When a contractor made off with the $8,500 insurance payout that was supposed to fix her roof, Ann Weber, a retired professor, didn’t know where to turn.
After wind and downed trees from Hurricane Helene damaged her home last fall, she and her husband, who live on a fixed income, were stretched thin cleaning up the mess. They couldn’t afford a lawyer to assist with what appeared to them as fraud, she said.
“We simply couldn't,” Weber said. “We were down the money. We needed a roof. We had less money than ever before to get one. So what were we going to do?”
Then a friend recommended Pisgah Legal, one of several legal aid nonprofits in the region. The nonprofit connected Weber with a lawyer, who helped her file a complaint against the roof contractor, which then helped her get additional money from her insurance company to, finally, repair the roof that was compromised by Helene ten months ago.
Without that help, “we could not have pursued it at all,” Weber said. “We would have had to give up and just be chumps.”
This kind of legal support, available for a swath of vulnerable communities, including low-income and senior residents, has taken on a new importance in the fallout of Hurricane Helene.
As people like Weber tangle with complicated insurance claims, FEMA paperwork, unemployment claims, evictions and a bevy of recovery scams, legal nonprofits are often the only place where people can turn for support.
Despite the increased need for legal aid, some of the funding for services is drying up. A small provision, quietly slipped into the state’s 2025 Public Safety Act last month, is freezing around $12 million in funding from a state program known as IOLTA that supports legal organizations across the state. The freeze lasts through June 2026.
At Pisgah Legal, funding freeze could cut service for 5,000 people
IOLTA, or Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts, is a national program that’s executed by the state government. It pools money from lawyer trust accounts and uses the interest from those accounts to fund legal aid programs at no cost to the state government. In North Carolina, the program has existed for more than 40 years and has awarded $135 million in grants. Last year it distributed around $13 million in grants, including $970,000 specifically for Helene relief.
Pisgah Legal serves 18 counties in Western North Carolina, along with the Qualla Boundary. In 2024, it received about $2 million, or 16%, of its annual budget from IOLTA. The nonprofit used the money to help 25,000 people navigate everything from evictions and FEMA to private insurance denials, according to Jaclyn Kiger, Pisgah Legal Executive Director.
She said the freeze in IOLTA funds, along with other federal cuts, may result in the organization serving around 5,000 less people next year.
Kiger described this potential reduction of services as “devastating,” and something that will further exacerbate the region’s problems with poverty, homelessness and public safety.
“After a natural disaster like this, people's needs are greater,” she said. “Helene exacerbated poverty. We already had a devastating housing crisis for affordable housing in the region. With the loss of homes and people being displaced, that only made our work around housing, for example, more important.”
Other major IOLTA grantees include Legal Aid of North Carolina, which received $5.3 million this year, and the North Carolina Justice Center, which received around $1 million. Other grantees include Disability Rights North Carolina, Land Loss Prevention Project, Civic Legal Aid, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and the Council for Children’s Rights.
Mary Irvine, the North Carolina IOLTA Executive Director, did not offer any theories about why the funds were frozen.
“NC IOLTA continues to seek a resolution to preserve funding for civil legal aid, which provides a lifeline for low-income North Carolinians in crisis,” she wrote in a statement. “We will keep stakeholders informed regarding the status of the program and any future availability of funding.”
State lawmakers won’t own the provision
The provision that freezes IOLTA funding for one year is a small sliver of a hefty public safety bill that Gov. Josh Stein signed into action this July.
The bill increases penalties around fentanyl crimes and offers new protections for victims of domestic violence as well as children who are exposed to controlled substances – all items that Rep. Lindsey Prather (D-Buncombe), said she supports. So, she voted for the bill, despite her misgivings about the IOLTA freeze.
“Ultimately, there were enough pros in here to outweigh the cons. For me, at least,” Prather said. In the same breath, she acknowledged that the provision to freeze legal aid is “frustrating” and will hurt anyone who can’t afford legal assistance.
“There's no good reason that we're freezing this money. And it concerns me a lot,” she said. “It's frustrating that we're focusing on things like stripping legal protections from poor people instead of passing a state budget, which we still don't have.”
Representative Marcia Morey (D-30) was one of six Democrats who voted against the bill. Morey attempted to remove the IOLTA provision, but was unsuccessful, according to NC Newsline.
The bill’s primary sponsor is Senator Warren Daniel (R-46). Other sponsors include Senator Buck Newton (R-4), Senator Danny Britt (R-24), Senator David Craven (R-29), Senator Bobby Hanig (R-1) and Senator Tom McInnis (R-21). None of the senators replied to multiple requests from BPR that asked why they inserted the provision.
While the funds are slated to sit untouched for the next year, Kiger said Pisgah Legal will do whatever they can to meet the needs of more people with less funding.
“I am hopeful that state lawmakers will see how difficult this will be for Helene survivors out here in Western North Carolina,” Kiger said. “Difficult isn't even the right word, devastating.”
