At a recent meeting, the Mitchell County Board of Commissioners received an update on hurricane recovery on national forest lands and learned that the county’s audit produced a clean result.
Roan Helene damage
District Ranger Jennifer Barnhart gave the board an update on Hurricane Helene (downgraded to a tropical storm after slowing down over land) recovery on U.S. Forest Service lands.
“Forty-eight percent of your forest lands were severely impacted in Mitchell County,” Barnhart said.
Barnhart indicated that an important consideration in the recovery process has been the threat of forest fire.
“We’ve particularly been focusing on fuel debris removal,” she said. “Around 60,000 tons that we’ve been able to remove so far.” … Emergency responder access has been a huge component.”
Barnhart said that the peaks of Roan Mountain received a lot of wind damage, and the Forest Service has brought in logging crews to harvest the downed trees to prevent fires.
“About 25 acres we treated up there in order to hopefully not have the other 2,200 acres of spruce fir also taken down if we’d have a fire in there,” she said. “People do campfires when they backpack through up there on the trails. So we did remove a lot of that.”
Barnhart said the debris removal caused a certain amount of controversy.
“Some folks understood why we did that, and others didn’t understand why we did that,” she said. “So, but yeah, it was really just to be able to reduce that risk there, and then also start looking at restoration efforts.”
Positive audit results
Accountant Misty Watson presented the results of the county’s most recent annual audit.
“The county did receive an unmodified opinion, which is a clean opinion for your audit, which is what you want,” Watson said.
Watson noted that the audit looks somewhat different from previous years, primarily because Helene recovery has led to much higher expenditures and incomes, with money coming in from unusual sources such as federal reimbursements from FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) and cash-flow loans from North Carolina state government.
“The audit has been submitted and approved from the local government commission,” Watson said.