Part of a series about the effects federal budget and staff cuts and the cancellations of programs and services are having in coastal North Carolina.

The call from the North Carolina Attorney General’s office late last year relayed news of a victory.

A federal judge in Boston on Dec. 11, 2025, sided with Jeff Jackson and 19 other state attorneys general in their case against the Federal Emergency Management Agency, informed the caller.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns ruled that FEMA unlawfully terminated a federal grant program under which roughly $200 million had been awarded to North Carolina communities, including Pollocksville, to tailor projects to reduce and prevent storm damage.

Stearns issued an immediate, permanent injunction restoring the Building Resilient Infrastructures and Communities, or BRIC, program.

“And, that’s all we’ve heard,” Pollocksville Mayor Jay Bender said. “We’ve never heard anything official from FEMA saying yay or nay. We have not heard anything from North Carolina Emergency Management saying yay or nay.”

FEMA funnels BRIC grants to state emergency management offices, which are responsible for managing and passing funds on to grant recipients.

N.C. Division of Emergency Management’s Justin Graney, chief of external affairs and communications, said in an email that the agency had not been notified by FEMA as to when funding would be released.

“NCEM continues to work closely with FEMA to determine the next steps and looks forward to a resolution,” Graney said.

But any such resolution could be, at a minimum, months away.

The federal government still has time to appeal Stearns’ decision. The 60-day window to challenge his ruling closes before the middle of next month.

The N.C. Department of Justice’s communications office confirmed in an Jan. 26 email that FEMA had, at that time, not filed an appeal in the case.

“We are closely monitoring FEMA’s compliance with the court order,” the email states.

FEMA’s news desk at its regional office in Atlanta did not respond to requests for comment. 

The agency announced without any forewarning last April it was canceling the BRIC program, one created under President Donald Trump’s first term in office.

But just three months or so into Trump’s second term, an unnamed FEMA spokesperson stated in the announcement that the agency considered BRIC to be “wasteful” and “political.”

FEMA later clarified only projects that had been completed would be fully funded, erasing congressionally appropriated funding for more than 60 infrastructure projects in North Carolina.

Jackson joined a lawsuit filed last July by a coalition of state attorneys general who argued FEMA’s termination of the program was unlawful.

The court agreed, concluding that FEMA did not have the authority to end BRIC because Congress, not the federal agency, appropriated funds for that program.

“The BRIC program is designed to protect against natural disasters and save lives,” Stearns wrote.

“Our towns spent years doing everything FEMA asked them to do to qualify for this funding, and they were in the middle of building real protections against storms when FEMA suddenly broke its word,” Jackson said in a release following the court ruling. “Keeping water systems working and keeping homes out of floodwater isn’t politics – it’s basic safety.”

Pollocksville and Leland were selected to each receive about $1.1 million through the BRIC program.

Leland plans to relocate the town’s sewer system away from Sturgeon Creek from which floodwaters rise often after storms and natural disasters.

Jessica Jewell, Leland’s communications manager, said in an email that the town is exploring other grant opportunities to help fund their project.

At the time of FEMA’s announcement last April, Pollocksville had already paid out about $18,000 in legal, advertising and procurement fees ahead of the project the Jones County town had secured to raise six commercial buildings in its downtown next to the Trent River.

“I mean, this is a project that we thought was done,” Bender said. “We had a contractor. That was probably one of the most frustrating things. We were already under contract.”

Before the state attorneys general filed their lawsuit, town officials were contacted by the state and encouraged to submit their project proposal through the Hazard Mitigation Grant program. The HMGP is federally funded, but managed by the state Division of Emergency Management.

“Having to file all the same paperwork over – I don’t know that I can convey to you the complexity of the paperwork,” Bender said. “The positive thing about this, going through HMGP as opposed to going through FEMA, is that HMGP will be at no cost to the town. There’s no match and so that will obviously make it a more financially attractive proposal than FEMA.”

He went on to say that the town will take “the best deal that comes the quickest.”

“I will feel much more confident when there is an actual piece of paper to sign and when I see people on the street preparing elevate a building,” he said.

Part of a series about the effects federal budget and staff cuts and the cancellations of programs and services are having in coastal North Carolina.

POLLOCKSVILLE – North Carolina’s attorney general is confident federal funding unceremoniously stripped from local governments earlier this year will be reinstated under a court ruling.

“I think we’re going to win in court,” Jeff Jackson said Tuesday afternoon. “I think our argument is very strong.”

Jackson had just wrapped up a short tour of Pollocksville’s Main Street, where the town’s longtime mayor pointed to building after building tapped to be raised higher off the ground and out of the path of future flooding that might spill over the banks of the Trent River.

“This building’s got great potential,” Mayor Jay Bender said as the two men strolled a sidewalk toward the river. One that, in September 2018, rose more than 25 feet when Hurricane Florence dumped more than 30 inches of rain.

Floodwaters forced most of the town’s residents to evacuate and destroyed or damaged more than 80% of its buildings.

