A federal grant awarded last year to improve drinking water quality in hundreds of rural Brunswick County homes made U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin’s round of funding cuts earlier this month.
But Zeldin’s plan to terminate the nearly $20 million grant awarded in December to The Working Lands Trust Inc. and its community-based nonprofit partner, Democracy Green, has been halted — at least temporarily.
Supporter Spotlight
The grant to assist Brunswick County’s unincorporated communities of Supply, Ash and Longwood is mired in an ongoing lawsuit brought by 22 Democratic attorneys general, including North Carolina’s Jeff Jackson, against President Donald Trump’s administration.
The states and the District of Columbia requested a preliminary junction to block the administration from damming the flow of taxpayer dollars to programs previously allocated by Congress.
A federal judge granted the 22 states’ request March 6, two days after the EPA announced Zeldin, assisted by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, canceled 21 grants totaling more than $116 million. The preliminary injunction issued by John J. “Jack” McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, applies only to those 22 states.
The administration is seeking an emergency stay pending an appeal to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. On March 17 the states filed in opposition. At the time this report was published, a hearing date had not been set.
Zeldin casts the grants he terminated as “wasteful federal spending” in a March 4 release announcing the agency’s third round of cuts that “marks more than $287 million taxpayer dollars saved” since he was sworn in Jan. 19.
Supporter Spotlight
“At EPA, we are working in partnership with DOGE to fulfill President Trump’s promise to rein in wasteful federal spending,” Zeldin said in the release. “We will not stop until we ensure every taxpayer penny spent is to advance clean air, land, and water and Power our Great American Comeback for all Americans.”
The grant awarded to The Working Lands Trust in mid-December is for the Clean Water is Safe Water Community Initiative in North Carolina and focuses on improving water quality, restoring ecosystems and removing contaminants from local watersheds.
The program entails removing and replacing lead pipes that route drinking water to the taps of some 500 homes in rural areas of the county and restoring wetlands in the Lockwood Folly River watershed.
The Working Lands Trust did not respond to requests for comment.
Democracy Green cofounder La’Meshia Whittington, speaking on behalf of her organization, told Coastal Review in a recent telephone interview that the grant is not tied to clean energy or diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs Trump has targeted.
“Our grant is so much about community,” she said. “It is so explicitly about spending and renovating and remediating and restoring actual community that you can’t make this a political issue and you can’t make it a government ‘oh, this is just wasteful spending.’ It quite actually is water contamination and replacing lead pipes, lead drinking water pies and cleanup of a wetland.”
A little more than 100 organizations received funding through the Community Change Grant Award funded by the Inflation Reduction Act.
The program tapped for Brunswick County was one of three the EPA singled out as exemplifying bringing change to a community, thrusting the project and its funding recipients into the public spotlight.
At the time of the award announcement, elected officials including Republican Frank Iler, who represents District 17 – Brunswick County, lauded the program.
“These areas of Brunswick County that are unincorporated in the Gullah-Geechee corridor of the county can benefit greatly from EPA grants such as this,” Iler said in a Dec. 12 release. “This assistance with infrastructure and water systems will be well utilized in these parts of our county.”
Iler’s office did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
“We had actually planned on not announcing our award to the press,” Whittington said. “We wanted to get the work done and we wanted to prove we could do the work because we knew there would be naysayers.”
Democracy Green has been the focus of two stories in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative-leaning publication, “Dedicated to uncovering the stories that the powers that be hope will never see the light of day … Whether it’s exposing cronyism, finding out just who is shaping our domestic and foreign policy and why, or highlighting the threats to American security and peace in a dangerous world, the Free Beacon is committed to serving the public interest by reporting news and information that is not being fully covered by other news organizations.”
The stories put the nonprofit on the defensive with it offering on its website a point-by-point counter to claims ranging from the estimated cost of replacing lead pipes in homes to Democracy Green has no experience with water quality-related projects.
Democracy Green is considering a defamation suit against the publication, Whittington said.
In a letter to Zeldin dated March 6 with the subject line, “Setting the Record Straight – False Attacks on Critical Clean Water Efforts,” Democracy Green Executive Director Sanja Whittington further defended the organization against claims made in the story.
“It is especially troubling that these falsehoods target a predominantly red district – one that turned out in great numbers to vote for President Donald J. Trump – where residents are simply seeking access to safe, lead-free drinking water. This is not a partisan issue. It is a public health necessity, and efforts to undermine it with misinformation do a grave disservice to the people who stand to benefit most.”
These are communities La’Meisha Whittington, Sanja’s daughter, describes as “deeply a melting pot” of the older homeowning class living on land passed from generation to generation. Drinking water in those areas is provided through a mix of private water wells and public utilities.
“Their water has been extremely impacted from legacy contamination. They’ve had years of lead contamination, decades, generations,” Whittington said.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, have leached from landfills in these areas and into the environment, including drinking water sources, in these areas, she said.
The wetlands area, which has been under the ownership of Democracy Green, is near the communities where lead pipes will be replaced.
“Us being unable to clean it up the way it needs to be, it will continue to push pollutants into the actual groundwater of these homes and their backyards and community centers and churches that are in these unincorporated areas adjacent to the wetlands,” Whittington said.
Under its agreement with the EPA, the organizations are set to receiving grant funding April 1.
“Once April 1 hits, if our funding isn’t made available and our portal is still suspended, if it’s still that way then we will have to go the legal route to challenge,” Whittington said.
