The University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Blue Economy Index (Bloomberg Ticker: BLUEECO) saw gains during February, outperforming broader, global benchmarks that suffered weaker performance.

The Blue Economy Index rose 8.66% from 2,882.49 to 3,132.02. At the same time, the S&P Industrials rose 5.64%, the MSCI All World Index increased 1.24%, and the S&P 500 fell 1.40%.

The index trackers said in a news release Thursday that the comparatively strong performance “showcases” the blue economy’s “concentrated exposure to ocean-related industries and balanced sector allocation.”

“This month’s returns were defined by strong expectations in infrastructure demand and international economic activity, as well as a sharp decline in large technology and growth stocks.”

The UNC Wilmington Blue Economy Index tracks the economic activity of companies operating on or in oceans and waterways, with a focus on environmental sustainability. The index was developed through a collaboration between UNC Wilmington’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Alliance for the Blue Economy, or AllBlue, the Cameron School of Business, and it relies on data from FactSet.

The index aligns with the World Bank’s definition of the Blue Economy: “the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and jobs while preserving the health of the ocean ecosystem.”

“The index represents a fusion of academic insight, environmental science, and financial market expertise,” according to the university.

February’s performance was supported by strong gains in industrial and utilities sectors, which benefited from rising expectations for global infrastructure spending and energy demand. Sector rotation also played a key factor as investors transitioned from technology to industrial sectors.

Industrials climbed 16.61% after investors rotated into companies tied to infrastructure, heavy manufacturing and energy systems. A large wave of AI storage and network demand helped prop up the sector’s performance, which signaled higher future revenue and earnings, according to the release.

Consumer staples, supported by increased expected demand and improved profitability in the global seafood and animal feed markets, increased 8.06%. The sector also gained from higher aquaculture prices in Asian and North American markets, which improved margins for fishing and processing companies.

Utilities rose 5.60%, driven by expanding economies and the rapid build-out of data centers, AI computing, and renewable energy systems. Furthermore, many utility companies are expanding renewable energy projects which investors view as long-term growth opportunities, the analysts said.

Consumer discretionary spending gained 3.12%, supported by steady continued growth in travel and tourism spending.

Doosan Corp. saw a 50.65% gain and topped the index for February thanks to new legislation that provided a regulatory framework for modular reactor development and export.

Harbin Electric Corp. saw a 41.88% gain thanks to an increase in Chinese gas turbine demand and the company’s financials, which forecast a 57% increase year-over-year net profit and 33% revenue growth.

Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd. Realized a 40.31% gain based on increased submarine and defense systems production after Japan planned to increase defense spending to 2% of its GDP.

More information about the Alliance for the Blue Economy is online at https://uncw.edu/research/centers/innovation-entrepreneurship/events-programs/programs/all-blue.

As North Carolina’s population grows, local and state governments, elected officials, educators and nonprofit groups are bracing for the demands more residents will put on the state’s already taxed and aging water infrastructure.

The 2026 Emerging Issues Forum: Future Forward Water held Feb. 25 brought together these decision-makers and advocates to forums in Morehead City, Winston-Salem and Asheville, where they could share their challenges, ideas and solutions regarding the often-unnoticed necessity.

The forum featured several speakers, including Gov. Josh Stein, and group discussions that focused on four main challenges: aging infrastructure, resiliency, the water workforce crisis, and maintaining safe and reliable water systems.  

In a video message, Stein said that North Carolina’s water infrastructure faces serious challenges. The American Society of Civil Engineers recently graded the state, giving it a C-plus on drinking water, C-minus on stormwater, and a D-minus on dams and on wastewater.

“Storms like Hurricane Helene, Hurricane Matthew, Hurricane Florence and tropical Storm Chantal damaged wells and water systems across the state, leaving many communities without clean water,” he continued. “At the same time, continued population growth in some of our areas require expanded service and new infrastructure. Life sciences, companies, data centers coming to North Carolina also require large amounts of water to operate, further straining our infrastructure. Many rural communities struggle in aging systems and limited financial capacity. Contaminants such as PFAS further poison our water supply. We must take all of these challenges on as a clarion call.” 

Usually held in Raleigh, this year’s forum was hosted in the three locations to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Emerging Issues Forum, the idea of the late Gov. Jim Hunt, who died in December. Institute for Emerging Issues, established in 2002 at North Carolina State University, hosts the forum. The institute “is a nonpartisan connector, bringing North Carolinians together across sectors, regions and perspectives to address the state’s most significant challenges while advancing its economic competitiveness.”

Sandra Merkel DeJames, who is a member of the Institute for Emerging Issues National Advisory Board, explained to the more than 100 attending the Morehead City forum that the challenge being addressed that day is how to keep up with the unprecedented population growth facing the state. Population growth is the topic of the three-year Emerging Issues Forum series that kicked off in 2025, and focused on energy infrastructure. Next year the event will address housing.

“Last year, the state added an average of 400 new residents every day. That’s over 145,000 people by 2050. Some 14 million residents will call our state home, compared to the 11.2 million today,” said DeJames, who is president and CEO of Harmonize Strategy Group.

“People are moving to North Carolina for work, education, our climate and a host of other reasons,” she continued. All of these “new residents will need access to housing, energy and water that’s safe and affordable. They’ll need transportation and broadband and all of the other critical infrastructure needed to support a thriving economy, like childcare, healthcare, public safety and education.”

Companies are moving to the state as well, she continued.

“We’ve been named the best state for business in three of the past four years by CNBC. Once here, they too need infrastructure to support their operations,” DeJames said. “As to those businesses already here, this population and business growth will not be even across the state, or even within this region, but all areas have infrastructure needs, and we must now meet them.”

DeJames continued that forum organizers spent the last year learning more about the state’s water issues, “and we’ve learned the following: Water is a truly hidden infrastructure.” But, it is also the “most local form of infrastructure.”

The state is one of 10 with more than 5,000 public water systems – it is closer to 6,000 — and that number does not include the more than 2 million people who use privately owned wells and septic systems.

While water issues vary by region, there are common themes.

“First, our water infrastructure is aging,” DeJames said, despite some of the largest increases in water infrastructure spending in recent years.

“One conservative estimate is that we need $20 billion in new investments for drinking water and $21 billion in new investments for wastewater treatment and sanitary sewers in the coming decades, left unaddressed, our state’s economic vitality and public health are at risk.”

Next is the need to treat water for new contaminants.

“The emergence of new contaminants that can impact our health, such as PFAS, and the additional billions of dollars in cost to treat them will further compound financial pressures on our water systems and our customers,” DeJames said. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are long-lasting chemicals found in water, air and soil that are linked to harmful health effects.

Third, the state’s water infrastructure is too vulnerable.

“The damage done to wells and water systems from Hurricane Helene, Tropical Storm Chantal and other storms add to longer-term challenges to water and wastewater systems across the state. We need to increase our infrastructure’s resiliency,” she said.

“And finally, we need more workers in the water sector. There is significant shortage of qualified workers as the current workforce ages out, and not enough new workers to enter these fields.”

N.C. State’s Peter A. Pappas Real Estate Development Program Director Chuck Flink expressed similar points in a message delivered to all three forum locations via video.

The state’s population is expected to grow by between 3 and 3.5 million people in the next 25 years, and the growth is not going to hit North Carolina in a uniform manner. “A lot of it’s going to congregate in our two metro areas, which we expect to grow by more than a million people each in this 25-year period,” Flink said.

Wake County currently is the third fastest growing county in the country, averaging around 65 to 75 people moving there each day. It is the most populated county in the state. Charlotte is currently the sixth fastest growing city in America, averaging around 65 residents a day, and it’s the 15th most populated city in the country today, Flink continued.

By the year 2050, 75% of all residents will live in cities, and that’s a new phenomenon for the state, and at the same time, while we have this population growing, the state is experiencing population loss, with 41% of North Carolina’s municipalities in decline.

“We have vast swaths of our eastern part of our state and some portions of our western counties that are losing population,” Flink said. “In fact, we have a band of counties that stretches from the Virginia border to the South Carolina border, where we need more population, we need more economic opportunity. So it’s not a real simple picture there.”

He paused to say that he loves that the state is a collection of small communities, “and yet some of these small communities, especially in the eastern part of the state, are literally being abandoned due to population loss.”

“In North Carolina, 50% of us derive our drinking water from underground reservoirs, aquifers, and when we look at other elements of our water infrastructure, our water and wastewater systems are antiquated and they’re failing,” he said.

In some cases, there has been an overall decline in water quality across the state because of drought, overconsumption, and pollution, including forever chemicals.

The people that manage water infrastructure are aging as well. More education and training is needed for a new workforce to manage the infrastructure going forward.

However, Flink said he’s optimistic about where the state can go.

“It really begins with planning. Planning for growth. How do we want to grow? I think that’s the ace of spades that we control,” Flink said, adding that growth can be controlled and that’s how these challenges will be met.

There were four panel discussions throughout the day. The panels each had participants represented different sectors who shared the hurdles they’re facing, their frustrations and ways they’re navigating these challenges.

Martin Doyle, professor of River Systems Science and Policy at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, explained that water systems are not supported by general tax revenue, but are covered by the funds generated by billing its customers.

The UNC School of Government surveyed water systems around the state, and found that less than a quarter of those water systems actually collected sufficient revenue to be considered economically viable.

“They’re not collecting sufficient revenue to cover their costs as well as to cover the cost of preventative maintenance,” Doyle said. “The challenge for this is that we have a large number of water systems that are operating right at the financial threshold. They’re just getting by” and unable to keep up with preventative maintenance.

East Carolina University Water Resources Center Associate Director Samantha Mosier said that there are a number of ways to solve some of the state’s problems. She encouraged raising awareness about infrastructure needs, but the “real solution” is to help municipalities establish or join a regional authority.

“Most small local governments in North Carolina have their own water and wastewater system because that was part of becoming a town, years and years ago when we had lots of population,” Mosier said. “But in the eastern part of the state, we’re seeing that loss of the population.”

With the population dwindling, utilities are losing their customer base, making it no longer feasible for every small town to maintain a water system. Encouraging regionalization brings folks together to have those conversations. 

“To me is that next critical strategy we’ve got to embrace as a local, regional and state level,” she said.

Belhaven Town Manager Lynn Davis said that Beaufort County town’s obstacles are many, including a limited budget. “How do we not just look at the day to day, not just look at the infrastructure that we have, but how do we plan for if something breaks and that’s a challenge that faces us.”

She said staffing is another challenge. Half of the town’s staff could retire right now, and it won’t be easy to replace those workers. “You just don’t find people that have the knowledge and the skills.”

Cape Fear Public Utility Authority Security and Emergency Manager Craig Malone said when it comes to tackling these issues, “it’s not the plan itself that we need to focus on, it’s the process of planning. It helps us look at these contingencies, look at these risks, and our options to address these emergencies.”

He incorporates resiliency planning into his capital improvement plan. “Now you don’t have to stop and plan for emergency. Now you don’t have to stop and plan for that resiliency action or that upgrade to your facility.”