“There’s nothing woke, there’s nothing political, there’s nothing wasteful,” Bender said to Jackson.

There’s also nothing left of the federal program that helped communities tailor projects to reduce and prevent damage from future storms.

Four days before Pollocksville officials were to sign contracts to kickstart their project to raise buildings, President Donald Trump’s Federal Emergency Management Agency killed the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, grants program.

The agency said only projects that have been completed will be fully funded.

Gone was the nearly $1.1 million in funding this small Jones County town had worked so hard to secure through a process vetted by FEMA for more than 30 months.

“The rug was pulled out from under us,” Bender said.

A coalition of 20 state attorneys general, including Jackson, filed a lawsuit on July 16 in a federal court in Boston accusing FEMA of unlawfully terminating the BRIC program.

“The basic argument is that was not FEMA money to cancel,” Jackson said during a press conference under a picnic shelter in the town’s waterfront park. “That was congressional money. Congress gave that money to FEMA and told FEMA how to spend it. They said we want you to spend it helping small towns like Pollocksville defend themselves against the next flood. That is exactly what Pollocksville was doing with this money.”

Tuesday’s visit to Pollocksville was his second in recent days to a North Carolina town awarded BRIC funding only to have it ripped away.

Several days ago, Jackson went to Hillsborough to visit a pumping station that flooded when Tropical Storm Chantal swept through parts of central North Carolina early this month. Plans were to construct a new pumping station outside of the floodplain with more than $5 million in BRIC funds.

“We’re going in order of indefensibility,” he said Tuesday in what seems to be a campaign of sorts to raise awareness of FEMA’s decision to cut the BRIC program.

Pollocksville is one of 68 towns, cities and counties in the state that have been awarded BRIC grants since the program officially began its first round of funding in 2020. As previously reported by Coastal Review, almost half of the local governments awarded funding are in the 20 coastal counties.

The only completed BRIC project in the state is a living shoreline in Duck.

Congress approved the program in 2018 with bipartisan support and Trump’s signature during his first presidential term. Since then, nearly $5 billion has been committed to communities across the country for projects to elevate buildings and roads, relocate vulnerable sewer pump stations, control flooding, and strengthen building codes.

“Yes, we want to get this money back to Pollocksville,” Jackson said. “If we’re successful it means we get money back for the entire state.”

He said he expects the court will hold a hearing “within the next few weeks” over a request by the attorneys general for an injunction to lift the funds from being blocked.

“That’s been our request that they treat this as an emergency,” Jackson said. “What we want the court to do is say, while this matter is winding its way through court, which will take six to nine months to fully resolve, the money can continue to flow.”

Jackson said there’s no lack of evidence to support the importance of BRIC funding for communities like Pollocksville that are trying to better protect its residents and infrastructure from floods and other natural disasters exacerbated by the changing climate.

“The flood here, the flood in Hillsborough that happened three weeks ago, there’s fresh evidence with respect to an enormous number of these things,” he said.

Part of a series about the effects federal budget and staff cuts and the cancellations of programs and services are having in coastal North Carolina.

MANTEO — In the six months since the chaotic and seemingly random cutting in the federal government began, a terrible uneasiness has descended on the northeast corner of North Carolina, where all of the state’s nine national wildlife refuges employ neighbors and family members who live in the rural communities in which they’re located.

At least 10 Coastal North Carolina National Wildlife Refuge Complex staff and five employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional Ecological Services office in Raleigh, so far, are believed to have voluntarily left their jobs, whether nudged by coercion or incentives.

With staff forbidden to speak with media, and ongoing legal challenges and limited public information creating uncertainty, no one appears to know what will happen to their refuges.

“I just found out we should be getting some staffing numbers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the next couple of weeks,” Howard Phillips, the Southeastern representative for the National Wildlife Refuge Association, a nonprofit advocacy and support group for the refuges, told Coastal Review, citing informed but unofficial sources. “The dust seems to be settling a little and (the agency) is starting to get a handle on where they stand.”

But Phillips, who retired at the end of 2020 as manager of Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in Tyrrell County, says he fears that serious consequences are already baked into the refuges’ cake, no matter what the government decides to do. The lack of trust engendered by often abrupt, unexplained cuts of staff, research and budgets as well as the “crippling” brain drain of expertise, experience and local knowledge has only made the situation more problematic.

“Could the administration suddenly decide they want to hire everybody back and start doing conservation again?” he continued. “That would take at least six months, probably 12 months. They’d have to be trained.”

The stark reality, he added, is that without knowing the Trump administration’s timeline or goal in the current upheaval, it’s impossible to understand the long-term impacts and impractical to expect much to change, much less improve.

“I mean, they’ve just given no indication that they’re going to do anything that’s going to reverse the trend right now, which is down, down, down, down,” Phillips said.

An unnamed spokesperson from the agency’s public affairs office ignored Coastal Review’s request to authorize or facilitate a refuge staff interview, but responded to several questions about impacts on North Carolina’s wildlife refuges in a May 23 email.

