Helene response likely set back NC road projects by years, officials say as 2025 hurricane season opens

Responding to the widespread devastation from Hurricane Helene will cost so much that it’ll set other road and bridge construction work back by years, state business leaders told reporters Thursday, as North Carolina braces for the upcoming 2025 hurricane season and whatever additional damage that might bring.

The NC Chamber of Commerce, the state’s main business lobbying group, is working to highlight the domino-like effect that natural disasters can have on funding for roads and bridges, since having good roads affects so much of the state’s economy from tourism to trucking.

Fixing storm-damaged roads takes away funding that would otherwise be spent on normally scheduled road widening or repairs. That causes those projects to be delayed, which causes costs to rise, which in turn might lead to even longer delays or fewer road projects being completed.

“We have to have the resources to do both things,” Jake Cashion, the Chamber’s top lobbyist, said Thursday. “We must continue to support recovery in western North Carolina. And we must continue to make investments in the transportation network statewide.”

The Chamber wants to see more public-private partnership options — like toll roads — approved to help fund road construction. It also supports what it calls a State Infrastructure Bank that would offer low-interest loans to boost road funding.

Cashion and others including a state Department of Transportation representative spoke with reporters Thursday about a new report from TRIP, a D.C.-based transportation research group, that estimated the state government will need to spend nearly $1 billion just on fixing roads and bridges damaged by Helene.

That’s equivalent to 3 years’ worth of spending on bridges statewide, or 18 months worth of road resurfacing work statewide — meaning that other non-emergency efforts are now likely going to need to be pushed back by months or years.

“The North Carolina Department of Transportation has really done a heroic job of addressing this devastating damage from Hurricane Helene,” said Rocky Moretti, TRIP’s research director. “But moving forward, they also have significant transportation challenges across the state.”

At the same time, climate change is making storms more severe, along with inflation causing recovery work to cost more. Hurricane Matthew in 2016 set a North Carolina record by doing $5 billion in damage. Two years later Hurricane Florence shattered that record. And in 2024 Helene set a new record, with $60 billion in estimated damage.

More hurricanes coming

Asked by WRAL about what the 2025 hurricane season might add to those pressures, Alyson Tamer, one of NCDOT’s top leaders for Helene recovery work, said Thursday that Helene drained much of the agency’s funding set aside for emergencies.

But DOT has flexibility, she noted, to take money from other road projects to pay for disaster response — if that’s the only option.

“We are working towards preparedness now,” she said. “We’ve learned a lot of lessons from Helene on steps that we can take, hopefully, to build back well.”

DOT’s flexibility to delay or defund previously scheduled projects to pay for disaster response, however, frustrates some business leaders, even in the areas hit hardest by Helene.

“It also is not lost on me that we have transportation projects that are completely apart from anything related to hurricane relief that we want to see funded — as do people throughout the state,” Kit Cramer, president of the Asheville-area Chamber of Commerce, said Thursday. “So, we have an ongoing concern about the funding level for our transportation infrastructure.”

Wake County affected

Helene is far from the first storm to derail other road projects and lead to unintended consequences years later.

WRAL reported this past weekend that state lawmakers are looking to kill a proposed toll road on Capital Boulevard in Raleigh — even though local leaders say that’s their only option since the cost of widening Capital Boulevard has ballooned from a $93 million plan in 2012 to a $1.3 billion plan in 2025.

A large part of the reason that much cheaper 2012 plan never happened was because it was supposed to get started in 2018. But that year Hurricane Florence hit the state, causing transportation officials to put the Capital Boulevard project on hold to divert the money to repairing storm-damaged roads out east instead.

Since then, the rising costs of labor, construction materials and land have all contributed to the project’s cost exploding — now leaving local and state politicians in a stand-off over how to proceed.

Adam Wright, a Wake Forest Town Commissioner, told WRAL the toll road would never have come up as an option if the stat legislature had appropriated enough money for roads in the first place, to keep transportation officials from having to shuffle funds around and delay the project.

“We don’t want tolling,” he said. “But if you’re going to prevent us from tolling, can you at least give us the money? That’s the long and short of it. None of us want tolling. But NCDOT has been massively under-funded by the legislature for years.”

Fight over taxes

Concerns over transportation funding have been highlighted further this year as the Republican-led state legislature debates pressing ahead with more cuts to the state’s income tax rate, the main source of revenue for state services in general.

North Carolina is projected to hit a deficit as soon as next year unless state lawmakers freeze tax rates in place. Some Republican leaders in the state legislature now want to pump the brakes on tax cuts. But others say they don’t believe their own budget analysts and are pushing to pass even more aggressive tax cuts than what’s already planned.

That intra-GOP fight on tax policy is currently holding up passage of the new state budget, as well as a new round of funding for Hurricane Helene relief that might end up being tied to the budget.

The current state budget year ends on June 30, but lawmakers appear months away from reaching a final deal on a new budget.