Nags Head Mayor Ben Cahoon said the town has 3,000 year-round residents, and around 45,000 in the summer time, and 80% of the properties have on-site septic systems. On a summer day, millions of gallons of water goes through the houses and into the septic systems.

“At the same time we have sea level rise, which is bringing the water table up under those wastewater systems, causing them to perhaps function less effectively. And then we get a storm, and you get a lot of water in those ditches and in the ground, and you can imagine the dynamics of what’s happening in the ground.”

Cahoon said the town has to plan for these issues.

“We do integrate drinking water, wastewater, stormwater, capacity into our zoning, development/redevelopment decisions. We do that by tying our infrastructure capacity directly to our long-range planning and adopted master plans and our resilience strategies, rather than treating any of these separately. So in Nags Head, our land use and development decisions are guided by the town’s comp plan.”

To address the retiring workforce that most local governments seem to be facing, some town leaders are changing how they recruit. For example, Maysville Town Manager Shcumata Brown said they’re looking for employees who have the aptitude to learn and not focus on certain certifications.

Perry Harker, vice president of Workforce Continuing Education at Carteret Community College, said that students aren’t hearing about this type of career, and the college is trying to introduce students to water and wastewater industry opportunities.

Compounding these issues is water quality.

Ben Farmer, planning and development services director for Upper Coastal Plain Council of Government, said raw water is pumped to a treatment plant, and that water has to fall within certain threshold or maximum containment levels. The systems, regardless of the town or city’s size, have to make sure that drinking water is up to that very extreme standard to keep the water safe.

Cape Fear Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette told the attendees that many residents get their drinking water from rivers — the Cape Fear River basin provides about one in five residents with the drinking water – and “protecting rivers is the single most effective way of protecting drinking water supply and reducing infrastructure costs for communities, period.”

Jacksonville Stormwater Manager Pat Donovan-Brandenburg said that we all need to be part of the solution.

“Each one of us impact stormwater. Meaning we have a home, we have a car, we have a road to get to and from work. I challenge all of us to look at our individual yards, our individual businesses,” she said.

“What can we do to disconnect our stormwater runoff from ever making it out to the storm drain in the road and out to a stream? Can we get it to infiltrate instead of making it to our surface waters? Making it to our surface waters does not recharge our aquifers, and we need to recharge aquifers in order to have the drinking water,” she said. “There’s the connection. So can you disconnect your storm drains or your gutters and put it into your landscape beds? Can you put in an infiltration trench? Can you put in a rain garden or rain barrel? Everybody’s yard, everybody’s business counts toward stormwater runoff, so we can all be part of the solution,” she reiterated.

There’s so much technology out there, so ask your engineer to think outside of the box. “Yes, it may cost a little bit more, but if you’re building there for the rest of your life, invest in your community. Because that’s what it is. We’ve got to invest in our neighborhoods, invest in our communities. So my message is very simple, reduce the storm water that you’re creating individually off your own property, and collectively, we will make a difference.”

While North Carolina residents are dealing with the inches of snowfall in the aftermath of this weekend’s winter storm, National Park Service officials on the Outer Banks are also dealing with the debris left behind by four more houses collapsing on Cape Hatteras National Seashore’s beaches.

National Park Service Public Affairs Specialist Mike Barber told Coastal Review Monday that Cape Hatteras National Seashore officials were notified that a house in Buxton collapsed earlier in the day, around 9 a.m. It was the fourth unoccupied house to collapse since Sunday morning.

The first house at 46201 Tower Circle Road collapsed early Sunday morning. Overnight, two more unoccupied houses at 46215 and 46219 Tower Circle Road fell, then the fourth house, which was at 46285 Old Lighthouse Road, Buxton. These four bring to 31 the total number of houses to collapse on the seashore’s beaches since 2020.

“Cape Hatteras National Seashore advises everyone to stay away from the collapse sites and the surrounding beach area, due to potentially hazardous debris. The beach is closed in front of the entire village of Buxton,” Barber said.

The Outer Banks, like much of the coast, continued to experience compromised roadways Monday and people were advised to stay off the roads unless necessary.

State transportation officials closed N.C. Highway 12 Saturday evening between the Basnight Bridge and Rodanthe, as well as on the north end of Ocracoke. They said Monday that the road would remain closed, “as we continue to see ocean overwash from this weekend’s nor’easter. Overwash also occurring at Buxton corner and on Rodanthe secondaries. Crews will be out working to clear today.”

N.C. 12 experienced ocean overwash and dune breaches on Pea Island Sunday morning, as well in Buxton and in Hatteras.

Additionally, all ferry routes were suspended Friday and remain suspended until conditions are deemed safe for operation, according to the North Carolina Department of Transportation.

NCDOT crews said they were making progress Monday clearing interstates and highways, but dangerous icy spots may remain because temperatures remained low. Gov. Josh Stein’s office and transportation officials urged people to stay off snow- and ice-covered roads and warned people to beware of black ice, which forms when ice and snow melt and then refreeze overnight into hard-to-see slippery patches.

As of late Monday, there were 2,500 NCDOT employees and contractors working to plow snow and spread salt on the highways and secondary routes. Since the storm began affecting the coast Saturday, crews have spread more than 23,000 tons of salt and plowed thousands of miles of roads.

Stein said that the state was “working around the clock to clear roads and get people back to their daily lives as quickly and safely as possible, but because temperatures will remain low overnight, this process takes time. We ask for your patience, and if you need to be on the roads this week, I urge you to slow down, give extra distance, and use caution while traveling.”

His office reported that the sunshine Monday, with temperatures reaching the upper 30s to lower 40s, allowed for snow that fell over the weekend to melt. However, that water will likely refreeze after sunset Monday evening because temperatures are forecast to fall into the teens and 20s.

Temperatures will warm into the low to mid 40s Tuesday before a cold front approaches the region.

The National Weather Service said Monday that for parts of eastern North Carolina, a light wintry mix of snow and freezing rain was possible Wednesday night.

“Please continue to remain vigilant as we are still experiencing extremely cold temperatures across the state,” NC Emergency Management Director Will Ray said in a statement. “As a reminder, several hazards remain, such as the risk of freezing pipes in homes. There are many people in our communities that are especially vulnerable to prolonged cold temperatures, so please check on your friends, family, and neighbors.”

Currituck County Emergency Management, in a social media post around lunchtime Monday, said that NCDOT crews were actively out working on the primary roadways throughout the county.

“While some roads are improving, many side roads remain covered with snow and ice, and freezing temperatures are keeping conditions slick. As temperatures drop and the sun goes down tonight, please be alert for black ice: a thin, nearly invisible layer of ice that forms when moisture refreezes on road surfaces. Black ice is especially common on bridges, shaded areas, overpasses, and low-lying roads, and can cause vehicles to lose traction with little warning,” they warned. “If you must travel, slow down, increase your following distance, and use extra caution. If you can stay home, that remains the safest option.”

Carteret County sent out a similar message Monday.

“Some roadways still have several inches of snow coverage, and partially melted snow and ice are expected to refreeze overnight, creating dangerous travel conditions. Residents are urged to stay off the roads if possible. If travel is necessary, exercise extreme caution, as icy conditions may make driving at posted speeds extremely dangerous and cause vehicles to lose traction with little warning,” according to Carteret County government officials. “Secondary and less-traveled roads are more likely to remain untreated and pose additional risks. Remaining off the roads also allows first responders and emergency management staff to continue their work safely.

Largely because of travel concerns, most county government offices were closed Monday because of the weather, and several had announced plans to close Tuesday as well, including Beaufort, Carteret, Gates, Pamlico, Dare and Hyde counties.

Record snowfall in coastal counties

Assistant State Climatologist Corey Davis, in a blog on this weekend’s snow storm, called the accumulated snow that fell all across North Carolina, “our most widespread wintry event in more than a dozen years, and the biggest snow for some areas in several decades.”

For parts of eastern North Carolina, this was the snowstorm of a lifetime, he continued.

“More than a foot fell over the central Coastal Plain, surpassing every other wintry event so far this century. The 12.5 inches in New Bern and 15 inches in Newport made this the first foot of snow for both areas since December 1989. The highest totals in the state came along the Crystal Coast, including 19.5 inches in Peletier and 17 inches in Swansboro,” he wrote.

In Cape Carteret, near whiteout conditions were observed on Saturday, Davis continues, bordering on blizzard criteria. Beaufort reported three consecutive hours with visibility of a quarter-mile or less, wind gusts of 35 mph or greater, and heavy snow falling or blowing.

Northeast North Carolina from Friday to Sunday experienced between 6 and 10.5 inches of snow, according to the National Weather Service Wakefield, Virginia, office, which provides the forecast for the region that includes Ahoskie, Elizabeth City and Currituck County.

Mainland Hyde County experienced a widespread swath of 8 to 12 inches, with localized snowfall totals in some townships exceeding 12 to 16 inches. For Ocracoke Island, “reliable totals” range from 4 to 6 inches, and that accumulation was coupled with “significant coastal flooding and inundation,” county officials announced Monday.

Heading south, centrally located counties including Beaufort, Carteret, Craven, Dare, Pamlico, Onslow and Tyrrell saw between 2 and 19 inches. Dare experienced the least amount with 2 to 11 inches and Carteret, Craven and Pamlico had areas getting hit with more than 18 inches, according to the Weather Service office in Newport.

“Most remarkably, along the Pamlico River in Beaufort County, this was the first foot of snow in more than 67 years, since December 1958. In that region, reported totals included 17 inches in Bath, 15 inches in Bayview, and 13 inches in Belhaven,” Davis explains in the blog.

“Along with having a strong, moisture-laden low pressure system just offshore, a key factor in ramping up the snowfall amounts was the cold air that created unusually high snow-to-liquid ratios for this part of the country. While Wilmington only measured 0.32 inches of liquid precipitation, that yielded 5.8 inches of fluffy snow – the heaviest snow there since 1989 – at an impressive 18-to-1 ratio,” Davis wrote.

In a Monday morning announcement, Holden Beach officials in Brunswick County warned residents that, although the bridge to the island had reopened, roads on the island were “treacherous.”

Holden Beach’s neighboring island to the west, Ocean Isle Beach, was covered in a whopping 15 inches of snow, according to estimated totals based on National Weather Service reports and local observations.

Farther north in Brunswick County, Leland, Bolivia and Southport all received a reported 9 inches of snow.

Brunswick County announced its offices and facilities will reopen at 10 a.m. Tuesday. The Brunswick County Commissioners meeting postponed Monday had not been rescheduled as of this report.

In New Hanover County, a reported 9 inches of snow accumulated in Carolina Beach. Wilmington saw less with a little under 6 inches of snow.

And, in Pender County, Hampstead received 10 inches of snow, while farther north, areas of Onslow County got upwards from 13 inches accumulation.

From a science perspective

Davis explained to Coastal Review that the coast was hit so hard because, “to put it simply, this was a strong nor’easter setup that happened to be cold enough for snow.”

He said that anytime the state gets these low-pressure systems right off the coast, whether they’re tropical storms or winter storms, “we know they’re capable of some major impacts. And we saw a lot of those typical impacts in this event, including the gusty winds and high surf that has already claimed a couple more houses along the Outer Banks.”

