A storm damaged house along Mill Creek in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on September 30, 2024 in Old Fort, North Carolina. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
As North Carolina rebuilds from the devastation of Hurricane Helene, the loss of $70 million in FEMA funds — $18 million of which would have helped western North Carolina to prepare for floods — may come back to haunt the state.
The shortfall can in part be attributed to the state’s building codes, which by design, only implement new standards years after they are adopted at the international level.
Currently, North Carolina still relies on 2015 international standards that were put in place in 2018 when the state used a three-year cycle (in effect, a three-year lag time) for adopting new standards. What’s more, because the state Building Code Council voted in 2014 to move to a six-year revision cycle with the support of the North Carolina Home Builders Association and other interest groups, it is only now working to implement the 2018 international standards. These delays put North Carolina behind most other coastal states vying for flood mitigation projects.
In addition to lower flood and wind protection requirements for new construction, these delays in adopting stronger standards also mean higher insurance rates for North Carolina residents and — crucially for disaster preparation — a disadvantage when communities in the state seek federal funding for climate resilience projects.
In 2023, FEMA denied a $1.2 million request for a wastewater lift station in Murphy, roughly $6 million to build a flood-resistant park in Canton, and $10.9 million for water infrastructure upgrades in Beech Mountain — all of which could have improved flood resilience in western North Carolina. Flood mitigation projects worth a combined $8.3 million in Taylorsville and Lenoir were approved through the FEMA program.
“The General Assembly’s legislation that stops the update of building codes makes North Carolina less competitive for federal funds to strengthen the response of communities across the state to natural disasters like Hurricane Helene,” wrote Jordan Monaghan, a spokesperson for Gov. Roy Cooper. “Over the next few months as the General Assembly works to pass legislation to help with Hurricane Helene recovery, they should consider changing this law.”
North Carolina Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) and House Speaker Tim Moore (R-Cleveland), surrounded by state lawmakers, address reporters ahead of a vote on a first round of Hurricane Helene relief money. (Photo: Galen Bacharier/NC Newsline)
Republican pushback
During a news conference prior to the General Assembly’s vote last Wednesday on initial disaster relief to western North Carolina, Speaker Tim Moore denied that the legislature’s actions made western North Carolina towns more susceptible to flooding.
“That simply is not true. You can talk to folks who live in the mountains, I mean, you got buildings that were destroyed that had been there 60 years,” Moore said. “The regulatory reform that’s being looked at is not to make (construction) less safe, it’s to speed up the process and make sure that we get those done soon.”
He pointed to the urgency of repairs to I-40, other bridges and roadways, and water treatment systems in western North Carolina and said it would be a mistake to slow that work down with unnecessary regulations.
A key to crucial federal funding
But whether the state receives federal funding for disaster preparation often hinges on those regulations — and funding through the program could mean the difference between systems withstanding storms like Helene and being overwhelmed with floodwaters.
In 2022, Hickory received $5.4 million through FEMA to make the city’s Northeast Wastewater Treatment Facility more resilient to storms, elevating an embankment around the facility’s pump station and stabilizing 2,000 feet of the connected creek to reduce flooding risk.
Though heavy rainfall from Helene required Hickory to discharge wastewater from the upgraded plant during the storm, it continued to operate and water in the city remained safe to drink.
Plants elsewhere in the western part of the state were forced to shut down and sustained damage from the storm. The treatment plant that serviced all of Mitchell County “is gone,” State Senator Ralph Hise said at Wednesday’s news conference. “It does not exist and is unsalvageable.”
Rebuilding that plant will likely take four years, he added, leaving the county’s residents reliant on wells and shipments of clean water for the foreseeable future.
A national competition
FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program uses a point system to assess potential projects. It assigns 10 points for state and local regulations that mandate the 2018 and 2021 International Building Code standards. Because North Carolina only mandates the 2015 requirements, all of its proposals start with an automatic -5-point handicap. Likewise, North Carolina is not eligible for $2 million in FEMA funding allocated to each state for updating buildings to comply with the newer codes.
FEMA does not make public its full assessments of each project proposal, so it is not possible to say where newer building codes would have resulted in approval. But in a video presentation ahead of this year’s BRIC proposal cycle, the North Carolina Department of Public Safety labeled it a decisive factor in the failure of projects to secure funding.
“That really puts us behind in capturing these points for these federal grants like BRIC,” department grant officer Kaine Riggan told attendees of an Oct. 9 informational webinar. “We have to work that much harder to get the points that are available in the other categories that we’re losing because of our code adoption.”
Governor Roy Cooper and FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell meet with people affected by the storm and thank emergency personnel and volunteers for their continued hard work. (Pool photo/Paul Barker-Governor’s Office)
In 2023, the BRIC program made $1 billion available through a national competition — just $22 million of which North Carolina received. The previous year, BRIC projects in the state were awarded more than $93 million in funding from a pool of nearly $2.3 billion. While 22 projects received funding in the 2022 cycle, only seven did the following year.
While the Building Code Council can try to approve revisions ahead of time, those changes can be blocked by the General Assembly. In 2023, legislators overrode a veto by Governor Roy Cooper to pass House Bill 488, blocking the council from passing revisions to energy, efficiency, mechanical, and gas fuel standards in the residential code for homes until 2026. The General Assembly further rolled back the council’s authority in passing Senate Bill 166 last month, removing two architects from its membership and preempting various potential Building Code requirements.
An ongoing debate
North Carolina is set to adopt the 2018 building code standards in January 2025, after which state law will not require another update until 2031 — likely setting the state up to fall behind FEMA standards when the agency next updates its own requirements.
Brooks Rainey Pearson, a legislative counsel with the Southern Environmental Law Center, called on the General Assembly to roll back both laws in the interest of public safety. She also urged the state to return to a three-year mandatory update cycle for the Building Code to ensure homes are built to withstand North Carolina’s increasingly damaging storms.
She said the SELC warned the state would lose out on BRIC funding but were accused by proponents of the bills of “exaggerating” the issue. “Of course we weren’t, and we did lose that funding.”
Tim Minton, executive vice president of the North Carolina Home Builders Association, said the legislature has not put structural, health, or safety standards on hold. He also noted that because the total pool of BRIC funding fell by $1.3 billion for 2023, a drop in funding to North Carolina was expected.
“We’re happy to have a debate about building codes anytime,” Minton said. “We think right now, it’s probably a little early to have that debate because we don’t have the data from this historic event yet.”
In addition, only a small number of homes have been built in the year since lawmakers passed changes to the Building Code Council, he said. Most of the homes destroyed in the storm were likely built decades ago and would not have been affected by lawmakers’ actions. “It did not have any impact on this unfortunate historic event,” he said.
Minton said his group opposed the implementation of new energy standards and supported a six-year cycle over a three-year cycle in the interest of housing affordability, citing studies showing that two-thirds of North Carolinians cannot afford a single-family home. “The costs were just too high for the return on investment,” he said of the updated energy code.
Pearson called the idea that the rollbacks were motivated by affordability rather than industry profits “laughable.”
“We have an affordable housing crisis. I don’t see our way out of that as building less resilient housing stock, or building in our wetlands, or building houses that can’t sustain flood damage and wind damage,” Pearson said. “What it’s going to do is make climate disasters worse for the people living in those homes.”