ASHEVILLE, N.C. (WLOS) — Residents expressed to the Asheville City Council what they think the city should do with $225 million in federal relief funding.
The city put a survey out in January looking for that input. Today, the council got it at their annual retreat.
Around 8% of the city’s residents, nearly 6,900 people, took the questionnaire. The responses showed that people want to see the rebuilding of critical infrastructure as the number one priority. This is in response to the city’s continued recovery from Helene.
“What does Asheville look like when it comes on the backside of this recovery?” Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer asked. “It’s going to be better. It’s going to be better than before. But what is that going to look like? What are we going to focus on? Now that we have the robust community input to be able to help put this together, we’ll build a plan.”
That plan will likely start with critical infrastructure like the city water system. That’s just one example of not just building back but also looking ahead to the next disaster.
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“Preparedness is key,” Manheimer said. “We need to be ready for pretty much anything. We need more resilient infrastructure to withstand these types of events in the future.”
Other priorities that people from the survey identified were to expand housing solutions, support economic and business recovery and enhance food security among others.
This all came during the council’s annual retreat. A time outside of normal sessions to discuss multi-layered topics.
“There’s only so far we can go in an hour meeting,” Council Member Maggie Ullman said. “Before we start doing any goal setting as a team, we needed data. Two days of really digging in together, I expect us to have a unified vision by the time we leave. When we do these annual retreats, we look big picture, get alignment, and get on the same page.”
The retreat continues tomorrow, Feb. 14, and the council will meet for another six hours.
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Immediate action may not come from the two-day gathering.
“Don’t expect coming out of this session today some specific project,” Manheimer said. “Some things might take months. Some things might take years. That work is happening.”
It’s the start of crafting a recovery effort for the near and far future. It’s all to ensure that $225 million in federal relief is used properly.
“I’m expecting that we’ll have clear goals around housing, infrastructure,” Ullman said. “The rest of the time, we’re going to be looking at our vision, guiding principles, as well as the key priorities of what we need to do. This is an unprecedented infusion of resources to rebuild our communities. We’ll have clear, aligned goals as a team, to guide how we’re going to spend this money so that we can build the community back better and more resilient.”
With this plan and takeaways after the retreat, you’ll start to see references back to these conversations had today and tomorrow in the council’s regular sessions.
The next Asheville City council session is Tuesday, February 25.