Davis compared this system and the nor’easter that moved up the coast October 2025.

The main low-pressure center started to deepen at pretty much the same location just south of Cape Fear, and the minimum pressure observed at Hatteras was nearly identical: 998.8 millibars in October, and 998.4 millibars during this storm. A millibar is a metric measurement of atmospheric pressure.

“If this had happened at any other time of year, we would have been talking about similar impacts, but with rain instead of snow. Having such cold temperatures in place so far south meant that it fell as all snow, and the snow-to-liquid ratios were off the charts compared to what we’re accustomed to. That let a lot of snow add up very quickly, and with the wind added in, that snow covered everything, and deep,” Davis continued.

When it comes to climate change and storms like these, Davis noted that a “common, or at least vocal, misconception about climate change is that it can and will make cold and snow impossible.”

He explained that while warming temperatures do make some wintry events — like the one from this previous weekend — more marginal for anything frozen, cold and snow are still a part of the winter climate, and big events like this can and do still occur.

“Of course, we’ve also seen the flip side of that, with a nearly three-year stretch with no measurable snowfall across much of the state, the average annual snowfall nearly cut in half in places like Charlotte and Raleigh, and steady warming in our wintertime low temperatures at the rate of about a degree per decade. All of those things — warming with snow events becoming rarer, along with seeing an occasional big snowfall — can still be true,” Davis explained.

“As a scientist, I think it’s important to acknowledge our certainty about climate changes and future projections. We’re very confident that the overall warming trend, especially in our nighttime low temperatures, will continue into the future, and that will continue to reduce our overall snow totals and snow event frequency. We’re less certain about how coastal winter storms like this one may change in the future,” he continued. “We often think about these climate trends as clearly pointing in one direction, but that’s really not true for projections of coastal storms like this, and there are competing forces that may affect how they evolve.”

He said that on one hand, these systems originate in tropical areas and strengthen over the warm ocean, which we know is warming at an even faster rate than the atmosphere, letting these coastal lows strengthen faster and pull in more moisture. But, on the other hand, it’s getting tougher to get temperatures cold enough over land to see all-snow events. These lows tend to bring in warm air in the mid-levels that causes precipitation to transition from snow to sleet, freezing rain, or regular rain, like we saw a couple of weekends ago.

“You might say that this storm offered up the best — or worst, depending on your perspective — of our past and future climates. We had that deep layer of cold air like we saw during our big storms back in the 1970s and 80s, but also a rapidly intensifying coastal low in a very warm and moist ocean environment that was able to drop extreme snowfall amounts,” he said. “That doesn’t mean this sort of event will get any more common in the future. It is now, and always will be, a rare collision of circumstances to bring such a major winter storm over such a large part of the state.”

Though there’s piles of snow out there, Davis said to keep in mind that, in terms of the liquid precipitation totals, most areas saw less than an inch of total liquid during this event, which he said is “a surprisingly low amount, given how much snow we received.”

That matters because it may mean the state sees less drought recovery than expected.

“Most of eastern North Carolina is still in moderate to severe drought, and even after the storm, places like Wilmington, Greenville, and Fayetteville are more than 10 inches below their normal precipitation over the past six months,” Davis said. “We may see some small improvements this week based on that precipitation, and the gradual snow melt may bring a slow recharge in streamflow and soil moisture levels over the next few weeks. But this winter is still tracking as a dry one overall, and we could use some more precipitation in any form before the end of the season to keep from entering the spring and the growing season with a bad drought still going on.”

Editor’s note: The following is from historian David Cecelski’s “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” The Carteret County native introduced the nearly 20-part photo-essay series earlier this year on his website, explaining at the time that the images he selected from the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection were taken in the late 1930s into the early 1950s of the state’s farms, industries, and working people.

In this photograph, we see a long line of fishing nets drying in the sun on Harkers Island, N.C., in the fall of 1944.

It is hard to see them, but there are two men talking in the midst of the net reels.

The photographer’s notes only identify one of the men: Stacy W. Davis, a local fisherman, charter boat captain, and fish dealer. That’s his fish house and dock on the far side of the net reels and fishing nets.

Capt. Stacy had built the fish house just before the war. He and his brother Leslie also owned the S.W. Davis & Brother Seafood Co. in Beaufort, on the other side of the North River.

The shoreline is beautiful, but in a way the tranquility of the scene belies the great upheaval that was happening on the island just before and during the Second World War.

When I was younger, old timers from Harkers Island often told me that it all seemed to start with the great hurricane of ’33, which is a story in itself and one that I think I’ll save for another time.

But not all storms come out of the Atlantic, and what happened over the next few years turned island life upside down more than any hurricane or nor’easter ever had.

Just a few years after the ’33 storm, in 1936, Harkers Island’s first road was paved. The age of automobiles and trucks was coming.

Three years later, in 1939, electricity arrived on the island, delivered via a submarine cable that ran beneath North River.

The stars would never be as bright again.

A year later, in the latter part of 1940, the biggest thing of all happened: workers finished building the first bridge from the mainland to Harkers Island. The bridge opened to the public a few weeks later.

That was on New Years Day 1941. Many a time, I have heard old timers say that it was the best and worst day in the island’s history. More than anything, it marked the end of one way of life, the dawn of another.

Then, of course, the war came. Young men and women went away to fight in distant lands and on distant seas. On the island, families crowded around radios to follow the news from places that few of us had known existed until that moment. Soldiers and sailors were everywhere.

An Army camp was built on the island. Soldiers and sailors seemed to be constantly coming and going.

During the war, untold numbers of islanders also crossed the new bridge and went out into the larger world to take jobs at shipyards, military bases, and defense factories. Some commuted every morning to defense jobs as close as the Naval Section Base in Morehead City; others moved as far away as the big shipyards in Wilmington and Newport News.

The Great Depression had worn people down, but suddenly there seemed to be work for any and all.

A hundred things about the war changed the island, but few things more than the War Department building the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station only 25 miles away in 1942.

Nearly 10,000 men came together at at a remote crossroads on the south side of the Neuse River to build Cherry Point – carpenters, brick masons, ditch diggers, logging crews, railroad builders, and many, many others. Among other things, they laid enough concrete to build what is believed to have been the largest aircraft runway in the world at that time.

Most of those workers were fresh off the farm or right off a fishing boat.

When Cherry Point was finished, people came from all over the country to work there, and most particularly to find jobs at the base’s assembly and repair department, a massive aircraft repair and refitting operation that relied on civilian workers and was usually just called “A&R.”

Those workers included many a Harkers Island fisherman. And when they left their boats and crossed the new bridge, they began a new life in more ways than they possibly could have imagined at the time.

Some of those islanders, my older friends on Harkers Island used to tell me, were saved by that trip to Cherry Point. Others lost.

For the island’s women, the coming of Cherry Point meant, if anything, even more. Because so many men had gone to war, the base employed thousands of women in jobs that would have traditionally fallen to men.

Those jobs ranged from aircraft painters to mechanics, PX and commissary managers to electronics specialists.

My grandmother was one of those women. She lived on a farm in Harlowe, about halfway between Harkers Island and Cherry Point, and she found a job in A&R’s machine shop during the war.

With the opening of Cherry Point, a daughter fresh out of school, perhaps still living with her parents, might suddenly be earning more than her fisherman father and all her brothers put together.

Of course, that changed things. Maybe not right away, but over time.

Likewise, with the coming of the bridge and the war, a lad that had never taken to the water — and there were plenty of young men like that even on Harkers Island — suddenly had a chance for a different kind of life.

I guess what I am saying is that photographs tell some stories, but not others.

Our tranquil scene of fishing nets drying in the sunshine also does not really speak to what had been happening out at sea during the war.

By 1944, things had calmed down out in the Atlantic, but only a couple years earlier, in the first months after Pearl Harbor, the war had seemed much closer to Harkers Island that it did to most of the United States.

Many of the island’s young fishermen had gone into the Navy and Coast Guard, and they were serving all over the world. But the U.S. Navy had also recruited the island’s fishermen for war duty closer to home.

As German submarines torpedoed merchant ships out in the Atlantic, one of the islanders patrolled the beaches out at Shackleford Banks, watching in the surf for the corpses.

Others, when they heard the explosions offshore, had the duty of taking their boats far out into the Atlantic to search for survivors and the dead.

Out in those seas, 15 and 20 miles off Cape Lookout, they often found themselves in a hellish seascape of charred hulls, burning oil slicks and scenes of which few of them would ever speak.

Special thanks as always to my friends at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

One distressed coastal county has been selected to receive an economic development grant through the Southeast Crescent Regional Commission.

Gov. Josh Stein’s office announced Friday that $7.2 million would be awarded to 15 counties, $400,000 of which will go to Hertford County to replace the “inadequate and deteriorated” booster pump station that serves the Como area, a small municipality on U.S. 258 near the Virginia line.

Project activities include installing a new prefabricated unit.to improve service for 32 businesses and 644 households in the surrounding area, which currently experiences routine low pressure and insufficient capacity, according to the release.

Funds are awarded under the State Economic and Infrastructure Development program.

The Southeast Crescent Regional Commission is a federal-state economic development partnership authorized by Congress in 2008 to promote and encourage economic development in parts of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and all of Florida.

The commission invests in projects that support basic infrastructure, business development, natural resource preservation, and workforce development in the 428 counties of the seven-state region.

The sector known as the Blue Economy, which includes companies operating on oceans and waterways that are focused on environmental sustainability, saw a 1.36% decline in November, according to the University of North Carolina Wilmington Blue Economy Index, but still showed relative stability compared with industrial benchmarks.

By comparison, in November, the S&P 500 was down 0.57%, the MSCI All World Index, which measures global equity portfolio performance, dropped 0.66%, and the S&P Industrials Index ended the month with a 2.07% decline.

The Blue Economy Index (Bloomberg Ticker: BLUEECO) slipped from 2,592.91 to 2,557.57, “reflecting broad-based softness across global equity markets,” according to a UNCW news release.

“November’s decline was driven by weakness across industrial, maritime, and consumer-related segments as global risk sentiment softened,” the release continues. “Cooling manufacturing activity, lower freight demand in key trans-Pacific routes, and cautious spending patterns in developed markets contributed to a more defensive posture among investors.”

The November results, while reflecting what UNCW called “a broadly negative month for global markets,” were buoyed by the index’s diverse mix of marine transport, renewable infrastructure, and essential services companies.

Consumer discretionary spending was down 5.71%, reflecting weaker seasonal demand for leisure, travel and discretionary goods. “Slowing economic momentum and reduced spending appetite weighed on retail-linked and service-oriented holdings,” UNCW said.

Consumer staples, however, increased 1.18% in November, the month’s only gain. “Strong demand for essential goods, along with resilient pricing in food and aquaculture producers, supported modest gains despite broader market weakness,” according to the university.

Utilities were down 1.48%, reflecting what UNCW called “softer sentiment toward renewable and grid-focused firms as project timelines and regulatory decisions remained in flux. Nonetheless, core power and distribution operators maintained stable operational fundamentals.”

