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HENDERSONVILLE, N.C. — As the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene approaches on September 27, Congress is confronting failures in disaster response — and one North Carolina mayor is under fire for misleading testimony.
During a Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee hearing on Sept. 22, Chimney Rock Mayor Peter O’Leary told Senator Ted Budd (R-NC) that the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) failed to arrive in his community until months after the storm.
“Eventually, they did send some representatives down after, I can’t remember the exact time frame, but it would have been in the January, February time frame that they sent some SBA officers,” O’Leary testified.
But what I saw and documented at the time, and public records and testimony from other officials show that SBA (and FEMA) were active in Rutherford County as early as October 2024 — just days after Helene struck. Information about the SBA was even shared multiple times on the town’s own Facebook page and website, as well as the Rutherford County Facebook page.
Henderson County Commissioner Rebecca McCall told Senator Budd: “Within a few days, organizations showed up to offer assistance. SBA was one of those. We quickly established a disaster relief center. SBA had a presence at the DRC to answer questions and assist in application filing for loans.”
A Disaster Recovery Center was set up in Lake Lure at the closest library to Chimney Rock Village, the Mountains Branch library, part of the Rutherford County library system. SBA officers staffed the site, offering business and homeowner loan consultations.
O’Leary’s claim that “SBA didn’t show up until January” directly contradicts those facts. His broader frustration — that no SBA staff were physically stationed in Chimney Rock Village itself — may have been valid. But in his testimony to Congress, he presented it as if the agency was absent from the county entirely for months.
Budd: “They were asleep at the wheel”
Sen. Budd, who chaired the hearing (and was the only member of Congress present), described Helene as one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history. “Almost one year ago today, Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida before continuing northward and devastating western North Carolina,” Budd said. “Altogether, a total of 11 states were impacted and Helene caused almost $80 billion in damage, making it one of the worst hurricanes to hit the United States, ranking alongside Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina.”
He blasted the Biden administration’s SBA for running out of loan funding just weeks into the recovery. “This led to an unacceptable 66-day shortfall lasting from October 12th through December 20th of last year. Here in North Carolina, 97% of business loan applicants were impacted by the shortfall,” Budd said. “Frankly, under President Biden, they were unprepared and asleep at the wheel.”
“For more than two months, the federal government left survivors in North Carolina on their own with nothing but bootstraps and their community to assist in rebuilding,” he added. “That is unacceptable, and it must never happen again.”
McCall: “He broke into Ingles”
Commissioner McCall testified to the dire reality in Henderson County after the storm: “September 27, 2024, will be a day we long remember in Henderson County and Western North Carolina. Hurricane Helene hit us with full force. Not only was there an enormous amount of rainfall that resulted in flooding as deep as 30 feet in some areas, there were also 2,000 landslides — eighty of which were in Henderson County.” State officials have estimated there were 2,579 landslides, causing 24 of the 108 deaths in NC from Hurricane Helene.
She described the collapse of supply chains: “The power outages that lasted up to two weeks in most areas registered to 1.5 million in the multi-county area, with 95% of Henderson County affected. More than 425 miles of roads and 200-plus bridges were severely damaged in Henderson County alone.”
McCall added a startling anecdote about her own county manager. “I’m going to tell on our county manager,” she said. “He broke into Ingles and took food off the shelves just to take to our EMS facility so that those people would have something to eat.”
She concluded: “We did come together and we did take care of each other and our EMS was amazing. They had prepared days ahead of time, and they were in prominent locations so that they could respond quickly. Our fire departments had gone door to door previously, days before, to evacuate people that we thought needed to be out of harm’s way and that saved many, many, many lives.”
O’Leary: “It essentially added six to seven months”
For O’Leary, the central problem was delays. “Hurricane Helene severely damaged two of my buildings and completely destroyed the other one,” he said. “The buildings were assessed at some point by SBA after we filled out an application for assistance in October of ’24. We were approved shortly after that and everything seemed to be going extremely well. Our application to SBA is for the funding to rebuild the destroyed building.” The Chimney Rock Planning Board and the Town Council approved his plans at the Sept. 16 meetings.
“But we knew at the time that no funds were available and we were told that when we filled out the application,” O’Leary said. “We were assured that funds would be available soon, and they were, I believe, in January. So we were excited to move forward.”
The mayor said turnover inside SBA compounded the problem. “Over about a six-month period, I had five different case managers. It became very frustrating. Many times I would have questions and would reach out to the case manager and not get the information I needed,” he said. “It did take about seven to eight months longer than it realistically should.”
O’Leary added, “It essentially added a good six to seven months to our rebuild time. For a seasonal business like Chimney Rock Village and a lot of Western North Carolina, if you don’t do it at the right time of year, then you’re liable to not only miss this season, but maybe the next season.”
SBA: “Always ready to serve”
SBA’s Associate Administrator Chris Stallings, testifying under Administrator Kelly Loeffler and President Donald Trump, insisted the agency has learned from Helene. “We have committed to taking the lessons learned from Hurricane Helene to ensure that the SBA is always ready to provide reliable and robust disaster support,” Stallings said. “We have improved funding readiness to prevent disruptions like those we saw during the Biden administration, which left thousands of Americans stranded without vital relief.”
“We are ready when disaster strikes, and we are committed to serving as a trusted partner in recovery,” he added. “SBA has expanded ground support to guarantee help is visible and accessible to everyone.”
The record vs. the rhetoric
The hearing revealed hard truths about federal failure and community grit. But O’Leary’s false claim stood out.
As the anniversary of Helene approaches this week, the stakes are clear. Budd warned: “We must ensure that a crisis like this will never happen again. Returning Western North Carolina to normal following Helene hinges on our federal government and its agencies working in coordination with one another.”
For survivors in Chimney Rock, Rutherford County, Henderson County, and across Western North Carolina, accuracy matters. Congress cannot fix what went wrong if local leaders are not honest about what actually happened.
