Just one month after having the lowest unemployment in the state, October numbers show Buncombe County's jobless rate at 8.8%, now the state's highest.
"We've been forecasting this unemployment crisis from the very beginning," (D) Sen. Julie Mayfield said. "I think our job, as legislators, is to try to relieve this crisis and we have not done that sufficiently."
Mayfield, who represents much of Buncombe County in District 49, returned from Raleigh on the heels of her senate colleagues overriding Gov. Roy Cooper's veto of SB 382, a bill that allocates $277 million for Helene relief and would strip highly elected democrats of certain powers.
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The House will vote to override next week and if they succeed and SB 382 becomes law, it will still be months before the region sees the relief it is so desperate for.
Should the override succeed, the funds will be allocated, not appropriated.
The Legislature will still have to decide where those monies go and will not be able to do so until they return to Raleigh in late January or early February.
In the meantime, more than 13,000 people are without jobs in Buncombe County; that includes 15 housekeepers paid by the hour at Black Mountain-based Greybeard Rentals.
Greybeard is a vacation property rental agency with homes in Burke, Buncombe, McDowell, Yancey, Rutherford, Polk and Henderson Counties.
The housekeepers that no longer work there are now a part of a group of more than 27,000 people who have filed for Helene Disaster-Related Unemployment.
"Workers have nowhere to go," Mayfield said. "If they get evicted from their apartments, they're going to leave because they can't just go across town and rent another apartment."
Bruce O'Connell, who owns the Pisgah Inn in Haywood County, did the best he could for the 57 seasonal workers he had to lay off at the beginning of October.
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"We kept them up there for about a week to 10 days after were closed, feeding them and allowing them time to decide what they were going to do and where they were going to go," O'Connell said.
In Haywood County, a part of the Asheville Metropolitan statistics along with Buncombe, Henderson and Madison counties, unemployment ballooned to 7.3%.
Yancey and Mitchell counties' unemployment rate also grew to more than 7%.
That equals thousands of people out of work in the region's more rural counties.
"Pre-pandemic 50,000 people a day commuted into Asheville," Mayfield said. "Our population increased almost 50% by people coming into work, to work, so if Asheville, as the economic engine of the region, crashes - those impacts get felt all around the region."
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The big fear, according to Mayfield, is what if those seasonal workers who were laid off don't return?
"If those people move away, then come the spring when our tourism numbers do start to naturally climb again, we won't have enough people to support that industry," Mayfield said.
O'Connell remains optimistic his staff will return, along with vacationers on April 1, 2025, when their doors reopen.
"When I open, I know we're going to be busy because reservations are coming in and lots of people that had October reservations did not really cancel them, they just moved them to next year," O'Connell said. "So, people are chomping at the bit to get back to this area."