Dell Pressley is not a real person. She is a composite character built from documented program mechanics, published reporting on post-Helene recovery in western North Carolina, and the structural realities facing small-county hazard mitigation offices. Every factual claim she makes is drawn from public sources cited in the footnotes. Her opinions are her own, which is to say, ours. If she reminds you of someone you know, that's the point.
The county hazard-mitigation coordinator occupies one of the least visible and most consequential positions in American disaster recovery. She translates federal program rules, written for agencies with legal departments and planning staffs, into conversations with homeowners who are paying mortgages on condemned houses. She manages the buyout queue, the BRIC application, the consultant relationship, the match requirement, and the expectations of people who believe "approved" means something is about to happen.
In western North Carolina, twenty months after Hurricane Helene, those queues are long and moving at the pace the federal system was designed to move. That pace assumes the people inside the queue have spare time, spare cash, and spare housing while they wait.
Dell Pressley has been a county hazard-mitigation coordinator in western North Carolina for six years. Before that, she taught eighth-grade math. She took the emergency management job after a previous flood and discovered she was good at it, mostly because the work turned out to be sequencing problems. She agreed to talk on a Thursday afternoon in late June, between a consultant call about a BRIC resubmission and a voicemail she hadn't returned from a homeowner in Group 3.
You were a math teacher. How did you end up here?
Dell: I was good at word problems. "Train A leaves the station at 9 a.m. traveling 60 miles per hour." Federal grant programs are word problems. Except Train A left the station two years ago, nobody told the passengers which station it's going to, and half of them are sleeping in their cars in the parking lot.
What does your office actually look like, staffing-wise?
Dell: Me, and a part-time admin who also works for the planning department. That's the whole operation. Buncombe County has a team. We have a filing cabinet and a shared Outlook calendar. When people picture "the county office handling your buyout," I want them to picture that.
Let's talk about the buyout queue. Buncombe County started closings on their first group of properties in late May.1 Where is your county?
Dell: Behind them. We submitted our first batch to the state months ago. The state submits to FEMA. FEMA reviews. Each property goes through environmental and historic preservation review, benefit-cost analysis, duplication-of-benefits checks.2 Our properties sit in mountainous areas near stream corridors, so the environmental review involves Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, all of it.3 I'm not complaining about that. Those reviews exist because people used to bulldoze floodplains without checking what lived there. But the review was designed for a state agency with environmental compliance staff. I'm running it through a consultant I share with two other counties.
How many gates does a buyout file pass through before a homeowner gets paid?
Dell: I've counted nine. Application intake. Eligibility documentation. County prioritization. State submission to FEMA. Environmental review. Benefit-cost analysis. Formal award and obligation. Pre-offer steps like surveys, appraisals, title searches. Then closing, demolition, and the deed restriction that the county holds forever.4 Each gate has its own timeline. Each one can stall independently. I think of it like a nine-lock canal. Your boat doesn't move until every lock ahead of you opens, and some of them are rusted shut.
The Congressional Research Service says the average HMGP buyout takes over five years from disaster to project closeout.5
Dell: And that's an average, which means plenty run longer. What people don't understand, what I spend half my time explaining, is that "approved" doesn't mean what they think it means. FEMA can approve a project group. That doesn't mean the appraisals are done. The appraisals can be done and the title search finds three owners on the deed, one of whom died in 2019 and the estate was never probated. All owners on the deed have to sign. FEMA won't close without that.6 So now we're waiting on a probate court in another state. Meanwhile, the homeowner in the condemned house is still paying her mortgage.
The mortgage doesn't pause because a buyout application is pending?
Dell: No. Disaster forbearance exists through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and there are options.7 But there's no automatic mechanism that says "this home is in a FEMA buyout queue, freeze the mortgage." The buyout clock and the mortgage clock run on completely separate tracks. I have homeowners paying on houses they can't live in, renting somewhere else, waiting for a file to clear a review process that might take another year. One woman told me she's paying two housing costs on a teacher's salary. I used to be a teacher. I know what that salary is.
Some of the rules you're describing sound like they exist for good reasons.
Dell: They do. Every single one. DOB checks exist because without them, someone could collect an insurance payout, a FEMA Individual Assistance grant, and a buyout offer for the same loss.8 That's fraud prevention. BCA exists because you shouldn't spend $400,000 of public money buying out a property that will never flood again. Environmental review exists because a buyout that destroys a wetland to build a retention pond is not actually mitigation.
I defend every one of those requirements in principle. What I can't defend is the assumption underneath them: that the entity running the process has a legal team, an environmental compliance officer, a GIS analyst, and a grants manager. I have a filing cabinet and a shared Outlook calendar.
Tell me about the consultant.
Dell: We hired a firm to do our benefit-cost analyses and help with the FEMA GO submissions. They're good. They also helped us scope a BRIC project last year, drainage infrastructure, pre-disaster, exactly what the program is supposed to fund. Then BRIC got cancelled in April 2025.9 All previous awards from 2020 through 2023 were cancelled too. $882 million, gone.10 Our application, the consultant hours, the stakeholder meetings. All of it evaporated.
And then BRIC came back.
Dell: After twenty states sued and a federal judge ordered FEMA to release the funds.11 It reopened this year. A billion dollars available, deadline July 23.12 But our old application doesn't carry over. We resubmit from scratch under new criteria. And the restored program no longer funds hazard mitigation planning or non-construction capacity building.13 So the step where a county like mine develops the expertise to even identify a competitive project? BRIC used to pay for that. Now it doesn't.
