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Boone mayor warns of impact on budget from Helene-related revenue losses

Boone Mayor Tim Futrelle painted a bleak picture Wednesday of how Helene will impact the town’s finances in the coming year.

Futrelle took a moment for fiscal candor during a Boone Town Council meeting. He said there will be shortfalls following widespread closures from Helene’s floods, which swept through the area in late September.

The storm shut down the fall tourism season. Futrelle described October as the highest revenue-drawing month for the area.

“We are going to struggle financially in ways that we have not before and in ways that we had hoped we would not have to,” he said.

As a result, Futrelle said there are going to have to be “heavy and hard decisions” made during the financial year.

Separately, the council also voted to update the town’s development ordinance to make it easier to provide temporary housing during emergencies. Boone officials realized that the ordinance did not provide exemptions for temporary housing during Helene relief efforts. 

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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