Two months after a BPR investigation revealed Asheville had allocated only $3 million for repairs to homes damaged by Hurricane Helene — enough to cover just eight eligible homeowners — the city has made a major shift in its plans for federal grant funds.
In a 6-1 vote Tuesday evening, Asheville City Council authorized moving $19.2 million of a $225 million disaster recovery grant toward single-family home repairs. Bridget Herring, the city’s recovery coordinator, estimated that the money would cover 55 to 65 additional households. Roughly 150 households are eligible for the program, with a total estimated need of $32 million.
No Council member spoke from the dais prior to their vote. Bo Hess was the only member against the move; in a statement to BPR, he said he supported home repair but had concerns over the specifics of the program.
“We have an obligation to make sure we’re using limited disaster dollars where they create the greatest long-term impact,” Hess wrote. “As taxpayers, we have to ask not only whether a program is well-intentioned, but whether it delivers the greatest return for our community. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per single-family repair through a federal program may not be the most effective use of these scarce disaster funds.”
Many residents and community groups also opposed the shift. To support the single-family repair program, Asheville would take $10 million of federal funding away from infrastructure work and $9.2 million from multifamily construction.
As previously reported by BPR, a coalition of 10 local housing nonprofits said the money would be better spent on building new affordable units. Of the 75 public comments received on the proposal, according to a city staff report, a majority shared concerns about the cost and relative importance of single-family home repairs. Neither the Housing Recovery Board nor the Infrastructure Recovery Board, two citizen advisory bodies established by the city in the wake of Helene, supported the move.
The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development must now sign off on Asheville’s reallocation. The city estimates that final approval will come sometime in July.
Asheville approves one-year moratorium on data centers
No new data centers will be coming to Asheville for at least a year, following City Council’s unanimous approval of a moratorium on their development.
Chris Collins, the city’s assistant director of planning and urban design, told Council that the temporary pause would allow staff to formally define data centers in the city’s development ordinances and create appropriate zoning rules. The approach is similar to the hotel moratorium Asheville enacted in 2019, during which the city crafted public benefits requirements for new hotels and a specific hotel overlay district.
As previously reported by BPR, other western North Carolina communities have also been placing moratoria on data centers, including Canton and Swain County. Residents have shared concerns over the facilities’ water usage, electricity needs and limited economic benefits for local residents.
Speakers at the public hearing on Asheville’s moratorium largely echoed those worries. Rob Campbell, an energy policy analyst for consultancy EQ Research, added that residential ratepayers often end up shouldering the costs of increased power generation to meet data centers’ demands.
“Data center construction is incentivizing the buildout of additional gas plants in particular,” Campbell said. “Which is not only going to increase rates, but of course it’s going to lead to increased pollution and all sorts of other issues.”
Collins estimated that city staff would begin public engagement on data center regulations sometime in the fall.
Other tidbits
- Council approved a package of contracts related to Hurricane Helene recovery. Three separate projects, at a total cost of roughly $11 million, will cover landslide-related design and engineering work. Another $3.1 million contract will cover design work for repairs to roads and sidewalks damaged by the storm, while a nearly $4.6 million contract amendment authorizes additional spending on a consultant to help manage recovery efforts. The city expects the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cover the bulk of these expenses.
- Council unanimously awarded a 3.72-acre property and a $1.6 million low-interest loan to 29 Oak Hill LLC to subsidize the construction of 42 affordable townhomes in Emma. The three-bedroom units will be offered for sale to households making below 110% of the area median income ($113,500 for a family of four). As explained by Sasha Vrtunski, the city’s affordable housing officer, the developer’s loan repayments will be repurposed to provide down-payment assistance for homebuyers; when those owners sell, the city will then recoup those funds for further affordable housing work.
- Boston-based landscape architecture firm Sasaki shared its final conceptual design for the reconstruction of Asheville’s riverfront parks. In response to the impacts of Helene and extensive community input, the plan focuses on “nature-based strategies” such as stormwater wetlands, floodable lawns and open structures to “restore floodplain function, strengthen habitat systems and support long-term stewardship.” Initial estimates place the design’s construction cost at nearly $63.5 million, which could be substantially defrayed by federal grant funding. More detailed design work will continue through at least early 2027.
- Asheville OK’d up to $900,000 for the installation and upkeep of Axon Fleet cameras in new Asheville Police Department vehicles over the next seven years. The cameras will feed into the APD’s recently funded real-time intelligence center, which has sparked major community pushback over civil liberties and data security concerns.
- The city passed a resolution backing “Lennie’s Law,” a state legislative proposal that would establish “bicycle safety zones” similar to school zones on major cycling routes. The measure, named in honor of a cyclist killed by a vehicle collision in Madison County last year, received the unanimous support of Woodfin’s Town Council in April. It has yet to be formally introduced at the General Assembly.
Asheville City Council regularly meets every second and fourth Tuesday at the Council Chamber on the second floor of City Hall, 70 Court Plaza, beginning at 5 p.m. However, Council will take the second week of July off; its next regular meeting will take place Tuesday, July 28. See the full recording and documents from the June 23 meeting.
