigation Program, which the state administers.
Residents can apply for the program starting Tuesday at the FEMA location at Asheville Mall in the former Gap store location, across from Bath & Body Works. Staff will be on location from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Tuesday through Friday, Nov. 12-15.
“We will have a team there that will be able to answer questions, help assist you in filling out a paper application form where we get all your information,” McGugan said. “We’ll also go ahead and check your tax card to make sure we have all the proper names that need to be on the application, and signatures that we will need. We will also verify where you are located within the flood zone.”
FEMA provides funding to the state, which then flows to the community.
// Credit: North Carolina Department of Pubic Safety, Division of Emergency Management
In Buncombe, 900 homes had substantial damage from Helene, with about 300, including 75 commercial properties, totally lost, according to Buncombe County.
Three types of assistance
The program offers three types of assistance:
Acquisition: “If your property has been severely damaged and you are located in a flood hazard area and wish to relocate from that flood hazard area, you can sign up for the acquisition program,” McGugan said. “In the acquisition program, your home would be bought just as if you were selling it to another homeowner, and moving away.”
The property would be appraised based on its value the day before the storm struck, in part based on the tax valuation. That gives a base value to work from, and appraisers will also use a “multiplier” provided by the county for homes whose valuations likely have increased, he noted. Additionally, they look at comparable homes that sold before the storm hit to arrive at the appraised amount.
Upon the home’s closing, “our closing official or a closing company would basically pay off your loan, if you have a loan on the house remaining, and then the proceeds would then be handed over to you, just like a normal acquisition process,” McGugan said.
“Once that’s completed, that property would then be deeded over to the county, and the county would retain that property,” McGugan continued. “And that property would not be available to be reoccupied or be reused for housing, but in the future the county can use those properties for such things as parks, greenways, other things in their future plan that benefit the community, as well as assist in being able to prevent future flood damages from occurring.”
Raising the home: Called “Elevations,” this program is basically what it sounds like: lifting the home, typically by 2 feet, to raise it out of the flood zone.
“An elevation project is done when your home may have had a little bit of water on the first floor — one or two feet,” McGugan said.
He showed a home before and after — on a lower brick foundation when it flooded, and then raised to a higher concrete block foundation.
“You would move out of the home — and when I say move out, we will provide you temporary lodging while the construction process takes place,” McGugan said. “You don’t have to move any household goods out, because we pick the house up as is.”
The program can accommodate homes with Americans with Disabilities Act provisions.
Mitigation reconstruction: “Mitigation reconstruction is done when first you requested an elevation, and we came in and determined that your home may be more damaged than was thought, and we cannot safely lift it and elevate it to the new height,” McGugan said.
“The old house would be torn down, a new foundation built that, again, is at an elevated level, and then a new home is built in place of the old home,” McGugan said, noting that these are not custom homes but contractor grade.
The state would “move your furniture back in, set it back up, and you would move back in again,” McGugan said.
What about the cost?
McGugan stressed that there is no cost to homeowners for these programs. For example, on acquisition, FEMA pays 75 percent of the cost to acquire and demolish the property and restore the property to green space. The state pays the other 25 percent.
“There is no cost to the homeowner for this program,” McGugan said.
Are most applications accepted?
McGugan said that a very high percentage of applications are accepted. He noted that since Hurricane Florence struck North Carolina in 2018, “if a homeowner has applied and stayed with us and did not walk away from the program, we have been able to complete their home.”
The program is voluntary, and homeowners can walk away at any point, he said, but the success rate in getting applications approved is very high.
“I will tell you that at this point, I have never not been able to get a home approved,” McGugan said. “There are many rules that go with this program and many ways that we can work together in the application to always meet a benefit-cost ratio of one, which is requirement for FEMA to approve it — that we show that the benefit-cost ratio of doing an acquisition or an elevation or a mitigation reconstruction is one.”
The state has “a lot of tools” to reach that level.
“So I have not had any denied based upon the value of a home,” McGugan said. “Really, the only thing that prevents a home from being approved is if there are issues with the title — we can’t get a clear title.”
Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s local reporting during this crisis is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.
www.thecentersquare.com – By Alan Wooten | The Center Square – (The Center Square – ) 2025-03-31 16:37:00
(The Center Square) – Judicial warfare is eroding the confidence in Americans’ justice system leaving a blight on justice itself, says a North Carolina congresswoman who leads the Rules Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C, is speaking out against judges blocking the president’s decisions as granted in the Constitution ahead of a Tuesday congressional hearing.
“As of late, we have certainly seen a slew of rulings by rogue judges that surpass their own constitutional authority,” she said in a post to social media Monday afternoon. “This is judicial warfare in the flesh. If it is not remedied in a commonsense and expeditious fashion, these exercises in partisanship will do further irreparable damage to the nation and to the confidence of Americans in our justice system.”
More than a dozen orders from President Donald Trump – more than in the entire time Joe Biden, Barack Obama and George W. Bush served as presidents – have been thwarted or attempted to be blocked. Among the judges in the spotlight is U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, a pivotal figure in deportation of people accused of being in gangs in addition to just being named to preside in a case involving military operations and a messaging app.
Boasberg, appointed by Bush to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in 2002, was nominated to the federal bench by Obama and confirmed in the Senate 96-0 in 2012.
Boasberg on Wednesday issued and on Friday extended a temporary restraining order that prevents Trump from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport people believed to be part of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. A hearing, Judicial Overreach and Constitutional Limits on the Federal Courts, is at 10 a.m. Tuesday to be conducted jointly by the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet, and the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government from within the Judiciar Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.
California Republican Darrell Issa is chairman of the former committee, Texas’ Chip Roy the latter. North Carolina Democrat Deborah Ross is a minority member of the former; North Carolina Republican Mark Harris is a majority member of the latter.
Witnesses scheduled include former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Cindy Romero, a victim of criminal activity believed perpetrated by Tren de Aragua in Aurora, Colo. Also on the invite list are witnesses from the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation.
Other federal judges drawing fire from supporters of the president include Biden appointees Amir Ali, Loren AliKhan, Deborah Boardman, Angel Kelley and Brendan Hurson; Obama appointees Paul Engelmayer, Amy Berman Jackson, John McConnell and Leo Sorokin; Bush appointee Joseph Laplante; Bill Clinton appointee William Alsup; and Ronald Reagan appointees John Coughenhour and Royce Lamberth.
“Without question,” Foxx said, “exceeding constitutional mandates as a matter of judicial philosophy does nothing more than blight justice itself.”
www.thecentersquare.com – By Alan Wooten | The Center Square – (The Center Square – ) 2025-03-31 15:21:00
(The Center Square) – Wildfires continued to burn Monday in the Carolinas, though a sign of optimism arose with a burning ban lifted in 41 South Carolina counties and measured rainfall in both states.
Largest of the fires is Table Rock in Pickens and Greenville counties of South Carolina. The Black Cove fire is burning in North Carolina’s Polk and Henderson counties, the Rattlesnake fire is burning Haywood County, and the Alarka 5 fire is in Swain County.
South Carolina’s Horry County at the Atlantic Ocean and North Carolina border, and the northwestern counties of Spartanburg, Greenville, Pickens and Oconee remain under a burning ban. In North Carolina, all 100 counties have a ban in effect.
The Table Rock fire size is about 13,191 acres in South Carolina and 574 in North Carolina, the Forestry Commission of the former said. Containment is about 30%.
The Persimmon Ridge fire is 2,078 acres in size with 64% containment. Rain Sunday into Monday measured nearly 1 inch.
The Covington Drive Fire in Myrtle Beach is about 85% contained and in mop-up and strengthened firebreaks stage.
In North Carolina, the Black Cove complex of fires are 7,672 acres in size. It includes the Black Cove (3,502 acres, 36% contained), Deep Woods (3,971 acres, 32% contained) and Fish Hook (199 acres, 100% contained) fires. Rainfall overnight into Monday helped the battle.
by Jane Winik Sartwell, Carolina Public Press March 31, 2025
Corn farmers on food stamps and taking second jobs. Equipment not being repaired. Debts going unpaid.
That’s the reality for many North Carolina corn growers this spring.