Industrials declined 1.13%, which UNCW said was due to lower freight volumes, moderating shipbuilding activity and softer machinery demand across Asia and Europe. “Despite the downturn, the sector remained more resilient than the broader industrial benchmark,” UNCW said.

Notable gains that helped cushion overall Blue Economy Index performance included Himalaya Shipping, which rose 20.48%; Vestas Wind Systems, which posted a 16.62% gain as renewable equipment supply chain sentiment improved and turbine orders rebounded in key markets; and Wallenius Wilhelmsen, which posted a 14.95% gain driven by vehicle logistics demand and continued strength in roll-on/roll-off shipping activity.

“Together, these names demonstrated the index’s capacity for selective outperformance even during periods of broader market weakness,” according to the release.

The Blue Economy Index was developed in collaboration among the UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Alliance for the Blue Economy, or AllBlue, and the Cameron School of Business, and it relies on data from FactSet. UNCW says the index “represents a fusion of academic insight, environmental science, and financial market expertise.”

The index measures the performance of leading global firms that demonstrate both commercial viability and environmental responsibility, aligning with the World Bank’s definition of the Blue Economy: “the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and jobs while preserving the health of the ocean ecosystem.”

It serves to provide investors “a timely and transparent benchmark for evaluating the sustainable growth potential of ocean-based sectors such as shipping, offshore energy, aquaculture, and marine infrastructure,” according to the release.

A Piedmont town’s request to permanently pull millions of gallons of water a day from the Cape Fear River would raise the risk of water shortages during periods of drought, undercut utilities’ ability to keep up with growing demand, and result in higher levels of contamination in the raw drinking water source for downstream communities, opponents of the plan say.

Of the dozen people who spoke Tuesday night during a public hearing in Raleigh, none supported Fuquay-Varina’s call for transferring 6.17 million gallons per day from the Cape Fear River Basin to the Neuse River Basin to meet that town’s projected water demands.

Similar opposition was expressed during a hearing held in Fayetteville last week by the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission and the state Division of Water Resources. A third hearing was scheduled to be held Thursday in Pittsboro.

Both elected officials and heads of public utilities in the lower Cape Fear region on Tuesday continued pressing the commission and division to host a public hearing in that area.

“None of the hearings for the Fuquay-Varina request are being held in the lower Cape Fear region, even though our communities will feel the downstream impacts,” said New Hanover County Commissioner Rob Zapple. “Residents in the city of Wilmington and the counties of New Hanover, Brunswick and Pender would have to spend four to five hours on the road just to attend the public hearing. Most residents simply cannot do that. Holding a hearing in the lower Cape Fear region in Wilmington would reduce frustration, encourage public trust, and allow our communities to be hearing in a constructive manner.”

As of Wednesday, more than 20 counties, municipalities, environmental organizations, businesses and drinking water providers have adopted resolutions opposing Fuquay-Varina’s request for an interbasin transfer certificate, or IBT.

Officials in Fuquay-Varina, which is about 30 miles south of Raleigh, project that the amount of water the town currently buys from the capital city, and Harnett and Johnston counties will fall short of demand by 2030.

Under the proposed preferred alternative identified in a draft environmental impact statement for the IBT, the town would source its entire water supply from a water treatment plant in Sanford, which is in the Cape Fear River Basin.

Once water pulled from the Cape Fear River is used by residents and businesses within the town, the treated wastewater would be discharged into the Neuse River Basin. This would permanently subtract more than 6 million gallons each day from the river flow that currently sources more than 500,000 residents with drinking water.

“We have absolutely no problem with Fuquay-Varina wanting to continue with their development,” Zapple said. “But if you take the water, just return it. That’s all. That’s the way the system works. And, if it costs more, well maybe that’s the price of doing business. We need our development down in the lower Cape Fear region as well and we can’t afford to lose 6.17 million gallons a day.”

The Cape Fear River is Brunswick County’s “primary and only reliable water source,” said Christopher Giesting, Brunswick County Public Utilities deputy director of water operations.

The utility supplies drinking water to 19 municipalities and serves more than 350,000 residents and seasonal visitors.

Giesting said that Brunswick County has invested more than $183 million to expand its Northwest Water Treatment Plant and upgrade to a reverse osmosis system designed to remove per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, discharged into the river by upstream polluters.

“These investments were made with the expectation that the full safe yield of the Cape Fear River at the intake would remain available,” he said. “Any IBT that removes water without returning it means that safe yield volume is reduced, ultimately making these major infrastructure investments unable to function as planned and designed. Our county alone has more than 50,000 planned housing units already built, under construction, or in the works. Without reliable access to the full safe yield of the Cape Fear, we cannot meet future water demands for these communities.”

The IBT proposal also threatens water quality, Giesting continued, because the requested daily transfer would lessen the amount of water available to dilute contaminants, including PFAS and 1,4-dioxane, discharged by upstream polluters.

The Lower Cape Fear Water and Sewer Authority, which provides wholesale regional raw water to treatment facilities that serve more than 550,000 customers in a five-county area, has sourced from the Cape Fear River more than half a century.

Authority Executive Director Tim Holloman said the river is already being substantially used as a water resource in the region.

“For a river that’s already maxed, we just ask that that be considered. If the IBT is granted, that (water) be returned to the Cape Fear River Basin because the need is not going to go away. It’s only going to increase over time,” he said.

Fayetteville Public Works Commission Chief Executive Officer and General Manager Timothy Bryant said that the commission would be forced to spend millions more each year to ensure safe drinking water to its more than 250,000 customers.

“I would argue very strenuously that no one with any legitimacy can claim that removing over 6 million gallons of water per day isn’t a foreseeable detrimental effect on the river basin and the 900,000 downstream residents of North Carolina who depend on this water every day,” he said. “To be clear, growth in Fuquay-Varina should not come at the expense of other communities. There are multiple reasonable alternative options presented that are not only consistent with the intent and letter of North Carolina law, but also squarely place the cost burden on Fuquay-Varina and not the customers downstream of it.”

Cape Fear Public Utility Authority Executive Director Ken Waldroup asked that the Environmental Management Commission look into what he said are “critical technical shortcomings” associated with models presented by the town.

The commission will make the final determination on whether to grant Fuquay-Varina’s request.

If approved, the IBT would occur after 2031, according to the draft impact statement.

No announcement had been made at the time of this publication as to whether a public hearing will be held in the lower Cape Fear region.

Guest Commentary To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues.

This fall has been one of the wettest in my memory — and yet, we haven’t had much significant rainfall, or a single hurricane or tropical storm make landfall. Still, the water lingers.

King tides have been washing over docks, creeping across yards, and flooding roads that once stayed dry except in the worst storms. For those of us living Down East in Carteret County, it’s a clear sign that something deeper is changing.

I’ve lived in Atlantic for six decades. I’ve never seen the roads hold water like this. The fields don’t dry out anymore. The ditches stay full — they just don’t drain.

When ditches stop working

For generations, Down East communities-built ditches moved water off the land and into nearby creeks or sounds. Those systems were based on one simple principle: gravity. Water flows downhill, and as long as the outlet of a ditch was lower than the land it drained — and the tide stayed low enough — water could flow freely.

But that balance has been shifting. The “hydrologic head,” or the difference in elevation that drives water to move from land to sea, has been shrinking as sea level rises. When the sea surface and ditch outlet are nearly the same height, there’s no longer enough downward pressure to push the water out. Even small rises in tide height or groundwater level can stop drainage altogether.

Today, many ditches are effectively at or just above mean high tide. That means during normal tides, water from the creeks seeps inland through the ditches, instead of the other way around. Even when a ditch still looks dry at low tide, the groundwater beneath it is now closer to the surface, leaving the soil perpetually saturated. Digging the ditch deeper doesn’t help — it only invites more saltwater in and raises the groundwater table even higher.

In short, the plumbing that once kept the land dry is backing up.

Ghost forests: symptom of a deeper change

Drive Down East in Carteret County, and the change is plain to see. Along North River, Core Sound, and the backroads of Cedar Island and Atlantic, stands of gray, lifeless trees rise like skeletons from the marsh — the ghost forests of a drowning coast.

Where there were once loblolly pines, red maples, and black gums, saltwater now seeps through the soil, killing the trees from the roots up. These ghost forests are not isolated patches — they are expanding corridors of dead timber that trace the slow inland march of the tides. They are, quite literally, the frontline of sea level rise.

The loss of these forests shows that this isn’t just a surface flooding problem. It’s the entire groundwater system responding to rising seas — a shift in the coastal hydrology that’s transforming once-productive working lands into wetlands and marsh.

What the future holds

If sea level continues to rise at its current pace — or faster, as most scientists expect — the next two or three decades will bring dramatic change to Down East Carteret County.

• Farming will become progressively more difficult, as fields stay too wet or too salty for crops or equipment.
• Roads will flood more often and for longer periods, isolating communities during high tides.
• Septic systems will fail, as the groundwater table rises to meet the drainfields.
• Homes and businesses built on low ground will face chronic flooding, declining property values, and higher insurance costs.

And yet, all this is happening without a single hurricane this year. The water is simply no longer leaving.

Working with water, not against it

The North Carolina Coastal Federation and many partners are working to restore natural hydrology on thousands of acres of previously ditched farmland and forestland. By filling or plugging ditches and re-establishing wetland systems, these projects allow the land to store and slowly release water — the way nature intended.

Restored wetlands act like natural sponges and filters, reducing flooding, improving water quality, and providing habitat for fish and wildlife. More importantly, they show that living with water is possible — but only if we plan for it, rather than trying to drain it away.

Facing reality

The ghost forests now lining our creeks are not just dying trees; they’re a warning. They tell us that the old ways of managing water — cutting deeper ditches, pumping harder, pushing it away — will not work in a world where the sea itself is rising.

Down East has always lived close to the water and thrived because of it. But if we want our communities to endure, we’ll need to give the land room to breathe again — to let it hold water where it must and adapt to what’s coming.

Because the water isn’t waiting.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation has awarded an $11 million contract to replace a Beaufort County bridge.

The 35-year-old bridge over Blounts Creek, which feeds into the Pamlico River, on Mouth of the Creek Road will be replaced on new location, just south of the existing bridge, NCDOT announced Wednesday.

The two-lane bridge provides access to the neighborhoods east and west of Blounts Creek, which officials said rely on this bridge to access N.C. Highway 33. 

NCDOT said it awarded the contract to Sanford Contractors Inc., a 56-year-old Sanford firm that can begin construction as early as Dec. 1.

Drivers will continue to use the current bridge while the new one is under construction. The project is scheduled to be completed by fall 2028.

A new steel manufacturing company’s plans to open a factory in Hertford County will be “transformational” for the area, according to a state senator who worked behind the scenes to help land what is anticipated to be a nearly $1 billion investment project.

Sen. Bobby Hanig, R-Currituck, said he expects an official announcement from U.S. Forged Rings Inc., “coming very soon and it will be a very large event.”

“There’ll be folks from (Washington) D.C. coming down for this event,” he said.

USFR did not respond to requests for comment.

