A town in North Carolina is doubling down on its earlier commitment to provide hurricane relief to local business owners based on race and sex.
Asheville, a town in western North Carolina that was devastated by Hurricane Helene, said in its 2024 Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery action plan, released this month, that the plan’s Small Business Support Program would “prioritize assistance for Minority and Women Owned Businesses (MWBE) within the scoring criteria outlined within the polices and procedures.”
In January, the Western North Carolina Citizens for Equality filed a complaint with the Treasury Department after Buncombe County, which includes Asheville, would “focus” on hurricane relief for “BIPOC” and “women” owned businesses damaged in the hurricane, The Daily Wire reported at the time.
“In this situation, there is no doubt that Buncombe County intended to discriminate against white business owners in its Helene Relief Project. The County directed that the funds be used in manner that prioritizes one group of business owners over another based solely on skin color,” the complaint says.
The County Board of Commissioners, which is controlled by Democrats, released its small business relief grant program in November, and the residents asked the Trump administration to intervene in January.
Now, in March, Asheville appears to be doubling down on the racist and sexist prioritization of hurricane relief. In addition to prioritizing small business grants based on race and sex, the city plans to implement other programs based on income. The city said that at least 70% of program funds would meet the low- to moderate-income (LMI) objective set forth by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. A fund was created to build multi-family housing units that would require 80% of the units to be occupied by households at 80% or below the area median income, which was $90,300 in 2023. The cost of living in Asheville, however, is higher than the national average.
The city’s infrastructure projects “prioritize projects that primarily serve LMI populations or support affordable housing development.”
As The Daily Wire previously reported, Buncombe County in mid-November partnered with Mountain Bizworks, a non-profit, to administer $1.5 million in aid to small businesses owned by people of color and women.
“Further, Mountain Bizworks used the repurposed federal [American Rescue Plan Act of 2021] funds and furthered the County’s objective: culling applicants and awarding grant money based, in part, on the skin color of applicants. These actions are clearly illegal,” the complaint filed in January says.
Before the complaint was filed, county statistics showed that small business grants disproportionately went to women and minority-owned businesses.
“Of the 137 awards given out, 28.5% were given to ‘minority owned businesses,’ and 60.6[%] were given to ‘women-owned businesses.’ The county is nearly 90% white, according to census data, The Daily Wire previously reported.