“As part of the broader efforts led by the Department of the Interior under President Trump’s leadership, we are implementing necessary reforms to ensure fiscal responsibility, operational efficiency, and government accountability,” the spokesperson wrote. “While we do not comment on personnel matters, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service remains committed to fulfilling our mission of conserving fish, wildlife, and natural resources for the American people.” 

Refuges in the coastal complex encompass nearly a half-million acres of farmlands, swamp forests and pocosin peatlands, intersected by rivers, streams, canals, lakes and sounds within the nation’s second-largest estuarine system.

The nine refuges — Alligator River, Pea Island, Mackay Island, Currituck, Mattamuskeet, Pocosin Lakes, Cedar Island, Swan Quarter, Roanoke River — are stretched along vast swaths of geography in the coastal plain that provide habitat for unique species and globally important ecosystems.

For instance, the critically endangered wild red wolves, the only surviving in the world, roam within a five-county recovery area based out of Alligator River, descendants of Spanish mustangs range free in Currituck, and thousands of migratory birds and waterfowl passing along the Atlantic Flyway overwinter every year at Mattamuskeet and Pocosin Lakes.

Mattamuskeet, the state’s largest natural lake, is undergoing an innovative and intensive watershed restoration project many years in the planning. And Pocosin Lakes, named for the Native American term for “swamp on hill” because of its boggy peat soil, has been studied by Duke University researchers for its ability to remediate carbon pollution. The refuge has also nearly completed an extensive rewetting project to restore the ability of the pocosin peat to absorb carbon dioxide and resist wildfires.

Two major wildfires in and around the refuge in recent decades have burned deep in the ground for many weeks, spewing tons of carbon back into the environment, with one smoldering for six months before it was finally extinguished.

Therein lies the dilemma — and the risk — to the refuges: What happens when there’s no one available to take proper care of the refuges, and to even continue the conservation mission?

Pocosin Lakes, for instance, with the recent retirement of former manager Wendy Stanton, no longer has a refuge manager.

“You know, with Wendy gone now, I don’t know that there’s anybody left at Pocosin Lakes that really understands that hydrology restoration and how it works,” Phillips said.

But it’s more than the upper-level staff, said Bonnie Strawser, president of the Coastal Wildlife Refuge Society, a local nonprofit group that supports all of the eastern North Carolina refuges. It’s also the loss of staff that maintain buildings and trails, she said, as well as the biologists who monitor water and test soil.

Strawser, who retired in 2020 after 40 years with Fish and Wildlife as visitor services manager, said that the project leader for Coastal North Carolina National Wildlife Refuge Rebekah Martin has designated acting managers in each refuge, but that’s in addition to their regular jobs with the refuges.

Martin is based at the agency’s Roanoke Island headquarters but is not authorized to speak to reporters. According to a 2023 article on the coastal refuges website, Martin oversees about 400,000 acres of habitat with more than a dozen endangered or threatened species. At the time, it said, the complex had 35 employees and more than 400 volunteers.

“We are currently down to 10 staff, and this is regular O and M — operations and maintenance — funded by general funding, refuge funding,” Strawser said in a recent interview. “Now that does not include firefighters or law enforcement, because they are funded through different programs.”

Strawser said that there were no probationary employees in eastern North Carolina, so no one had been outright fired. Some staff who agreed to resign under one of the agency’s two rounds of the deferred resignation program, she said, were quickly shut down and put on administrative leave for varied periods of time while collecting their salaries.

Cuts in both the U.S. Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service will also hamper the agencies cooperative response to wildfires and disasters, including with the national interagency incident management teams. Strawser is a member of one of three teams in the southern area.

“I don’t know what in the world we’re going to do when fire season comes,” she said. “They stood down our team. It’s not going to be available, they said, at least until after July.”

As Strawser noted, a lot goes on behind the scenes to keep the refuges humming, including procedural processes to keep records and run programs, as well as have sponsors to maintain the “casual hire” personnel to respond to emergencies.

“But the Fish and Wildlife Service, because they lost so many people in the administrative positions, they don’t have anybody to handle the payments and the travel, so they can’t sponsor” for a team member, she said.

For the time being, the public many not notice much difference when they go to a refuge, Strawser said.

“The visitor centers are run by volunteers,” she said. “The public programs are conducted mostly by volunteers.” But there’s only three maintenance people for their nine national wildlife refuges.

“There’s been no talk of closing anything, but it’s just common sense there will problems if there’s nobody to grade the roads, if there’s nobody to do the mowing on the road shoulders, she said. “And if there’s no ‘daylighting’ of the roads, they’ll get overgrown, the sun won’t reach down, and the mud doesn’t dry out and the road is destabilized and before you know it, they’re not drivable.”

