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.”
The struggles of western North Carolina now hang over a looming political showdown in Raleigh, the capital, where Republicans in the legislature moved to expand their power after losing their single-vote supermajority in the State House in the November elections. Last month, during the lame-duck session before the new legislature convenes in January, Republican leaders met quietly to draft the bill before rushing it through both chambers in 24 hours.
Now, to override Mr. Cooper’s veto, Republicans will need every single vote from their lawmakers in the House. That includes three Republican state legislators from the western part of the state who voted against the bill during its passage, arguing that it did not provide proper hurricane relief. If any of them break with their party again, the veto will stand.
The three lawmakers are under tremendous political pressure from fellow Republicans, even as many residents in western North Carolina have expressed anger about the injection of politics into hurricane relief legislation.
“A lot of them feel the same way — that it doesn’t do anything for the flood victims, even though it said that’s what it was going to do,” said State Representative Mark Pless, a Republican who represents Haywood County, where BearWaters and many other businesses are trying to recover. He said he had received about 300 emails a day about the bill.
With many in Raleigh expecting the House to attempt an override vote on Wednesday, Mr. Pless said he remained uncertain how he would vote.
“I’m going through it, and I’m looking to see what’s in there and see what I like and what I don’t like,” he said. “This is a take-it-or-leave-it bill. This is not a negotiation bill. So there’s nothing to benefit by going in and saying, ‘Hey, if you’ll change this or change that, then I can support it,’ because nothing can be changed.”
Phil Berger, the top Republican in the State Senate, told reporters last month that G.O.P. lawmakers had passed one jumbo bill because “it’s all within the rules.” He and other Republicans indicated at the time that they wanted to see how much the federal government would pay for recovery efforts before deciding on an amount the state would give.
State Senator Ralph Hise, a Republican, defended the bill in the upper chamber last month, saying it was only a first step in recovery from the hurricane, and criticizing those who he said were making “a whole bunch of crazy claims that we’re not doing anything for the people of western North Carolina.”
The initial $877 million Helene recovery bill included $50 million in loans for small businesses. Some small-business owners, however, said loans could only worsen their debt, and argued that grants would better help local economies. Governor Cooper had sought a much larger $3.9 billion proposal.
When Mr. Cooper vetoed the bill expanding Republican power, he called it “a sham,” arguing that it “does not send money to western North Carolina but merely shuffles money from one fund to another in Raleigh.” Mr. Pless compared it to moving money from “one savings account to another savings account” without actually allocating any money to be spent. The bill includes $227 million in a relief fund, but for any of it to go to western North Carolina, legislators would have to vote again next year on how to appropriate the money.
State Representative Lindsey Prather, a Democrat who represents southwestern Buncombe County, said her constituents had relayed their needs for small-business grants, money to rebuild homes and funding to repair private roads and bridges.
“Anybody who is out here and who has seen the impact of the disaster understands the need for urgency, particularly as winter is coming,” Ms. Prather said.
Indeed, the biggest season for western North Carolina is the fall, when amber and orange leaves glowing on the mountains draw millions of leaf-peeping tourists to the area’s hotels, bars and restaurants. Businesses store up cash reserves so they can weather the big drop-off in the winter.
“When this storm hit, the effect it had on our business community, it called for urgency like no other, because you have farmers, you have restaurants, you have small businesses, they don’t have the luxury of that fall season,” said Zeb Smathers, the Democratic mayor of Canton, N.C. “That may be what pays the bills the whole year.”
Mr. Smathers, whose family has been in the area for eight generations, said he had been urging leaders in both Raleigh and Washington to send relief as soon as possible. Unemployment in his home county, Haywood, recently doubled to about 5 percent. In Buncombe County, to the east, unemployment has soared to nearly 9 percent.
The delay in storm aid is particularly testing the mettle of residents in Asheville, where the hospitality industry is the main economic engine. Restaurants that already operate on thin margins were still paying off debt from loans taken out during the coronavirus pandemic. With little to no cash reserves, their owners say they need urgent help to get back on their feet.
“There’s still a mentality of ‘We’re just a bunch of bumbling, redneck hillbillies in the mountains, and you’ll figure it out because you always have,’” said William Dissen, an award-winning chef who runs the Market Place in downtown Asheville. He scuttled a tour for his first cookbook, “Thoughtful Cooking,” as he focused on helping his restaurant recover.
“I feel like we’re kind of being forgotten about,” Mr. Dissen said. “There’s people I hear dying, suffering.” He warned of a probable “exodus from the region.”
The scale of the storm’s effects can be difficult to comprehend, going well beyond visible damage. Even businesses set high in the mountains, away from the devastating floods, have been staring at hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
“We pretty much had to shut down for a month,” said Rick Shaich, the founder of Asheville Music Tools, which manufactures high-end guitar-effects pedals. The delay stalled projects and development on new releases, he said, and employees’ skill level meant he had to keep paying them: “We need to retain them, and we need to be good corporate citizens. So we had to pay money for employees that we weren’t getting labor back.”
For some businesses, it is already too late.
Vivian, a restaurant in the low-lying River Arts District of Asheville, survived the storm structurally intact. But power failures caused its steak and duck meat to rot in the freezer and its grouper and mackerel to spoil. A lack of clean drinking water kept the restaurant from reopening for weeks. Insurance claims were not accepted. There was no word of state-funded small-business grants coming through.
About a week after Republicans in Raleigh passed the bill expanding their power, Vivian’s owners announced on Facebook that they were closing the restaurant because they were “financially exhausted” and “emotionally decimated.”
“There should have been more aid, much more,” Josiah McGaughey, one of the owners, said in an interview. “And that could have possibly saved our restaurant.”
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