Politics

Moffitt pushes bill to ease rebuilding regs post-Helene

Many businesses inundated by Hurricane Helene flooding remain closed more than six months after the catastrophic storm.

By Ray Gronberg, BusinessNC, Published: April 10, 2025

State Sen. Tim Moffitt, who lives atop Bearwallow Mountain above the hard-hit Hickory Nut Gorge, says if state officials want to exempt the reconstruction of Helene-damaged buildings from flood-protection rules, they also need to pursue parallel changes to the National Flood Insurance Program.

Moffitt told members of the Senate’s Regulatory Reform committee on Wednesday that he will not seek the enactment of Senate Bill 266 unless he and other advocates can “get some movement at the federal level to hopefully achieve some type of compromise” regarding the program. Without such a compromise and the regulatory exemption the bill proposes, he said, a good bit of Helene’s damage is irremediable.

“If we cannot get our federal partners to also work on this at the same pace that I’m working on it, then probably 20 percent of the mountains will never return,” Moffitt said. “And I think that’s too steep of a price for us to pay.”

SB 266, you’ll remember, would create an exemption in state law and building codes to allow the reconstruction of storm-damaged buildings provided an engineer says the work won’t raise likely floor levels.

The exemption applies to any building damaged in a “historic flood event,” defined as a “200-year” flood with a 1-in-200 chance of happening in any given year.

Moffitt and other sponsors have pointed to the judgment of state and federal officials that Helene was a 1,000-year event that far exceeded the previous floods of record in many parts of the west.

Picking the 200-year level is just as arbitrary as the more normal 100-year floodplain standard, and tying the bill explicitly to the 1,000-year mark seemed “too narrow,” Moffitt said. Instead, he said, legislators can set a benchmark the state can return to after future storms.

“By looking at it as a 200-year flood or greater, then this type of exemption can be deployed in other affected areas across our state in the future,” Moffitt said.

But in proposing something beyond a one-off response to a one-off event, sponsors are taking on extra political risk — illustrated Wednesday when a national environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, issued a statement criticizing the bill.

“SB 266 is the latest measure in a decades-long trend for North Carolina lawmakers who have focused on cutting costs at the expense of public safety and resiliency,” the council said.

“Families recovering and rebuilding from disasters like Hurricane Helene deserve to know that the home they build is safe and can withstand the next storm,” added Rob Moore, the NRDC’s director of flooding solutions.

“Weakening building standards will make it far more likely these homes will be damaged again and families displaced,” Moore continued. “[It] will make homes more susceptible to flood damage and increase the cost of flood insurance, or make them unable to get coverage in the first place.”

Moffitt, meanwhile, said the country’s attempts to craft one-size-fits-all policies to prevent or respond to flood damage has led naturally to a “regulatory quagmire.”

History suggests that “our attempts to tame the planet are futile,” he said. “Things are going to happen that are outside our ability to control, and this is one of those events.”

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Republished with permission of NC Tribune, a daily newsletter of North Carolina politics from Raleigh.