Mike Bryant, who was succeeded by Martin, had served as refuge manager for 20 years, from 1996 to 2016, and he witnessed decreasing support for the refuges from the federal government, he told Coastal Review in an interview. After retirement, he had also served as consultant for the National Wildlife Refuge Association, and was former president of the Coastal Wildlife Refuge Society. Although he said he keeps in touch, he is no longer directly involved with either group.

Since about 2010, Bryant said there has been a steady decline in staffing.

“You have refuges where there were multiple people, and with some of them, there’s just one person left, and so that’s part of the story,” he said. “So it had nothing to do with the past 60 or 90 days, whatever it is now.”

But it’s not just mandated reductions in staff that threaten the refuges, he said. The management challenge is also an aging workforce that may not be replaced.

“You got over half a million acres of National Wildlife Refuge in multiple counties, and spanning across North Carolina to the Virginia border, with all kinds of infrastructure and management mandates and no staff to get those mandates done,” Bryant said. “They’re just wondering, how are we going to meet our responsibilities if we’re the only ones left? It’s a morale buster.”

After being fully staffed around 2003, he said it seemed as if the Department of Interior stopped prioritizing conservation and Congress slowly began losing interest in supporting the refuges.

“The Fish and Wildlife budget has so many facets to it, so many other responsibilities under various laws, endangered species and ecological services and all these other entities within the agency, fisheries and all those things, are all important,” Bryant said. “But Congress was never convinced to budget specifically for operations and maintenance of national wildlife refuges.”

Meanwhile, scores of new refuges came on line in the last 25 years. And rather than hiring more personnel, more work was heaped on less staff.

“I was hired in 1996 to manage Alligator River and Pea Island,” Bryant said. “Two years later, when the manager left Mackey Island and Currituck refuges, the regional office called me and said, ‘Hey, we want you to manage those two.’ All of a sudden, I had four refuges.”

Two years later, he was told to hire and supervise a new manager at Pocosin Lakes. Then staff was reduced, forcing him to share staff between the refuges. Next, Roanoke River was added to his responsibilities — along with the 90-minute drive each way. During all those years, he was bumped up just one pay grade.

Bryant said he gets why people get frustrated with the inefficient, cumbersome aspects of the federal government. But he remembers back when the Clinton administration had reduced both staffing and regulations, and not only succeeded, but ended up with a balanced budget.

“We went through all of those things without ever feeling like the sky is falling,” he said. Rather than taking rational steps to achieve efficiency, the interest now seems more in “just destroying the government, constantly degrading it, and yes, crafting corruption.”

“There’s a few bad actors, no doubt, always, in every organization everywhere, no matter what the enterprise,” Bryant added. “There was a rational process to deal with bad employees, grounded in policy. And the policy was grounded in regulation, and the regulation was grounded in law.”

The first official unit of the National Wildlife Refuge System was Pelican Island in Florida, established for conservation in 1903 by President Theodore Roosevelt. Today there are 570 refuges and 30 wetland management districts on more than 150 million acres entrusted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services and enjoyed by 69 million visitors.

Bryant is rooting for not just survival of the struggling refuge system, but its revival.

“I think we’ll recover,” he said. “I’m optimistic about that. But we’ll be deeply scarred.”

Part of a series about the effects federal budget and staff cuts and the cancellations of programs and services are having in coastal North Carolina.

This story has been updated to include comments from EMC Chair JD Solomon

Federal and state efforts to limit the public’s exposure to “forever chemicals” through drinking water sources seemed to be gaining traction just a year ago.

In a historic move in April 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency set limits on six per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, including PFOA, PFOS and HFPO-DA, most commonly referred to as GenX.

About three months after the federal drinking water rules were adopted, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Water Resources introduced proposed groundwater and surface water standards on eight PFAS.

Related: Zeldin says PFAS limits may get tougher, downplays layoffs

But, as of this week, the Trump administration says it intends to rescind and reexamine rules on four PFAS, including GenX, and extend the deadline for public water utilities to comply with rules on PFOA and PFOS by two years.

PFAS are a group of more than 14,000 chemicals used in everyday consumer products including food containers, stain-resistant carpet and water-repellant gear. These man-made chemical compounds are often referred to as “forever chemicals” because they are persistent in the environment and have been found to accumulate in people and animals. Exposure to these substances has been linked to weakened immune function, reproductive and developmental issues and increased risk of some cancers.

The EPA’s announcement Wednesday of its plans to scale back PFAS limits comes on the heels of a recent decision by members of the state-appointed commission responsible for adopting rules that protect, preserve and enhance air and water resources to again defer moving forward monitoring and minimization discharge plans for PFAS and 1,4-dioxane into the state’s surface waters.

Critics of those proposed plans argue the rules, as written, lack any real subsistence in reducing the releases of chemical compounds into the state’s waterways.

And in a new year with a new administration at the helm of the federal government, the impetus for regulation may turn up the pressure on state governments to limit discharges of “forever chemicals” into drinking water sources.

