Buncombe County is planning to purchase the former JCPenney site at the Asheville mall for $5 million, turning it into the county’s first standalone emergency operation center, officials announced May 27.
The proposed location will serve as the year-round home for the Emergency Services Department, providing a larger footprint for training, preparedness, and disaster response planning and operations.
Buncombe County officials began searching for a site for the emergency operations center since Hurricane Helene devastated the region, killing 43 people in the county. Officials outlined the importance of the center in the county’s Preparedness Action Plan and Helene Recovery Plan.
“Coming out of that storm, the county's gone through a pretty detailed process in public to understand, kind of, what went well and not only how we can recover, but how we could respond better in the future,” Timothy Love, Buncombe’s assistant county manager told BPR.
Love said the site could potentially house public safety communications, including 911 services.
Relocating those operations could require modernizing existing equipment which could potentially reduce maintenance costs and address major maintenance issues at the more than 100-year-old Irwin Hills facility, where the equipment is currently housed.
At just more than six acres, the former JCPenney location was chosen because of its central location in the county and its ability to house multiple different agencies, according to Love.
He said that officials looked at multiple locations before settling on the proposed site.
“We cast a wide net on this and evaluated lots of different properties that worked or didn't work along the way and there's a variety of variables that go into that,” Love told BPR.
County officials plan to purchase the site using general funds that are dedicated to capital improvement. The county will conduct design, engineering, retrofitting and resiliency upgrades before moving in 2028.
The Buncombe County Board of Commissioners is set to vote on authorizing the purchase at its June 2 meeting, with the expectation that the sale would close six days later on June 8.
BPR freelance reporter Daniel Walton contributed to this report.
