The Federal Emergency Management Agency approved 142 buyouts in Buncombe County on Friday, bringing the total number of approved properties up to 189 in the county.
The agency allocated a total of $59 million, which will also support the acquisition of 11 properties in Haywood County, nine properties in Mitchell County and several in Madison County.
The buyouts — which some people have waited on for more than a year — are part of the agency’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, a decades-old initiative that allows some homeowners to sell their houses to the local government. If the sale goes through, that land is then deeded for parks, greenways and other municipal projects.
“We were very excited to get the news of the additional properties here in Buncombe County,” Kevin Madsen, Buncombe County’s Helene Recovery Officer, told BPR.
This is the third batch of properties in Buncombe that has received a FEMA review, Madsen said. One more batch, which includes 74 property applications, is still awaiting approval.
Statewide, about 700 homeowners whose property was damaged by Hurricane Helene have applied for the program, according to data from the North Carolina Department of Public Safety. FEMA has approved more than 350 of these projects.
FEMA has allocated $1.5 billion for the program in North Carolina.
The program experienced significant delays under the leadership of Kristi Noem, the former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Noem required her personal signature on any expenditures over $100,000, which bottlenecked the funding approval process for many Helene recovery costs.
Noem’s replacement, Markwayne Mullin, who took over in March, pledged to speed up the flow of federal disaster aid to the state.
Justin Graney, a spokesperson for North Carolina Emergency Management, confirmed that funding has moved faster under Mullin’s leadership.
“I think Secretary Mullin has shown that he wants to move forward with recovery and find ways to move forward collaboratively,” Graney told BPR. “He got rid of Secretary Noem's $100,000 approval threshold and I think that illustrates that he's removing red tape where he can to try to expedite some of these programs.”
Graney added that the state, which manages the implementation of the hazard mitigation grants, “has been waiting to move forward” on the buyout program.
“The team is rapidly getting to work as soon as these approvals come in,” he said.
Gerard Albert III contributed to this report.