State Division of Water Resources officials were heading in that direction in July 2024 when they presented water quality standards for eight PFAS to committees of the N.C. Environmental Management Commission.

The standards would be used to limit permitted releases of PFAS into groundwater and surface waters, set health thresholds for providing alternative water supplies to residents on private wells whose drinking water exceeds contamination limits, and establish goals for cleaning contamination.

The commission’s groundwater and waste management committee agreed to recommend groundwater health standards for only three PFAS, including PFOA, PFOS and GenX. That proposal went to public comment later in the year.

The commission’s water quality committee deferred a motion to send the surface water rule package on all eight PFAS to the full commission and, since its July 2024 meeting, has also pared down its focus on PFAS to PFOA, PFOS and GenX.

Based on that committee’s vote earlier this month, the commission isn’t expected to see a proposed draft rule on PFAS or 1,4-dioxane earlier than its July meeting.

In an emailing responding to questions from Coastal Review on Thursday morning, EMC Chair JD Solomon said the commission anticipates receiving the hearing officer’s report on the proposed groundwater rules at that same meeting.

Draft rule ‘doesn’t have sufficient teeth’

The current proposed rules for surface water bear little semblance to those the Division of Water Resources presented last July.

The set of rule drafts presented to the water quality committee in March were largely written from input provided by the North Carolina Water Quality Association, a statewide organization that represents public water, sewer, and stormwater utilities.

The water quality standards included in the initial draft rules the division created last year have since been deleted. Without those standards, the state lacks ability to enforce limits on dischargers of PFAS and 1,4-dioxane, critics say.

One of those critics of the current proposed draft rules is Environmental Management Commissioner Robin Smith.

“I think that consistently there has been a concern that, in the absence of a water quality standard, even a minimization plan isn’t enforceable,” Smith told Coastal Review in a telephone interview earlier this week.

Following last week’s commission meeting, Smith raised several concerns in an email that she sent to fellow commissioners.

“My concern is that (the current draft rule) doesn’t have sufficient teeth,” she said. “If you read through the full draft, there’s just nothing there other than the minimization contents, like a table of contents for what the minimization plan would have to be. There are no standards for determining whether what a system submits in their plan is adequate or not.”

In his email, Solomon explained that the regulatory impact analysis, or RIA, which is an evaluation of the potential costs and benefits associated with a proposed regulation, did not sufficiently identify cost-benefits associated with the proposed rules.

Last September, the water quality committee voted to move forward with a proposed monitoring and minimization plan and “continue discussions with federal agencies to make sure the benefits portion of the numeric standard were realistic,” Solomon said.

“The monitoring and minimization approach is seen as a proactive measure by EPA because it addresses potential contamination before it gets into our human and natural systems communities,” he wrote. “Allowing potential contamination into our public water bodies and public sewer systems is also much more costly to clean up.”

But the proposed monitoring and minimization plan would fail to enforce consequences for industries if they increase their pollution, said Southern Environmental Law Center Attorney Hannah Nelson.

“DEQ worked really hard to put together a comprehensive set of water quality standards that would have required polluters to reduce their pollution at the source and they spent a lot of time putting those rules together,” she said. “We don’t see that same thing happening with this set of rules. Instead, the analysis supporting this rule making completely ignored impact to downstream drinking water utilities. They don’t address that because, if they did, we would see that this rule is all about protecting industry and it’s not about protecting the people of North Carolina.”

In an April 17 letter to state environmental officials, Cape Fear Public Utility Authority’s executive director admonished the revised draft rule for 1,4-dioxane.

“After months of research, our consultants determined, as a matter of law, that there is no legal basis by which to create mandatory, legally enforceable 1,4-dioxane minimization requirements without supporting water quality standards for surface waters,” wrote the utility’s Kenneth Waldroup in the letter addressed to Solomon and Division of Water Resources Director Richard Rogers.

“Given that the EMC determined many years ago that 1,4-dixoane adversely impacts the protected use of groundwater, we respectfully point out that the EMC neglects its statutory duty to protect surface waters from the same pollutant. Pollution mitigation plans that have no required or enforceable reduction targets will not garner any tangible results but instead be no more than an action in name only providing empty promises to the people of North Carolina,” the letter states.

There are six known 1,4-dioxane polluters upstream of the drinking water supply for Sanford, Fayetteville, Brunswick, New Hanover and Pender counties, and municipalities that buy drinking water from Sanford.

Waldroup has said that the utility will have to invest millions of dollars to remove 1,4-dioxane, a likely carcinogen, from its raw drinking water source: the Cape Fear River.

Cape Fear Public Utility Authority has already spent millions in upgrades and ongoing treatment of PFAS discharged into the Cape Fear River from, among other upstream polluters, Chemours’ Fayetteville Works plant.

GenX is specific to the Bladen County facility, which is roughly 74 miles upstream of Wilmington.

Since news broke nearly eight years ago that Chemours had knowingly discharged PFAS directly into the river, air and groundwater for decades, the company has spent millions to reduce its PFAS emissions to comply with a 2019 consent order between the company, DEQ and Cape Fear River Watch.

