Where Western N.C. Stands Two Years After Helene

Thank you for joining us this Saturday morning, a weekend that marks the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene. 

Today, as we check in on recovery progress, we return to a familiar theme: no federally funded disaster recovery program can realistically meet any definition of “success.” A litany of federal laws and regulations, not to mention multiple agencies with overlapping jurisdictions, smother even the best-designed programs.

Gov. Josh Stein’s administration looks to have performed better than his predecessor, but even his own view of the “Renew NC” program frames slow progress. 

Even so, Stein and the General Assembly look to have proven a key point that federal policymakers would do well to recognize: A parallel state-backed repair program that eschews federal funds entirely has made promising gains.

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In 2023, the year before Helene, we offered a withering rebuke of the federal disaster recovery system:

Brad Gair has managed federal recovery efforts for more than 20 years. He worked in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, New York City after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy, North Carolina after Hurricane Floyd, and in multiple disaster-stricken foreign countries.
 
In frank testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2016, Gair said this:
 
“The federal government often speaks of the sequence of delivery in disaster assistance as if there is a coherent plan behind it all, when in reality it is a series of patchwork programs that more than anything else confuse, frustrate and demoralize both those in need of aid and those trying to provide it.”
 
Not much has changed since then. The result is a status quo that wastes billions of federal dollars and leaves communities devastated for years, and sometimes forever.

In 2024, the week after the storm, we wrote:

We’re now in the very early stages of a recovery and rebuilding effort that will take years. The standard disaster recovery “process” – if one can call it that, because processes usually imply some level of organization – is itself a disaster. We covered this problem in-depth last year. Few people give much thought to this low-probability, high-impact issue until it’s thrust upon them, as it is now.

Which brings us to today. Gov. Stein, to his credit, took a different approach to disaster recovery than his predecessor, former Gov. Roy Cooper. Stein stood up an entirely separate office to deal with Helene, divorcing it from the office that managed recovery for hurricanes Matthew and Florence.

As of this week, the federally funded Helene program – called Renew NC – has 2,225 active, eligible applications for home repairs. Construction has been completed on 156 of them, and another 161 are underway. Put another way, two years after the storm, hammers have hit nails in 14% of homes eligible for repair.

If that looks paltry, it’s because it is, at least by any normal outsider’s view of the situation. But it’s actually far better than Cooper’s programs. In fact, Stein claims that his Renew NC program is the fastest in more than a decade “to begin reconstructing using HUD CDBG-DR funding following a major hurricane.” Only the Superstorm Sandy program – overseen by Gair, who we quoted above – moved faster.

Stein deserves credit for that. He’s taken ownership, focusing his power and authority on moving fast. And this past week, his administration unveiled its plans for the next decade of Helene recovery and revitalization in a 117-page report inspired by Gen. George Marshall’s post-WWII recovery plan for Europe. The nine-tiered initiative targets boosting the region’s tourism offerings, supporting key industries like agriculture and mining, and improving the transportation infrastructure around major cities. 

The problem for Stein in executing the region’s recovery is that his power and authority are limited when it comes to programs funded with federal dollars. 

But a parallel program – made possible because the General Assembly allocated state dollars from the well-capitalized Rainy Day Fund – has moved much faster.

The General Assembly and the Stein administration have allocated millions of state dollars to more than a dozen nonprofits. The goal is to get on with work instead of laboring through various approvals and reviews required when using federal money.

By Stein’s reckoning, these various nonprofit-driven initiatives have already repaired several times more homes than the Renew NC federal program. The Asheville Citizen-Times puts the number of homes repaired by state-funded nonprofits at 1,100.

Auditor Dave Boliek looked into one of the nonprofits, Baptists on Mission, and reached a similar conclusion. 

“From February 2025 through October 2025, Baptists on Mission completed 472 projects (an average of 1.87 repairs of individual residences per day), with the average expenditure from grant funds being $6,392 per home,” an April 2026 Rapid Response Report found. “BOM effectively reduced per-repair project costs by utilizing volunteer labor, securing disaster relief discounts from retailers, and bulk purchasing building materials.”

This is complex stuff, and we don’t claim to have all the answers. But this fact pattern seems to prove out something we wrote the week after Helene: 

North Carolina’s Rep. David Rouzer introduced the Natural Disaster Recovery Program Act, which would scrap the current federal process and replace it with a very-few-strings-attached recovery block grant to states to deploy as they wish.
 
This model would largely avoid the ad hoc rulemaking process that takes place after a special Congressional recovery appropriation. That, in turn, would offer far more predictability so states could create off-the-shelf recovery plans to deploy quickly after a disaster (instead of having to wait for new federal rules to come down weeks or months after the appropriation).

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Rouzer’s block-grant bill has been sitting in Congress since it was introduced. Meanwhile, somewhere in western North Carolina this weekend, a family is moving into a home that a nonprofit finished in a fraction of the time the federal program would have taken. That family doesn’t care which appropriations rider or CDBG-DR compliance rule caused the delay elsewhere. But Congress should.

We’ll close the same way we did in 2023, by quoting Gair’s 2016 call to action:

“We are all here today for the exact same reason that many similar Congressional committees and subcommittees have been convened in the aftermath of virtually every major disaster over the past several decades – the system is broken, everyone is mad, and billions of dollars continue to be wasted. The Post-Katrina Reform Act reformed next to nothing; the Hurricane Sandy Recovery Improvement Act improved far too little. Now let’s try something different.”

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If you’re looking for a way to support Helene recovery efforts, consider streaming the newly released documentary film “Scars on the Mountain.” The feature covers the devastation Helene caused in Yancey County and how the community responded in its aftermath. A portion of the revenue generated from watching the movie on the streaming service Angel supports recovery efforts in Yancey County.