Hanig spoke to Coastal Review in a telephone interview a few days after the General Assembly on Sept. 23 advanced to Gov. Josh Stein a bill to appropriate $51 million to construct a public dock with access to the Chowan River and another $11 million to build a public road “capable of accommodating industrial loads” to the dock.

Stein signed House Bill 358 into law on Tuesday, stating it “makes helpful investments across the state” and that it “supports the state’s broader economic efforts.”

The bill does not specifically name the business for which the dock and road would be constructed, but states the company “is a manufacturer of steel forgings and large diameter steel fabrications” that would be required to invest a minimum of $947 million in the project site and create no fewer than 835 new jobs.

USFR on its website advertises itself as the country’s “only integrated One-Stop-Shop Manufacturer of Steel Forgings and Large Diameter Steel Fabrications.”

“What it’s going to do for Hertford County and all of northeastern North Carolina is transformational,” Hanig said. “This is going to be probably the biggest economic development project in decades. What’s happening here with these folks coming to town and this dock and barge … it’s going to explode into a major economic area. It really is.”

Hanig called what he said was a teamwork effort that included Hertford County commissioners, the county’s Economic Development Director Kelly Bowers, and state Rep. Bill Ward, a Republican who represents Camden, Gates, Hertford, Pasquotank counties, “magnificent.”

“We’ve been laughing, we’ve been crying, we’ve been yelling,” Hanig said. “You name it, every emotion over the last couple of years to get this thing to happen.”

Hertford County officials did not respond to requests for direct comment, instead issuing a statement by Andre Lassiter Sr., chairman of the county’s board of commissioners.

“Hertford County officials are excited at the prospect of a major industrial company considering locating a manufacturing facility in the county,” Lassiter stated. “Discussions with the company, and state and federal lawmakers and officials, have been occurring for more than a year, and are ongoing. The $51 million appropriation by the N.C. General Assembly, and the assistance and cooperation of the Economic Development Partnership of N.C., the N.C. Department of Commerce, and the Office of the Governor of North Carolina, all have been and remain critical to this endeavor.”

According to its website, USFR aims to operate three plants, including a piping facility, a fabrications facility and a forging and ring-rolling facility, all by the end of 2029.

“We are developing a state of the art Atlantic Coast based heavy industry components manufacturing hub with three co-located facilities,” the website states.

The fabrications facility, which the company plans to have up and running by the second quarter of 2028, will produce annually up to 100,000 metric tons of steel cylinders and shells up to 26 feet wide and up to 200 feet in length.

“The factory will have direct access to a wharf for shipment of large sections directly to end users or downstream fabrication yards,” the company website states. “It will support the energy & infrastructure sectors, supplying critical shell components and containment vessels for a wide range of applications.”

USFR has a supply chain partnership with Charlotte-based Nucor, a steel production company that has a plant in Hertford County near Cofield, a small village off the Chowan River.

Nucor’s Hertford County mill has been in operation since September 2000 and employs some 500 people. According to a recent WRAL report, Nucor has purchased hundreds of additional acres in the county this year.

Nucor did not respond to a request for comment.

Hanig said the General Assembly fund-appropriated dock will be utilized by more than one company and that “multiple companies” are inquiring about nearby property.

“There will be an agreement with USFR that they use it a certain amount of time and then other businesses will be able to use it as well,” he said. “That’s what is attracting other businesses to the location. As soon as this project starts it’s going to fill up so fast it’s going to be incredible. This is just a springboard to what’s going to happen over the next several years in Hertford County. I just can’t even put it into words how excited I am for everybody involved.”

Beaufort officials are looking to the federal government for another $6.5 million to pay for a water infrastructure project that’s running months behind schedule and millions over budget.

The Carteret County News-Times reported that the town board has also acted to replace the contractor handling the U.S. Department of Agriculture-supported improvements to the water distribution system because of the delays.

The Beaufort Board of Commissioners in July 28 gave the town manager approval to apply for the additional USDA loan.

The estimated need is based on the most recent calculations of the cost to complete the project. The town is looking at a 3% interest rate on the loan, which is typically a 40-year note.

The work is to reduce flooding, improve water quality, and repair aging infrastructure.

The town had contracted Sunland Builders of Newport for the water distribution and stormwater work to include laying more than 20,000 feet of water line for just over $6 million.

The company’s contract expired Dec. 24 with nearly three-quarters of the work incomplete, but it will be required to finish the work it had begun on Pollock, Gordon, Marsh and Live Oak streets.

The contract includes repair and replacement of damaged sewer lines, manholes and other work, repairing storm drains and replacing parts of the water distribution system.

The Army Corps of Engineers Wilmington District has awarded a multimillion-dollar dredge contract to clear shoaling from sections of the Wilmington Harbor.

The Corps last week signed off a $17.12 million contract with Norfolk Dredging Co. to maintain the authorized depth of the harbor’s anchorage basin and mid-river area. The work, which is anticipated to begin sometime later this year, is part of the Corps’ routine harbor maintenance.

“This dredging project will ensure safe and efficient passage for commercial vessels, supporting jobs and commerce throughout the Cape Fear region and beyond,” according to a release. “Regular dredging is essential to remove accumulated sediment, which can impede vessel traffic and limit cargo capacity, thus impacting the Port of Wilmington’s operations and its critical role in the supply chain.”

Norfolk Dredging has been contracted to clear more than 1.8 million cubic yards from the harbor, including 1.15 million cubic yards from the anchorage basin and 730,000 cubic yards from the mid-river reaches, said Jed Cayton, the district’s public affairs specialist, in an email.

The dredged material, most of which is not beach-compatible, will be placed offshore at a permitted disposal site, he said.

Norfolk Dredging is also expected to remove an estimated 1.3 million cubic yards of material from the harbor’s inner ocean bar later this year. The material through this area of the harbor is deemed beach-compatible and is to be placed on Oak Island and Caswell Beach’s ocean shorelines. The project must be completed between mid-November and April 30, 2026.

Later this month, the Corps will open bids for dredging in the harbor’s outer ocean bar, where an estimated 1 million cubic yards of material is expected to be removed between Dec. 1 and April 15, 2026.

Tropical storms have cost North Carolina tens of billions of dollars over the last 40 years.

These weather-related disasters are putting a spotlight on the state’s “flood-risk crisis,” according to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, as well as the potential for “the role of a changing climate, including increases in rainfall and sea level rise to worsen the crisis.”

Heightening the threat, in association with a growing population, is that more impervious surfaces are being built, which decreases the amount of rainwater the ground can absorb.

The North Carolina General Assembly, in an effort to better understand and prepare for flood risks across the state, allocated $20 million in 2021 to NCDEQ’s Division of Mitigation Services to develop a flood resilience program, and nearly $100 million to implement resiliency projects in six of the state’s 17 river basins.

Called the North Carolina Flood Resiliency Blueprint, the program is intended to serve as “the backbone of a State flood planning process that increases community resiliency to flooding, shall be a resource for riverine and stream management to reduce flooding, and should support the establishment and furtherance of local government stormwater maintenance programs,” per the 2021 session law.

Stuart Brown, who has been leading the blueprint team for a little more than a year, told Coastal Review in a recent interview that the blueprint’s goal is to make the state more resilient to flooding.

“We’re trying to better understand what floods, how it floods, and what the impacts of that flooding are,” he explained, which began with looking at what information was available statewide on flooding, what information was needed to better understand flooding, and to see what other states and federal agencies were doing to try to address similar issues.

Studies show that around 60 to 70% of flood damage happens outside of federally defined flood hazard areas, Brown continued. “If that is our understanding of floods, then we’re not going to be particularly successful at mitigating that flooding, or doing things that help reduce the damage caused by that flooding.”

To get a more accurate estimate of current and future flood risks, NCDEQ has partnered with state Emergency Management and other agencies to improve existing flood modeling tools.

Being built right now, the improved modeling will consider, for example, changes in precipitation patterns and sea level subsidence in coastal areas, and all of that new information will feed “into our understanding of what our current and future flood risk is,” Brown said.

The improvements to existing flood modeling tools that are to “provide more accurate estimates of current flood risks and project future flood risk to support long-term strategic planning,” as NCDEQ states, are just one part of the blueprint strategy.  

Once the blueprint is complete, it is expected to offer decision-makers, especially in communities with limited resources, help to build site-specific flood mitigation projects and with funding opportunities.

“Traditionally, disaster management focuses on preparedness, response, and recovery. The Blueprint’s focus is on proactive resilience planning and implementation that can reduce the initial impact from future flood events and help communities recover more quickly,” according to the blueprint spring 2025 update.

Blueprint background

Brown explained during a presentation earlier this year that the state has suffered for decades from billion-dollar disasters and the blueprint “represents an opportunity to take a step back from the disaster cycle and invest in the proactive planning and implementation of resilience work to mitigate future risk and reduce the cost and disruption from future flooding.”

He was speaking at the two-day North Carolina Water Resources Research Institute’s annual conference this March in Raleigh. WRRI is a multi-campus program of the University of North Carolina System and provides resources and support to junior faculty and students.

After hurricanes Matthew in 2016 and Florence in 2018, both totaling around $27 billion in damage, the General Assembly, knowing that these types of storms are becoming more frequent, more severe and more costly, recognized that they should look more into investing in resilience, Brown continued.

When the General Assembly tasked NCDEQ in 2021 with developing the statewide flood resiliency blueprint for major watersheds impacted by flooding, it was with the goal “to better equip the state and its communities to manage current and future flood risk.”

The blueprint is imagined as a statewide program, but right now, the project is funded and authorized to work only in the Neuse, Cape Fear, Lumber, Tar-Pamlico, White Oak, and the French Broad, which was added in 2024 prior to Hurricane Helene, Brown said.

Ultimately, the blueprint is to provide a way to explore different options to reduce risk, exposure to and disruption from flooding, building resilience and give local governments “the tools and data and processing they need to support their flood resilience planning,” he added.

Phased approach

Brown said in an interview that the project has several components and is being developed in three phases.

The first phase was completed in March 2024 with the release of the 98-page draft blueprint document and 77-page draft Neuse Basin Flood Resiliency Action Strategy a few months later. 

The draft blueprint was the “first major deliverable and is the outline for how we do this work,” Brown said. “This is the framework for how to do these river basin action strategies. We put that framework in motion.”

A river basin action strategy is tailored to a specific river basin and uses the blueprint tool and public input to outline specific actions for increasing flood resilience.

The draft pilot Neuse action strategy serves as a template for this type of planning going forward, but is currently missing information about vulnerability that the flood modeling improvements are expected to illustrate, Brown said.

Both documents were written using contributions from more than 150 researchers, technicians, government leaders and staff, researchers, and other partners.

Phases two and three are being developed concurrently. Phase two includes building the interactive online tool with community-specific data and project management guidance tailored to the user’s needs. The tool also is a repository for information, modeling outputs and technical reports. Though the online decision-support Blueprint Tool is public now, Brown said the team is “still building functionality.” Once the improved modeling is complete, that new information will be incorporated into the online tool.

In addition to revisiting the Neuse pilot strategy during phase three, “we’ve also kicked off river basin action strategies for the Cape Fear, Lumber, White Oak and Tar-Pamlico,” he added.