The Cape Fear utility and other public water utilities in the region are calling for regulations that would ultimately shift the cost of reducing PFAS and 1,4-dioxane discharges to the industries that produce those chemical compounds.

“We seek meaningful regulation that acknowledges and rewards the reductions made to date, prevents backsliding, and requires uncooperative industrial dischargers to mirror the work of dutiful municipal partners,” Waldroup wrote.

The Clean Water Act includes “anti-backsliding” provisions advocates say prohibits repealing or weakening the drinking water standard.

“Unfairly” blamed

Water quality committee members pointed the finger at Division of Water Resources staff as the reason for the latest delay in getting proposed rules out for public comment.

Smith, who is not a member of the water quality committee, took issue with that assertion, saying in her email that committee members were “unfairly blaming” division staff.

“DWR was not responsible for the fact that the Office of State Budget and Management (OSBM) did not approve the Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIAs) for these two sets of rules before the May EMC meeting,” she wrote.

Instead, “significant changes” to the rule drafts and the draft regulatory analyses that were presented to the committee in March “led directly to OSBM questions that delayed approval of the RIAs and remain unresolved.”

Changes to the draft rules were made at the direction of a group of commissioners, including the chair and vice chair of the water quality committee, chair of the groundwater and waste management committee, and Solomon. Solomon did not respond to an email request for comment.

During the water quality committee’s May 7 meeting, Rogers said staff had “been engaged in taking direction from a subcommittee of this committee” over the last month.

“We have taken that direction and applied it directly to the draft rules that y’all have before you today,” Rogers said.

Exactly which commissioners had been meeting with staff had not been made clear until the May 7 meeting, Smith told Coastal Review.

“It’s not necessarily inappropriate to have a subcommittee or a working group, a small group of EMC members who work on something between committee meetings, but one of my concerns about this process has been there’s never been any transparency about the fact that was going on and who was involved,” she said. “I do think we need to reach some common understanding of how we’re working on these rules, but that also clearly affects the public, and I’m also not sure we’re on a path toward making great progress in July, depending on how willing some of these water quality committee members are to making changes to satisfy OSBM.”

Solomon said that DEQ staff “asked for a more collaborative approach” with the commission for the monitoring and minimization draft rule.

“Coordination and communication with DEQ divisions is charged to the chair and vice-chair of the relevant EMC committee, and in this case the WQC chair and vice chair interacted with DWR to move this draft item onto the committee agenda for debate and discussion,” he said. “No action has been taken on the draft monitoring and minimization rule, or the RIA, by the WQC or the EMC. Based on OSBM’s response to the draft RIA, the benefits aspect of the draft rule is the primary issue. My direction as EMC chair is to bring the updated draft documents before the committee in July.”

Part of a series about the effects federal budget and staff cuts and the cancellations of programs and services are having in coastal North Carolina.

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, speaking Wednesday during a Senate budget hearing in Washington, D.C., dismissed reports that the agency was weakening standards on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also called “forever chemicals.”

During questioning by the chair and ranking member, respectively, Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told the Senate Appropriations Committee that news reports about the EPA weakening PFAS were inaccurate and that the standards could instead get tougher. Zeldin said expected job cuts at the agency would not impact its work.

The senators said they were concerned about the EPA’s reductions in force, or RIFs, and its ability to meet commitments made earlier this year about tackling the compounds in soils and waters.

Related: Proposed state rules on discharges defanged as EPA retreats

Murkowski noted that the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees EPA funding, frequently discusses PFAS.

“Last month, you announced that EPA will, quote, ‘tackle PFAS from all of EPA’s program offices, advancing research and testing, stopping PFAS from getting into drinking water systems, holding polluters accountable and providing certainty for passive receivers. You said this was just the beginning of the work that EPA is going to do to tackle PFAs,” she said.

She asked Zeldin whether the EPA’s operating plan budget requests “actually reflect this kind of full-forward push on PFAS and whether it includes the $10 billion that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding provided to take on PFAS contamination.”

Zeldin replied that the EPA was “actually adding people” to its Office of Water, which he said does much of the agency’s work on PFAS. But Murkowski pressed further on the announced RIFs deferred resignations and how they would affect EPA’s ability to execute the plan.

“When I was in Congress, I was a member of the PFAS Task Force. I had voted for the PFAS Action Act. When I was a member of the House, I represented the district that had all sorts of different PFAS contamination issues,” said Zeldin.

Merkley did not appear swayed. He said rough counts showed EPA had lost about 400 people, who were fired within their first year, 560 in the first round of deferred resignations, 180  in diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility jobs who were RIF’ed. Another 1,129 exited via second round of deferred resignations, with 1,800 of opt-ins.