Last year was the worst season for the crop in state history, according to Ronnie Heiniger, a corn specialist at N.C. State. Drought wiped out acre after acre in eastern North Carolina last summer. Hurricane Helene devastated any crops left in the mountains.
Normally a $750 million dollar business, corn yielded only $250 million in 2024.
The economic cost to farmers — and their communities — couldn’t be more serious. And with a moderate drought stretching into the early days of this planting season, some are worried about more bad luck to come.
Corn is particularly sensitive to drought due to the crop’s very short window of pollination: This critical period of growth is just a few days long. In North Carolina, that vulnerable timeframe usually happens in June. If no rain falls during those days, corn will simply not continue to grow and yields will sharply decline.
“It was just about as bad as it could get (last season),” Heiniger recalled. “There’s no recovering from 60 days without rainfall. The mood among these farmers is very depressed. Some don’t know where to turn.”
But the N.C. House of Representatives is trying to help, hoping that the money allocated by the Corn Farmers Recovery Act, or HB 296, will be enough to keep the industry going.
The bill — which has yet to make it past the Appropriations Committee, the Rules Committee, the House and Senate — would transfer nearly $90 million from the State Emergency Response and Disaster Relief Fund to the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. The money would go toward the creation of a 2024 Agricultural Disaster Corn Crop Loss Program, which corn farmers could apply to receive relief funds.
“To be honest, I don’t think most farmers thought the state was going to pay much attention to them,” Heiniger admitted. “This comes as a complete surprise.”
Corn farmers ‘at risk’
Corn is a summer staple on tables across North Carolina, but the crop also is necessary for feeding livestock and producing ethanol, which has a variety of uses. Sampson and Duplin counties, where pigs outnumber people 38 to 1, are home to the largest hog industries in the country. A shortage of feed could make that billion dollar business less profitable, too.
“I think a whole lot of farmers will be applying for this funding if it passes,” Zach Parker, an extension agent in Sampson County, told Carolina Public Press. “I don’t think devastation is understatement in the slightest. As for this summer, the only certainty is uncertainty. But I don’t think the corn industry is going anywhere. We have animals to feed.”
The bill would have the greatest economic impact in eastern North Carolina — the region with the largest, most valuable corn farms.
“In Wilson County, corn farmers have really been at risk,” said state Rep. Dante Pittman, a Democrat who serves Wilson and Nash counties and co-sponsored the Corn Farmers Recovery Act. “We saw an almost $4 million drop in income from corn in Wilson alone.
“The thing about this industry is that we don’t know what this year’s weather is going to bring. Anything we can do to prevent that loss from being devastating is necessary.”
Desperation down on the farm
With the cost of farming supplies high and crop commodity prices low, farmers are growing desperate.
“This bill will not only help farmers, but the farm communities that survive on selling fertilizer, chemicals, seeds, tractors and farm labor,” Heiniger explained. “It will help these rural communities where farmers are turning to food aid for their kids at school.”
The bill is geared toward those who grow corn, but since most farmers harvest a diverse set of crops, the money would in turn support production of soybeans, cotton, sweet potatoes and other North Carolina staples, according to Mike Yoder, an associate director of the College of Agriculture at N.C. State.
But some, like Rhonda Garrison, have concerns about the bill. Like, how will the relief funds be allocated? That’s something Garrison, director of the Corn Growers Association of North Carolina, wants to know.
“The bill is pretty ambiguous in terms of the formula for distributing the money,” Garrison contends. “I guess farmers will just have to apply for it and see what happens.”
But she doesn’t think the money will come too late to be useful.
“There were some farmers — overleveraged farmers who were already on the edge — that were done in completely by 2024,” Garrison said. “But not the majority. The potential money from this bill will likely go toward paying down debt.”
As planting season approaches, North Carolina corn farmers face difficult decisions about the future. There is a possibility the state will face some kind of natural disaster in 2025, whether it be hurricane, drought or continued fires.
“Us farmers rejoice in suffering because it produces character,” Heiniger said. “That’s what these farmers are trying to do: hold onto their character so they can get some hope and keep on going.”
