North Carolina Secretary of Commerce Lee Lilley visited Mitchell County last week to discuss flood recovery with local business and government leaders.
Lilley visited a number of locations in the county, including downtown Spruce Pine and Bakersville. At a stop at DTs Blue Ridge Java in Spruce Pine, he spoke about the money that has already been spent on recovery and the efforts that are still ongoing.
“We launched our application program for the single-family housing program, what we call Renew NC, and we’ve got, I think, literally any time right now, we’ll have our 3,000th applicant to that program … within the affected area,” he said. “We finished our first home about three weeks ago.”
Lilley said he has hopes to build 3,000 houses for disaster victims in this area. He noted that Gov. Josh Stein is currently lobbying Washington for additional federal funding. Usually, he said, the federal government covers around 40 or 50 percent of the cost of rebuilding after a storm like this, however, at present, there is only federal funding for around 9 percent of recovery costs.
The secretary encouraged people to continue to reach out to his office with concerns.
“We love positive feedback, of course, but I’ve got to have all the negative feedback, too,” he said. “I’ve got to know when things aren’t working, and it doesn’t have to be a commerce problem, it can be an anything problem.”
“I want to thank you for helping us with the N.C. Works program,” said DTs owner Tricia Niven. “That gave me the opportunity to start hiring more people.”
Niven said she wanted to make sure Lilley knew about the effort his staff have put into helping local business owners access recovery funding. She also asked if there is any hope for a debt-relief program for businesses that had to rebuild after the hurricane.
Lilley said that there are private organizations that may be offering some kind of debt relief.
“We’ve got a lot of philanthropic partners in this — in fact, we just brought on a new philanthropic liaison to our team,” he said.