The basin strategy advisory boards are to use the draft blueprint and online tool to develop the other five river basin action strategies.

Staff have been meeting with these advisory boards, and there are plans to meet with different municipalities and counties, all leading to river basin action strategies in Early 2026, Brown said.

Funding, partnerships

The blueprint has an implementation component, Brown explained.

Staff began funding projects last year out of that $96 million allocated in 2021 for priority projects in the six river basins. The money was released after the draft blueprint document was published in March 2024.

NCDEQ partnered with state agencies and local governments to enable dozens of projects worth more than $65 million. The blueprint program invested $25.6 million into these projects according to the April 30 quarterly report to the General Assembly.

“We funded 61 projects so far statewide, that includes many coastal projects among them,” Brown said.

Beaufort, Brunswick, Carteret, Hyde, New Hanover, Onslow, Pamlico and Pender have all been selected to receive or have received close to $4 million total for stream debris or sediment removal, infrastructure, flood risk reduction, restoration or acquisition.

The state announced funding through the blueprint twice in November 2024 and again in April. Right now, proposals are being accepted for projects that address flood reduction or flood resiliency in key river basins in the state. The deadline is June 30.

“By investing in a more flood-resilient state now, North Carolina will protect and improve the lives and livelihoods of North Carolinians, secure and build upon its thriving economy, expand tourism, support agriculture, forestry, and other working land businesses, fortify transportation infrastructure, protect critical aspects of the military mission, and steward natural resources,” the draft blueprint document states.

Secretary Wilson highlights blueprint

NCDEQ Secretary Reid Wilson has spoken about the blueprint in front of larger audiences since stepping into the leadership role the first of this year, including at the WRRI conference in March and at the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s 2025 Coastal Summit in April in Raleigh.

“We have to engage the public. We have to plan for the future, and again, plan for more severe storms, which is why it’s a wonderful thing that our Division of Mitigation Services is developing the North Carolina Flood Resiliency Blueprint,” Wilson said at the WRRI conference.

He added that the blueprint is the backbone of a planning process to increase community resilience to flooding through all of our river basins and “is the largest statewide flood mitigation investment in state history.”

Wilson explained in April that the blueprint is one step the agency has taken toward resiliency and that the online decision support tool “will enable state and local government agencies to better understand how to build and rebuild to mitigate hazards.”

He continued that while the blueprint team is working with volunteers to develop the six river basins, including those on the coast, “the hope is to expand into all other basins as well. The action strategies are intended to bring together stakeholders to figure out steps to take to make their communities less vulnerable,” Wilson said.

Around the time of a funding announcement, Wilson said “so we’re trying to get the money out the door but in a really smart way, so we know there’s more to do on resilience.”

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.

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.

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 1^st 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.

“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.

North Carolina Department of Transportation officials said its Harkers Island bridge replacement project has been recognized for its use of innovative technology.

As part of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ annual America’s Transportation Awards contest, the NCDOT’s Harkers Island bridge replacement project won an Operations Excellence award. The announcement was made this week in Rogers, Arkansas, during the annual conference of Southeastern region departments of transportation. 

Ten projects from state DOTs earned awards. The Harkers Island Bridge project replacement competed with other projects that cost between $10 million and $100 million.

The Harkers Island Bridge project replaced two, 50-year-old bridges with a single, 3,200-foot-long bridge. The department said it was the first time it had built a concrete bridge with glass fiber-reinforced polymer and carbon fiber-reinforced polymer strands, which are designed to withstand the coastal environment and provide greater durability. 

The new bridge opened to traffic last winter, a year ahead of schedule. 

Since being selected as a regional winner, the project has an opportunity to compete for more recognition at the national level. An announcement is anticipated this fall.

BEAUFORT – A united town board on Thursday agreed to extend its lease with the longtime operator of the Beaufort docks for another year and prepare to release all records pertaining to its previous search for a new concessioner.

The records are to be released electronically to the public once scanned and uploaded. The board also unanimously agreed to formally terminate all pending requests for proposals and reject all proposals received for future dock operations.

The actions came after the board reconvened its meeting from the Monday session in which it had voted 3-2 to halt efforts to secure “the company of interest” in line to take over management of the Beaufort Docks. The actions were also a bit of housekeeping needed to clarify and solidify the vote taken during the previous session.

Mayor Sharon Harker, during Thursday’s meeting, appointed Commissioners Sarah Spiegler and Paula Gillikin to chair and vice-chair, respectively, a new Beaufort Waterfront Operations and Finance Committee to pick up the work done by a previous panel.

“This committee will review the recommendations from the Harbor and Waterways Advisory Committee, assess the feasibility and practicality of these recommendations and update the vision and objectives to align with our financial goals and expectations for the docks,” Harker said at the well-attended daytime meeting.

The new committee has no time to spare. The mayor set a Dec. 31 deadline for its report.

Attendees again, as during the meeting Monday, broke into applause numerous times in response to the board’s 180-degree turnaround. But previous tensions and opposing viewpoints among commissioners still simmered, as evidenced in a few exchanges.

Commissioner Dr. John LoPiccolo noted how the action Monday had created costs for the town. He asked how the board could ensure confidence in the process going forward.

“We spent a lot of money on attorneys,” LoPiccolo said. “We spent a lot of money on engineers. There is quite a bit of loss to this process that the taxpayers, they did have to pay for that. And I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. I just want to make sure that we don’t get into that same situation again.”

Valid points, said Gillikin, who had offered the motion Monday to terminate the letter of intent to “the company of interest” – until this week, the board’s chosen name for Safe Harbor Marinas, which had taken on Voldemort-like status among town officials despite being well known among residents.

“I think some of those monies that we spent with our discussions with Safe Harbor, I think there’s things that came out in those discussions that we can use in the new discussions. Not all is lost there,” Gillikin said.

She said it was important to look at the town’s objectives in the new search, because the goal in the original request for proposals, whether stated or unstated, was “to maximize super- and mega-yachts and look at the greatest profit, which is a great way to look at things, if that’s the objective.

“But I’m not sure that that is our current objective,” Gillikin said, adding that preserving the town’s character, views and the type of vessels most suitable to Beaufort were clearly tantamount to residents.

Commissioner Bucky Oliver, who like LoPiccolo, had opposed the action taken Monday to “reset” the process, said he was on board with the new direction.

“I’m very comfortable where we are, but I think that we need to, as a board, if you would, I think we need to recognize the importance now to support this effort and to solely look in the windshield and not look in the mirror,” Oliver said. “And I would ask our board to think about that on a personal basis, and I’d ask our community to look at it on that basis. I’d ask people in the audience to look at it on that basis, because that’s where we are.”

The North Carolina State Ports Authority said recently that its fiscal 2024 results were “mixed, yet balanced,” with volumes above budget at both the Wilmington and Morehead City ports.

Financial figures were not included in the July 25 announcement, which are expected to be made public later this year.

“Fiscal Year 2024 marked a robust year for investment in our ports and a record year for intermodal volume, demonstrating NC Ports’ commitment to strengthening the efficient movement of goods across the state of North Carolina and growing multimodal capabilities from port berths to the hinterlands,” North Carolina Ports Executive Director Brian E. Clark said in a statement.

The authority said strong cash flow from operations and state appropriations allowed it to pour $80 million into its Wilmington and Morehead City seaports and its inland facility in Charlotte.

Officials pointed to projects at the Wilmington port including the second phase of the authority’s refrigerated container yard and container yard expansion. They said new warehouse space and berth renovations in Morehead City are nearly complete.

New gantry cranes are on order for both ports to keep pace with what officials characterized as strong general cargo demand.

The authority said state ports moved a record 17,000 containers by rail during the year, 13% above budget.

The Wilmington and Morehead City ports moved nearly 4.2 million short tons of bulk and breakbulk cargo during the year, 5% over budget. Officials said the ports handled “substantial volumes” of natural rubber, steel, lumber, cement, wood chips and wood pellets and noted that the commodities support “everything from U.S. infrastructure, aerospace and the region’s growing automotive industry.”

The authority also noted a nearly $11 million United States Department of Transportation grant through the Maritime Administration’s Port Infrastructure Development Program. The money will go toward relocating the Wilmington port’s north gate closer to the designated truck route and away from neighborhood streets.

The authority noted a groundbreaking for an intermodal rail yard that will expand capacity to more than 50,000 container movements annually.

Officials also noted new roll-on/roll-off business at the Morehead City port. This includes imported finished vehicles such as coach buses and commercial vans and breakbulk and project cargo, including wind turbine blades, nacelles and towers for Timbermill Wind near Edenton.

Morehead City also has a new monthly ConRo liner service that Spliethoff Group launched between Belgium, the UK, and U.S. East Coast.

The authority said North Carolina, like other East Coast ports, faced global challenges in the container market, but there were bright spots.

“Given the challenges felt across the broader container shipping industry in FY24, remaining diversified between containers and general cargo continues to serve us well and remains a focus,” Clark said.

First of two parts.

EAST LAKE — From a half-mile away, the red wolf was a blur on the flat farmland within Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. Through binoculars, the young male was strikingly muscular, striding with confidence on the dirt access road, seemingly unperturbed by the spying humans.

“He’s a big guy — yeah, he’s close to 80 pounds,” said Joe Madison, manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Wolf Recovery Program, while peering through his field glasses in late April from the cab of his truck. “If we got closer, he’d definitely start running, but I don’t want to do that.”

Madison, a wildlife biologist who has had earlier stints with grizzly bear and gray wolf management, is keenly focused on conservation and protection of the only wild red wolves in the world. He knows that the wolves’ instinctual fear of people is critical to their survival. The two biggest contributors to wild red wolf mortalities are directly related to interactions with humans: The first is intentional killing by gunshot or poisoning, the second is vehicle strikes.

After establishing cooperative programs with landowners and others in the community to prevent wolf shootings, officials with the refuge are now working with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and the North Carolina Department of Transportation on constructing wildlife crossings at both ends of the planned replacement bridge over the Alligator River on U.S. Highway 64 between Tyrrell and Dare counties.

The hope is that, beyond the bridge project, funding also will be available to build numerous crossings along U.S. 64, said Travis Wilson, a biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission Habitat Conservation Division.

“It’s kind of a standalone discussion on wildlife improvements in highway permeability improvements,” Wilson told Coastal Review. “It’s outside the scope of a highway project.”

The Center for Biological Diversity announced last week that an anonymous donor had pledged a $2 million match of other donations toward wildlife crossings across U.S. 64, which bisects the Alligator River and Pocosin Lakes wildlife refuges. If the additional $2 million can be raised by the nonprofit center and its supporters by the target date of Aug. 1, it could leverage an additional $16 million in federal funds.

Funding for $350 million in grants was provided in the Wildlife Crossings Program, established in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

A million wildlife-vehicle collisions occur in the U.S. annually, costing more than $8 billion and resulting in thousands of injuries and hundreds of fatalities, according to the Federal Highway Administration website.

A second round of Highway Administration discretionary grants will be opened this summer under the Wildlife Crossing Pilot Program with the stated mission of reducing wildlife-vehicle collisions while improving habitat connectivity for terrestrial and aquatic species.

