(The Center Square) – On the two-year anniversary of North Carolina’s worst natural disaster, GROW NC has introduced a framework for rebuilding the economy of mountain regions where Hurricane Helene killed 108 and delivered an estimated $80 billion in damage.
The Western North Carolina Economic Recovery Plan is a product of the Governor’s Recovery Office for Western North Carolina, an initiative of first-term Democratic Gov. Josh Stein upon taking his oath of office in January 2025. Stein opted not to continue former Gov. Roy Cooper’s North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, an agency for help to the southeastern portion of the state dealing with hurricanes Matthew (2016) and Florence (2018).
That program instituted by Cooper, now a U.S. Senate candidate, became a disaster unto itself. At the time of a November 2024 legislative hearing, it was running a budget deficit as high as $265 million; possessing debts of $37 million for completed projects; and had completed projects for only 2,800 of 4,200 families in hurricanes that were then eight and six years earlier. Cooper’s pick to lead the agency, Laura Hogshead, was forced to resign while Cooper tipped lawmakers to the red fiscal hole by slipping in a request of $175 million in a broader $3.9 billion ask for Hurricane Helene relief.
GROW NC, in its plan, went back before Helene to decades of decline in the region's economy, sewed in the more recent challenges, and presents five-year and 10-year markers for which to measure. The areas of effort are defined as infrastructure; natural resources; economic development and entrepreneurship; housing; education and workforce development; healthcare; arts, culture and tourism; and agriculture.
No new appropriation is within the plan. Plans communities have already started are also respected and not overrun.
Already in the region are $29.2 million from the U.S. Economic Development Administration to strengthen advanced manufacturing at the Western North Carolina Futures Factory, a workforce a technology facility in Buncombe County.
Twenty-eight counties, the Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, five regional councils of government, and multiple chambers of commerce and economic development organizations gave input to the plan.
“Western North Carolina has never lacked plans or ideas,” said Sharon Decker, GROW NC’s senior advisor for long-term recovery. “What we’ve lacked is one place where the region’s own priorities line up with the money to back them and the people who can act on them. That’s what this plan gives western North Carolinians, and it’s why we didn’t write it in Raleigh. Counties, chambers, community colleges, business owners, and councils of government built it, and the work now belongs to them.”
Hurricane Helene was a Category 4 monster when it slammed into the Big Bend region of Florida on Sept. 26, 2024 – that state’s third hurricane in 66 days. That was Thursday and by weekend, it was into the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, a rare occurrence for tropical storms and one which produced catastrophic death, destruction and flooding.
Simple contour of the land contributed to rushing currents, a devastation very unlike coastal hurricane flooding where water doesn’t rush as much as it rises – especially via river basins from the middle of the state flowing to the ocean. Some mountain spots in North Carolina got more than 30 inches of rain in as many hours or less.
The storm killed 108 in the state, 237 in the South, and caused an estimated $60 billion to $80 billion in damage in North Carolina. Recovery is ongoing, better in some places, poor in others. New state laws have been enacted based in part on what happened in the aftermath.
Republican majority chambers in the General Assembly have appropriated more than $2.8 billion to recovery efforts through five spending packages and the fiscal year 2027 spending plan. The 2026 Appropriations Act, known also as Senate Bill 257 and signed into law this summer, brought Hurricane Helene relief of $700 million and added $450 million to the Savings Reserve in the General Fund – often called the rainy day fund – to lift its balance to more than $4.2 billion.
In combination with a December 2024 aversion of government shutdown, Congress appropriated about $9 billion of a $110 billion relief package for North Carolina’s recovery. Then-President Joe Biden signed the deal on Dec. 21.
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