“Now we’re up to almost 3,000,” Merkley said. “Office of R and D, it’s rumored that would reduce to 500 positions, which would be a loss of 1,300 additional — now we’re at 4,300. I’ll just point out that for two decades, the level of employment at EPA was about 17,000. Right now, it’s about 14,000, so subtracting the numbers I just shared, we’re talking about more than 4,000 reduction from that.”

He said cutting further to the expected number of 10,000 employees “raises doubts” the agency can meet its own goals.

“It sounds like it’s at odds with your commitment to tackling PFAS and I’m concerned about the numbers,” Merkley said to Zeldin.

Zeldin responded that it was apparent that the question was in response to a news story.

“It might not come as a shock to you, but sometimes the news says stuff that’s not accurate,” Zeldin said. “That is not what the agency announced. As it relates to PFOA and PFAS, you said that we were weakening the standards, and that’s actually the opposite of what the agency actually announced.”

Zeldin said “there was an issue” pertaining to four compounds, “and that’s something that we are going to be going through a process, but that doesn’t mean that the that it gets weaker. The (maximum concentration) might end up getting lower, not higher.”

Merkley entered for the record the Washington Post story with the headline: “EPA plans to weaken rule curbing forever chemicals in drinking water.”

Zeldin said he would “encourage the committee to look at the actual announcement from EPA, as opposed to the Washington Post.”

This is the first in a series of stories about the effects federal budget and staff cuts and the cancellations of programs and services are having in coastal North Carolina.

POLLOCKSVILLE – Jay Bender is rightfully proud of his town hall. Lovingly restored when it was moved to higher ground a few years ago, the old train depot has come to symbolize the grit of this little river town that a hurricane once tried to drown and its government in far-off Washington now has abandoned.

The mayor for 42 continuous years – a record in North Carolina – Bender fashioned his office to look like one that the stationmaster might have used when the depot was built in 1893. An antique rolltop desk anchors the room, accented by sturdy wooden chairs for visitors and framed railroad maps on the walls.

He led me to the handsome town council chambers with its wide-beamed oak floor and huge, sliding, wooden cargo doors that bear names and other graffiti that people scrawled during the building’s lifetime. “All of this was under water,” explained Bender. “We lost everything. We lost our records. We lost our computers. Everything.”

Related: North Carolina among most successful states for BRIC awards

The depot, which even then served as town hall, was a few blocks away, down on the banks of the Trent River, a pretty, usually placid stream that languidly flows northeast a dozen or so miles to its confluence with the Neuse River in New Bern. In these parts it’s known primarily for its catfish and largemouth bass. It was the little town’s biggest attraction.

Until it became the source of its destruction.

That would have been during those three, grim days in September 2018 when Hurricane Florence dumped more than more 30 inches of rain and unleased a biblical deluge. The river had overflowed its banks before, of course – back in 1999 after Hurricane Floyd, for instance – but never like this. Some experts would later speculate that the Trent hadn’t flooded that badly in maybe 1,000 years. It rose more than 25 feet, covering much of Pollocksville to its rooftops. Most of its 300 or so residents had to be evacuated. More than 80% of its buildings were destroyed or damaged, including every town commissioner’s home.

Bender, living in his grandfather’s old place on high ground, was spared. That’s where they ran the town until the river receded and the power was restored 11 days later.

The slow recovery then began.

Aided by state and federal grants, the town moved and refurbished the waterlogged old depot in 2021 and began getting pieces of its sewer and water systems out of the floodplain. Owners raised some buildings, and the town gussied up U.S. Highway 17, its main road, with a bike path, planters and banners.

The place was starting to look almost normal again, and Bender was feeling optimistic about his town’s revival until the Trump regime in Washington suddenly and without warning pulled the rug out from under him.

Killed without warning

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced about a month ago that it was cancelling its major grant program that provided seed money to communities that wanted to be better prepared for the next flood or weather catastrophe. FEMA didn’t contact Pollocksville or the 67 other communities in the state that were awarded grants but had not yet received any money. Neither did it notify the N.C. Division of Emergency Management, which administers the grants, or the media. The agency made the surprise announcement on one of its websites after 5 p.m. on a Friday, presumably to attract the least amount of attention.

Bender didn’t find out about the cancellation until the following week. It was the first time a federal grant program had been killed in midstream.

It would be another 12 days before FEMA clarified that only grant projects that had been completed would be totally funded. Those that have started might receive partial funding. Everything else was dead. In North Carolina, that meant almost $186 million in projects intended to help communities ward off weather catastrophes and save lives would have to be shelved unless the recipients could come up with the money elsewhere. That total includes about $81 million in the state’s 20 coastal counties, including $1.1 million for Pollocksville to raise six commercial buildings to revive its downtown.

“Losing the grant is very disappointing,” said Bender, whose town operates on an annual $600,000 budget. “It would have funded the next step in our long-range plan. Replacing the grant money will be difficult.”