Marissa Cox, the Western Regional Team lead with NCDOT’s Environmental Policy Unit, said that her team intends to apply for a grant, but it does not know yet what the total cost of the project would be. NCDOT is using information from the proposed — and since dropped — U.S. 64 widening project design plans to try to estimate costs for the structures, she said in an interview.

“It’s very competitive, and there’s not a lot of funding,” Cox said about the grant program.

During the first round, she recalled, the amount of project applications far exceeded the available funds.

Although Cox said there are about 26 wildlife crossings in North Carolina, Wilson said that when standalone structures are included, there are “dozens and dozens” of crossings.

As part of a wildlife stewardship memorandum of understanding signed in March 2023 with Wildlife Resources, NCDOT is currently compiling information and Global Positioning System data on all the crossings that it has committed to, designed and constructed, she said. The agencies are also finalizing a joint Wildlife Crossing Guidance document to be made available online.

With U.S. 64 and other less-traveled highways cutting through the 1.7 million-acre management area encompassing public and private land in Beaufort, Dare, Hyde, Tyrrell and Washington counties, the wildlife crossings could benefit not only the survival of the red wolves, but also the taxpayer who is supporting the recovery program.

A recently updated red wolf management plan estimated costs of $328 million over 50 years, and that does not include the millions spent over the decades since the wolf conservation program began.

The red wolf had once roamed much of the Southeast, but overhunting and habitat loss decimated its population. In 1973, the species was listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Fish and Wildlife, the agency charged with implementing the Endangered Species Act, first listed the red wolf as endangered in 1967, and it was declared extinct in the wild in 1980.

As part of an effort in 1987 to restore the species in the wild, four pairs of captive-bred red wolf pups, offspring of the few remaining from the wild population captured earlier in Louisiana, were released at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge.

After a series of setbacks beginning around 2010 — with the wild population plummeting from as much as 130 to seven — the recovery program has been renewed and reinvigorated since 2022.

Currently, there are 18 known and collared red wolves and a total of about 20 to 22 wolves in the wild and 263 in the captive-breeding population.

Wildlife crossings have been studied, planned and – sometimes – built along roadways in northeastern North Carolina, but in coming years they are to be a more significant part of the focus on conservation of the fragile population.

“Wildlife crossings along one of North Carolina’s most dangerous highways are crucial to protecting the world’s most endangered wolf,” stated Will Harlan, southeast director the Center for Biological Diversity.

In a study done for NCDOT by the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and completed in 2011, hair samples caught on a barbed fence were from 890 black bear crossings from March 2009 to March 2011 in the 147,432-acre Alligator River Refuge. The Virginia Tech study also found that 15 GPS-collared bears crossed the highway 99 times. In addition, 170 white-tailed deer, 200 bobcats and raccoons, and an additional 260 bear were caught on camera.

Surveys of roadkill from November 2008 to July 2011 showed eight deer killed. Between January 1993 and July 2011, factoring in historical data, there were 63 bear, 75 bats, 82 small mammals, 134 mid-sized mammals, 1,153 birds, 4,014 reptiles and 7,498 amphibians killed on the road. And in 2012, refuge biologists reported that 11 bear were hit by vehicles, not including those who ran off into the woods after being struck.

Data from the Virginia Tech study will be used to guide project estimates for crossings through the refuge, Cox said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service, in its February red wolf recovery program five-year status review, said that between 1987 and 2013, vehicle-wildlife collisions resulted in 34% of all mortalities related to humans; and there were 11 vehicle-related mortalities between 2019 and 2023.

“This mortality level would be expected to increase as habitat becomes more fragmented by roads and with increasing human traffic that would be expected with increased development,” the report said. “Additionally, this threat would also likely increase with increases in the population size of red wolf.”

Madison said that there is now orange reflective material on the GPS collars placed on the wild wolves to increase their visibility at night. There are also roadside mobile electronic message signs to warn drivers on all the highways.

Any wildlife crossings that are proposed separately from an NCDOT project, which would absorb some of the costs, will “not be inexpensive,” Wilson said.

“We have been successful in putting underpasses in coastal North Carolina in various places,” he said. Swampy Alligator River, with its numerous roadside canals, “has its own unique features and soil conditions,” Wilson said.

“That’s a big part of the conversation, building in the soil types that are out there, the fill and the engineering that have to go in place there. And as you know, anything that becomes more complex, the dollar figures begin to increase with that complexity,” he said.

“When it comes to the mammals that we’re talking about, if your structure is designed correctly and located correctly, and you have appropriate fencing, then you’re going to have mammals find those crossings and use those crossings,” he said. “And once they start, they’ll keep using them.”

The crossings provide habitat connectivity, as Wilson explained it.

After the New York Times recently published an article about wildlife crossings that included video of wildlife using an overpass, public interest in wildlife passages nationally increased dramatically.

“My phone blew up with reporters and the public wondering when is North Carolina going to do these things. And it felt like I spent a year on the phone every other day explaining to people that North Carolina has been doing it for two decades,” Wilson said. “The documents are memorializing a lot of what we’ve done but also will be good tools to give to people who have interest.”

Next in the series: Wildlife crossings dovetail with red wolf conservation science.

WILMINGTON – President Joe Biden announced Thursday afternoon millions of federal dollars coming to North Carolina to replace lead drinking water service lines.

“These lead lines are tough, durable, and they don’t rust, but we’ve long since learned that they lead to poisonous toxins in our water. The science is clear, lead service lines pose severe health risks, damaging the brain and kidneys, to children especially, they stunt growth and learning and cause lasting brain damage. We know we can stop it. We know how to do it,” Biden said.

Biden’s remarks to an invitation-only crowd in the Wilmington Convention Center were met with applause, cheers and shouts of affirmation from audience members yelling “That’s right” and “Yes!”

Across the country, nine million lead service lines connect water mains to homes, schools, daycare centers and businesses, he said. There are some 300,000 of these lead pipes disbursing drinking water in North Carolina.

“The cost to replace them is consequential,” Biden said. “Too many families only learn the threat to their children after they get sick. You know, this is, for some time, why I’m determined to fix it. Until the United States of America, God love us, deals with this, how can we say we’re a leading nation of the world for God’s sake. There’s no safe level of lead exposure.”

The only way to connect all Americans to clean water is to replace every lead service line, he said.

Biden talked about his landmark Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, one where a record $15 billion has been dedicated to fund lead pipe replacement.

“Today we’re releasing a third installment of that funding, an additional $3 billion dollars nationwide, which will bring the total to $250 million to North Carolina so far,” he said.

The president said the issue is not only one of safety, but about basic fairness to communities across the country. Nearly half of the funding has been directed to disadvantaged communities that have “borne the brunt of lead poisoning,” he said, adding that tribal lands are also receiving funds.

“Studies show communities of color have been hardest hit,” Biden said. “We have to make things right. Clean water, healthier communities, peace of mind, and jobs befitting those communities, jobs of plumbers, pipe fitters, laborers, engineers. Good paying jobs you can make a serious living with without a college degree to raise a family on.”

Protecting people from lead contamination is just one of the nation’s most ambitious agendas, he said.

The federal government is funneling $9 billion to upgrade filtration systems of public water systems found to have elevated levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

“They’re very dangerous chemicals that shouldn’t be in our water supply,” Biden said.

Wilmington has become ground-zero for PFAS contamination after scientists discovered several years ago a number of these chemical compounds in the Cape Fear River, the drinking water source for tens of thousands in the region.

Biden touted his infrastructure law as the most significant investment in the nation’s roads, bridges, ports, airports and public transportation, including passenger rail from Raleigh to Richmond, Virginia.

More than 50,000 projects in more than 4,000 communities have been announced to receive funding.

“To date this has dedicated over $9 billion dollars to North Carolina alone,” Biden said.

As his roughly 20-minute address neared its end, Biden spoke more like an incumbent on a campaign trail, touching on everything from job growth and rising wages to lower prescription drug costs, and taking verbal shots at his Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump.

Biden chastised the Republicans who voted against the infrastructure law, narrowing in on Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C., whom the president said called the infrastructure law fatally flawed and “a liberal trojan horse for the socialist agenda.”

“I don’t know about you, but I don’t think ensuring kids can drink clean water to avoid brain damage is a socialist agenda,” Biden said. “You may recall that my predecessor promised infrastructure every single week for four years. Didn’t build a damn thing.”

Instead, he said, the Trump administration rolled back wetland protections, gave mining companies leeway to contaminate groundwater and slashed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s budget.

Biden promised to “be a president for all Americans, whether you vote for me or not.”

“I believe doing what’s always worked best for this country, investing in all Americans.” He said. “I’ve never been more optimistic about our nation’s future. Let’s get out and work together and get this done and may God bless you all and protect our troops.”

Wilmington was Biden’s second and final stop in North Carolina Thursday.

He opened his remarks in the Port City by naming the four law enforcement officers killed Monday in a shootout in a Charlotte neighborhood, asking for prayers for the victims’ loved ones.

Biden visited privately with families of the victims in Charlotte before boarding Air Force One and heading to the coast.

He was accompanied by EPA Administrator and former North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Michael Regan and Gov. Roy Cooper, both of whom took the podium before a standing-room only crowd anxious to see the president.

Seats for the invitation-only event were filled two hours before Biden’s arrival, prompting event volunteers to fill any open spaces with chairs inside a room of makeshift walls of blue fabric.

Erin Carey, acting director of the North Carolina chapter of Sierra Club, was among the crowd invited to attend the event.

“We are grateful to the Biden administration for their determination to bring about the bipartisan infrastructure bill, an effort that has brought significant advancements in water quality initiatives, giving communities hope that the fear of drinking water contamination might one day be in the past,” she said in an email following the event. “It is comforting to know that our leaders are prioritizing the health of children and families, as well as the environment, as they put our tax dollars to good use – removing lead pipes from our service lines and PFAS from our drinking water.”

A group of pro-Palestinian protestors were gathered about a block away from the convention center shouting, “Free, free, free Palestine” and waving Palestinian flags. Trump supporters also showed their support for the former president.

Biden’s remarks Thursday afternoon came on the heels of a number of new federal environmental regulatory rollouts announced in recent weeks, including enforceable limits on PFAS in public water systems, a ban on most uses of methylene chloride, and a suite of rules addressing pollution from fossil-fueled power plants.

The day before Biden’s visit, NCDEQ announced a new state-implemented human health risk assessment for 1,4-dioxane in drinking water.

The health risk assessment was directed by the North Carolina General Assembly last year to examine the risk of exposure to the chemical, which is used primarily as a solvent in manufacturing processes, in drinking water. There are currently no federal drinking water standards for 1,4-dioxane.

North Carolina has the third highest measured concentration of 1,4-dioxane in drinking water in the country, exposing residents in the state to concentrations of the chemical that may be more than double the national average in drinking water and as much as four times the average in surface and groundwater, according to DEQ.

The Cape Fear River Basin has been found to have the most detections of the chemical in the state.

The EPA, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and International Agency for Research on Cancer classify 1,4-dioxane as a likely carcinogen.