And the national competition gives 30 out of 90 points for projects at 90% design completion.14 We're competing against cities that had engineering firms on retainer before the disaster. It's like entering a marathon and finding out the first twenty miles are scored on how fast you drove to the starting line.
The original BRIC had similar accessibility problems, didn't it?
Dell: Seventy-eight percent of awards went to high-capacity counties on the coasts.15 Smaller towns often lack the time, staff, and technical know-how even to apply.16 The restored version may be worse, because now you need a near-shovel-ready project and you can't use BRIC money to get there.
There's also a procurement rule—
Dell: The consultant who writes the application can't bid on the construction contract unless you had a single competitively procured contract covering both phases.17 Which we didn't, because we hired them for the application. So if we win, we have to find a different firm to build it. In a county where I share one consultant with two neighbors.
It's a conflict-of-interest rule and I understand why it exists. But it was written for a place with a procurement department. I am the procurement department.
What do you tell homeowners who call asking where their file is?
Dell: (long pause) I tell them the truth. I know where their file is in my system, and I often know where it is in the state's system, but once it's at FEMA, I'm reading the same updates they are. One applicant in Buncombe told a reporter she'd been emailing the county and state for months and was told "the county has the answer."18 Sometimes the county does have the answer. Sometimes the county is also waiting.
The hardest calls are when someone asks me a question I can answer. "Your file is in the third batch, the kickoff meeting is late summer."19 And what I'm really telling them is: six more months, minimum, before you even get an offer. They're paying rent and a mortgage right now. Today. While I'm explaining timelines.
Is there a version of this system that works?
Dell: The system works. It's slow and it works. The real question is who absorbs the cost of the slowness. Right now, it's the homeowner and the two-person county office.
FEMA extended the HMGP application period from twelve to fifteen months because they recognized underserved communities need more time.20 That's a real acknowledgment. But the fix is more time, and time is exactly what the household doesn't have.
The scandal isn't that there are rules. The scandal is that the rules assume you have spare time, spare cash, spare housing, and spare staff. After a disaster, those are the four things nobody has.
What's on your desk right now?
Dell: A BRIC resubmission due in three weeks. A Group 3 buyout batch I haven't heard back on. A consultant invoice I need to code to the right budget line. And a voicemail from a homeowner I haven't called back yet because I don't have anything new to tell her, and she deserves better than "I'm still waiting too."
(pause)
I'll call her after this.
Footnotes
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Buncombe County Commissioner meeting minutes, May 19, 2026. https://www.buncombenc.gov/m/newsflash/home/detail/967 ↩
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FEMA, "Hazard Mitigation Grant Program — When You Apply." https://www.fema.gov/grants/mitigation/learn/hazard-mitigation/when-you-apply ↩
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FEMA, "Hazard Mitigation Grant Program." https://www.fema.gov/grants/mitigation/learn/hazard-mitigation ↩
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NC Department of Public Safety, HMGP overview. https://www.ncdps.gov/HMGP ↩
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Carolina Journal, "FEMA Approves $297M for Helene Recovery." https://www.carolinajournal.com/fema-approves-297m-for-helene-recovery/ ↩
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FEMA, HMGP application requirements. https://www.fema.gov/grants/mitigation/learn/hazard-mitigation/when-you-apply ↩
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Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disaster forbearance and relief programs provide options including forbearance, payment deferral, and loan modification, but no automatic foreclosure stop tied to a FEMA buyout file was identified in reviewed sources. ↩
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FEMA, "Duplication of Benefits." https://www.fema.gov/hmgp-appeal-categories/duplication-benefits ↩
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Harvard Environmental & Energy Law Program, BRIC termination tracker. https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/tracker/fema-issued-new-building-resilient-infrastructure-and-communities-bric-policy/ ↩
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ASCE Infrastructure Report Card, "FEMA Ends BRIC Program." https://infrastructurereportcard.org/fema-ends-bric-program/ ↩
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NACo, "Federal Judge Temporarily Halts BRIC Grant Program Termination." https://www.naco.org/news/federal-judge-temporarily-halts-bric-grant-program-termination ↩
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FEMA, BRIC FY 2024–25 program page. https://www.fema.gov/grants/mitigation/learn/building-resilient-infrastructure-communities ↩
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Urban Institute, "FEMA Eliminating Hazard Mitigation Programs." https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/fema-eliminating-hazard-mitigation-programs-leaving-americans-nationwide-risk-disasters ↩
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FEMA, BRIC Evaluation Criteria, National Competition. https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_hma_bric-evaluation-criteria-national-competition_fy24-fy25.pdf ↩
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Reported figure from independent review of BRIC award distribution, cited in American Flood Coalition analysis. https://floodcoalition.org/fff-resource/bric/ ↩
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Natural Resources Defense Council, cited in multiple analyses of BRIC accessibility for small communities. ↩
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FEMA, BRIC FY 2024–25 NOFO, procurement and conflict-of-interest requirements. https://www.fema.gov/grants/mitigation/learn/building-resilient-infrastructure-communities ↩
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WLOS, December 2025, reporting on buyout delays and homeowner frustration. https://wlos.com/news/local/slow-process-property-buyout-program-leaves-helene-victims-financial-limbo-buncombe-henderson-yancey-madison-mcdowell-rutherford-transylvania ↩
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Buncombe County, May 19, 2026 meeting: Group 3 kickoff meeting planned for late summer/early fall. https://www.buncombenc.gov/m/newsflash/home/detail/967 ↩
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ASFPM, "FEMA Extends HMGP Application Period to 15 Months." https://www.floods.org/news-views/fema-news/fema-extends-hmgp-application-period-to-15-months/ ↩