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Boone Council to address lack of exemptions for emergency relief housing

The Town of Boone is updating its development ordinance to better accommodate relief housing during emergencies after some issues emerged during the response to Helene.

Federal Emergency Management Agency representatives asked town officials about their policy on relief housing in the aftermath of the storm. The agency was inquiring about things like temporary shelter for Helene victims and the volunteers helping them.

It turns out the Boone ordinance that guides land use and buildings did not have an exemption for temporary structures for relief efforts. So town officials last week came together to propose changes to those guidelines.

Mayor Tim Futrelle says the town wants to make sure that there’s no hindrance to helping people.

“We do want to get this done as quickly as possible," he says. "And we do want to provide for as many opportunities as we can, because there are still a lot of folks in need, and there are a lot of folks that still want to provide really good help for that.”

The Boone Council will vote on the proposed changes at its regular meeting next week. 

 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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