The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grants, known as BRIC, was the federal government’s showcase program to help communities help themselves by funding projects to lessen and prevent storm damage. It committed almost $5 billion to communities across the country since it was approved by Congress with bipartisan support and signed by Donald Trump in 2018 during his first term. Local governments had planned to use the money to help raise buildings and roads, relocate vulnerable sewer pump stations, control flooding, strengthen building codes and on similar projects to reduce the damage of future storms. The program was so popular that last year FEMA had to reject nearly 2,000 applicants because it didn’t have enough money to go around.

About $1 billion was allocated to the program as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021. Under President Biden, the BRIC grants were key parts of the government’s efforts to address climate change, and a special emphasis was placed on helping Black and other historically underserved communities. It was those directives that likely put BRIC on the regime’s hit list.

‘Wasteful,’ ‘political,’ fearful

An unnamed FEMA spokesperson said in the April announcement that the agency now considers BRIC to be “wasteful” and “political.” I called FEMA’s “news desk” at its regional office in Atlanta several times to get some examples. Each call disappeared into the ether because the number listed on the agency’s regional website didn’t even generate a dial tone. I sent an email to the address listed on the site. It remains unanswered. As do the emails and phone message I sent to the state’s two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Ted Budd, asking for their reactions.

Many county and town officials also didn’t return emails and phone calls. They watched the bullying of the country’s biggest universities and law firms and heard the threats about withholding federal funds to public schools and museums. They apparently got the message. They would need FEMA someday, and all depended on federal funding for something. Bender understands his counterparts’ desire to remain under the radar. He’s relying partially on federal money to upgrade his water and sewer plants. “We lose this grant and we’re out maybe $20,000,” he said. “But I can’t build half a sewer plant.”

Anna Weber, however, needed no coaxing. She’s a policy analyst for the National Resources Defense Council and helps communities prepare for the violence of an unstable climate. She has a hard time understanding how spending money to prevent death and damage from future storms can suddenly be considered wasteful.

“In fact, investing in adaptation and resiliency against climate change is one of the least wasteful things we can do,“ she said. “It’s actually one of the best investments in preventing future local damage and loss of life from storms.”

She noted that studies have consistently shown that every dollar invested on projects to prevent storm damage results in at least $6 in savings when the pieces later have to be picked up and put back together.

BRIC also seemed to dovetail with the regime’s desire to require states to pay more for cleanup and reconstruction costs after a disaster, Weber said. The grants pay 75% of project costs. The applicant is responsible for the remainder. “These were communities that were doing this right,” she said. “The federal government wanted communities to step up and take some responsibility. These communities did step up and do what the government asked, and now the rug is being pulled out from under them.”

The charge that the grants were doled out as political favors by the Biden administration makes little sense in North Carolina, which Trump carried handily in all three of his elections. The 22 counties, which include the state’s most populous, that Biden won in 2020 received only about a quarter of the grant money, while the 20 coastal counties, many of which Trump won with 60-70% of the vote, received almost 45%.

Jessica Whitehead was North Carolina’s first chief resilience officer and helped evaluate the state’s first BRIC applications in 2020. She’s now director of the Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience at Old Dominion University.

“Politics?” she said. “It never came up.”

No one asked Bender about his politics when the town applied for its BRIC grant.

“This had nothing to do with politics,” he said, “and I don’t know how you can consider it wasteful. This is all about trying to get our town back to normal.”

BRIC and North Carolina were made for each other.

Since the first applications were accepted for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grants in 2020, state and local-government officials had developed a keen sense of what the Federal Emergency Management Agency wanted to fund. A steady flow of successful applicants was the result.

“North Carolina was one of the most successful states to get BRIC funding,” noted Anna Weber, a senior policy analyst with the National Resources Defense Council. “As a result, it will be one of states with the most to lose.”

Related: Coastal towns awarded resilience grants see funding pulled

Sixty-eight cities, towns and counties in the state have been awarded grants since that first cycle of funding, according to the N.C. Division of Emergency Management, which administers the grant program. Thirty-three are in the 20 coastal counties. Those grants range from $120,000 to Bertie and Hertford counties for watershed studies to more than $18 million to Fayetteville for stream-restoration and bridge-relocation projects.

About all of it is now gone. FEMA releases BRIC money as work on a project is completed. The agency has said that only projects that have been completed will be fully funded. Those that have started may be partially funded. A living shoreline in Duck is the only completed BRIC project in the state, according to the division, and is the only one that will be completely funded. The project in Princeville to move municipal buildings out of the floodplain has started and will likely be partially funded.

Both projects in Fayetteville, the largest in the coastal counties, are currently being designed to lessen storm damage and flooding, Loren Bymer, the city’s marketing and communications director, explained in an email. He said the city “anticipates” being reimbursed by FEMA for the design work. The grants, however, won’t pay for construction as anticipated, he wrote. To complete the projects, the city would have to find other sources of income, such as issuing bonds or raising property taxes, or delaying other projects, Bymer said.

BRIC funding for all of the other projects on the list below has been killed. That amounts to about $81 million in coastal projects and more than $186 million statewide.