In the mountains of western North Carolina, the BearWaters brewery has sat vacant and decaying for nearly three months, its windows cracked or missing and the beer menu from its last day open still scrawled on one of them in white marker.
It has been this way ever since Hurricane Helene swept through, unleashing flooding a story high from waterways like the Pigeon River next to the brewery. A nearby building has collapsed on itself. Down the street, all that remains of a pet store is a muck-stained concrete husk.
The need for storm aid is everywhere in western North Carolina, well beyond the roughly $877 million already approved by the state’s legislature in October. But as residents and small businesses plead for more help from state lawmakers, they have found themselves in the middle of a clash over partisan power in one of the country’s top political battlegrounds.
Last month, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a bill that was titled “disaster relief” but that appropriated no new money for areas hit by Helene, nor created the small-business grants requested by local business leaders and Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.
Instead, the bill chipped away at the power of the state’s governor and attorney general, both of whom will be Democrats next year, in addition to giving Republicans more control over elections and judicial appointments. Mr. Cooper, who is stepping down because of term limits, swiftly vetoed the bill, and Republicans vowed to override him with their supermajority — a move that could come as soon as Wednesday.
All the while, people in western North Carolina are in limbo.
“We’re sort of just stuck,” said Art O’Neil, an owner of BearWaters, which has been racking up debt and waiting on insurance claims and permits to rebuild. “It would just make me sick to my stomach to think that we have to suffer because of politics in Raleigh or in D.C.”