Earlier Thursday, Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, or CFPUA announced it is close to wrapping up an inventory of its 70,000 water service lines. None of the lines checked so far are made of lead, according to the authority.

The utility will forward its inventory check to state regulators by mid-October.

DEQ recently tapped the utility to receive $4.16 million in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, money that will be used to replace about 300 galvanized service lines believed to have lead connectors.

These lines and connectors are coated to prevent lead from getting into drinking water.

With a sizable cargo ship docked Wednesday at the N.C. Port at Wilmington on the Cape Fear River in the background, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan announced the launch of a federal program to improve air quality at U.S. ports.

Regan was joined by Gov. Roy Cooper, Wilmington Mayor Bill Saffo and North Carolina State Ports Authority Board of Directors Chair Susan Rabon at the morning press conference to announce the $3 billion Clean Ports program.

“Ports like this one right here in Wilmington are essential for commerce and are vital to our nation’s economic growth and supply chain infrastructure,” Regan said, adding that at the same time, many people residing near and around the nation’s ports are exposed to unhealthy air.

“So today, we’re proving once again,” Regan continued, that environmental protection and economic prosperity can go hand in hand. “And that’s why I’m excited to announce that EPA is launching our $3 billion Clean Ports Program.”

The funding through the Inflation Reduction Act that President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022, “will advance environmental justice by reducing diesel pollution from U.S. ports in surrounding communities, while creating good-paying jobs,” according to the EPA.

Regan said the money will go to purchase zero-emissions port equipment and infrastructure upgrades, while supporting both climate and air pollution-reduction strategies at all U.S. Ports.

“This program will lay the groundwork for transformational change by encouraging a transition to zero-emissions operations and reducing diesel pollution in and around our poor communities,” he said.

Regan said the EPA is releasing two notices of funding opportunities. The first pot of money includes $2.8 billion to facilitate the transition to zero-emissions equipment and infrastructure to reduce emissions nationwide. The second is close to $150 million for climate and air quality planning activities at ports to help build capacity for the ongoing transition to zero-emission port operations.

The announcement is more than just an investment in the economy, Regan said, “it’s an investment in President Biden’s pledge and commitment to environmental justice.”

Through the president’s investments “we are ensuring that those who live near ports can finally breath cleaner, healthier air. We are reimagining clean technology, and revolutionizing our nation’s port infrastructure, while addressing climate and environmental justice concerns.”

Before Regan spoke, Rabon of the ports authority board said the facility in Wilmington, the deep-water port in Morehead City and the inland operation in Charlotte, combined to support more than 88,000 direct and indirect jobs, and the work at the authority contributes $660 million annually to local and state tax revenues.

“Businesses need access to the global markets where their products are sold, and where their resources are found,” she said. “The authority provides that access making North Carolina ports are a key factor in our state’s phenomenal economic growth.”

Rabon added that while the ports authority is focused on growing business, “we’re committed to doing so in an environmentally conscious manner that preserves this area we are fortunate enough to call home.”

Gov. Cooper, during his remarks, described the Biden administration’s infrastructure policies as “generational.”

“We’ve been waiting for them for decades and now they’re finally here,” he said of the federal funding for roads, bridges, airports, rail and public transportation, high-speed internet, clean water systems and clean energy jobs. “And of course, our ports, will improve our state for decades and generations to come.”

The funding announced Wednesday means a cleaner work environment for those working at ports, will help make the communities around the ports cleaner and “will help us further our goals of environmental justice,” Cooper said.

Regan said after the announcement that the administration wants to get the money out as quickly as possible. “I feel very strongly that one $3 billion is a lot of money. There’s enough to go around. We’re going to see strong applications all across the country.”

EPA officials said the Clean Ports Program will help advance the Justice40 Initiative, which has a goal for “40% of the overall benefits of certain federal investments in climate, clean energy, and other areas flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.”

The agency said it has strived to ensure that near-port community engagement and equity considerations are program priorities. That focus has included evaluating applications on the extent and quality of community engagement efforts.

The nearly $2.8 billion Zero-Emission Technology Deployment Competition will directly fund zero-emission port equipment and infrastructure to reduce mobile source emissions at U.S. ports, according to the EPA.

Eligible uses of the funding include human-operated and maintained zero-emission cargo handling equipment, harbor craft and other vessels, electric charging and hydrogen fueling infrastructure, and a number of other technology investments. Applications are to be evaluated under multiple tiers in order to ensure that funds are distributed across ports of different sizes and types, and to ensure funding for ports serving Tribal communities, officials said.

The approximately $150 million Climate and Air Quality Planning Competition will fund climate and air quality planning activities at U.S. ports, including emissions inventories, strategy analysis, community engagement, and resiliency measure identification.

“Together, these opportunities will advance next-generation, clean technologies that will more safely and efficiently drive the movement of goods and passengers at our nation’s ports, a critical part of America’s supply chain infrastructure while reducing pollution and advancing environmental justice,” the EPA said in its announcement.

According to the Sierra Club, research has shown that diesel pollution contains more than 40 cancer-causing substances, including benzene and formaldehyde. The group cited links to asthma, heart disease and premature death. 

“We continue to see vast clean transportation benefits moving out of the Inflation Reduction Act. Ports are a lesser talked about topic within the transportation sector – cleaning them up is crucial work,” Katherine García, director of Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All campaign, said in a statement. “This EPA program builds on the Department of Transportation’s ports program with necessary zero-emission investments that will bring significant health and air quality benefits.”

Coastal communities will see more than $55 million of the $238 million the state is awarding across North Carolina for drinking water, wastewater and stormwater projects, and lead service line inventories and replacements.

The water and wastewater infrastructure funding and stormwater planning grants will go to help pay for 114 projects in 52 counties statewide, including 28 construction projects, the governor’s office said Wednesday.

“This funding will help communities across the state access clean drinking water and set up critical infrastructures to better prepare for the future,” Cooper said in the announcement. “We have seen the positive impact these grants have made, and it is important for us to continue to provide more aid, especially for communities dealing with the impacts of forever chemicals.”

Cape Fear Public Utility Authority has been awarded $35 million to go toward its Southside Wastewater Treatment Plant replacement project.

Public Information Officer Cammie Bellamy told Coastal Review that the loans announced Wednesday are in addition to a separate $35 million in loans that the state awarded the utility last summer for the project.

The plant on River Road just north of Independence Boulevard was constructed in 1972 and while it has undergone numerous upgrades and expansions over the past 52 years, much of the plant’s infrastructure is nearing the end of its useful life, she said.

She explained that the project, estimated to cost $239 million, will fully replace the Southside Wastewater Treatment Plant, one of the two wastewater plants owned and operated by CFPUA, and expand its treatment capacity from 12 million gallons per day to 16 million gallons a day.

Construction is anticipated to begin in late 2024 or early 2025, with the project scheduled to reach completion by 2030.

“We are grateful for NCDEQ and the State Water Infrastructure Authority for awarding these loans, which will help reduce overall project costs for CFPUA’s customers,” Bellamy said.

Other notable coastal projects include $3.69 million for the Cherry Run Pump Station and 5th Street Force Main replacement in Washington as well as $365,000 for Jacks Creek Pump Station stormwater planning.

Ahoskie is to receive $4.16 million for work on its wastewater treatment plant, located in Hertford County, which is to receive $350,000 to have asset inventory and assessments, or AIAs, done on its northern and southern rural water districts.

The town of Hertford, in Perquimans County, is set to receive $4.84 million for a wastewater treatment plant rehabilitation.

Oriental has been awarded $2.97 million for improvements to its wastewater treatment facility.

Gates County is in line for $2.2 million for removal and replacement of lagoon lining, repairs on the spray irrigation field, installation of an emergency generator and Supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, system, replacement of the chemical feed system and installation of a new flow meter, according to the governor’s office.

The county is also set to receive $328,000 for a lead line investigation study, and $383,000 for a water system AIA and $167,000 for a wastewater system AIA.

Jacksonville will receive up to $400,000 to develop a watershed action plan, looking at the impacts of stormwater on a watershed scale to minimize the impacts of stormwater on the New River.

Rocky Point/Topsail Water and Sewer District in Pender County has been awarded $400,000 for a study on treatment alternatives for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

Tyrrell County is getting $255,000 for an assessment of its water system, and Bald Head Island is to receive $350,000 for stormwater planning.

North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Water Infrastructure reviewed 275 eligible applications from 75 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, requesting $2.29 billion.

The State Water Infrastructure Authority approved the awards Tuesday during its meeting. The authority is an independent body with primary responsibility for awarding federal and state funding for water infrastructure projects.

Funding came from state and federal funds, including the State Revolving Funds that provide low-interest loans and Principal Forgiveness loans, and through Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Cooper’s office also announced that the application period for the Spring 2024 funding round for water, wastewater and stormwater infrastructure projects opens Tuesday, Feb. 27, and ends at 5 p.m. April 30. Funding application training for this round will be provided through five in-person statewide sessions Feb. 27 through March 8, with a virtual option. The training session time and location schedule is available on the DEQ website.

COLUMBIA — In a coastal North Carolina county that has more wildlife — by far — than people, as well as vast amounts of public lands, U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s visit to Tyrrell County Thursday afternoon was especially significant. 

“Coming here is important,” Tyrrell County Manager David Clegg told Haaland during a media event with the secretary at the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge visitor center.

Haaland was in Tyrrell County to announce that $1.4 million has been awarded to the refuge from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to replace 1,000 feet of the badly weathered Scuppernong River Boardwalk.

“And we saw how dilapidated it is,” said Haaland, referring to a stroll she had taken earlier on the boardwalk behind the visitor center, which stretches along the river and through woods and marshlands. “Now we’ll really be ready to make it right for future visits by so many people.”

In a later interview, Clegg said he really appreciated the secretary’s openness and willingness to discuss Tyrrell and the value of Pocosin Lakes to the county.   

“She has an on-the-ground understanding of what it is now,” he said. “It’s not some concept to her.”

Although the boardwalk is still safe to use, it has the warped and blackened wood commonly seen in aging decks and docks in the region.

North Carolina Wildlife Federation CEO Tim Gestwicki recalled during his remarks the reaction he had when producers of a documentary about the area asked to take some footage outside the refuge headquarters.

“They said, ‘Let’s go out on the boardwalk,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, lord, I don’t know about that.’”

Gestwicki said he is “delighted” with the infrastructure work that is being done at Pocosin and other refuges because it will allow more access for people to enjoy being outside in nature.

The project is part of President Biden’s $157 million Investing in America agenda to restore our nation’s lands and waters through locally led, landscape-scale restoration projects, according to a Department of the Interior press release. The funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will support 206 ecosystem restoration projects in 48 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. territories.

Projects will focus on a restoration and resilience framework that builds climate resilience and addresses impacts, restores lands and waters, and enhances the quality of life for communities.

“What I love is the framework serves as a roadmap to where we can make the greatest difference,” Haaland said. “By grounding the framework in landscape-level projects like this here at Pocosin Lakes, it will supercharge our efforts to foster biodiversity and restore the habitats we all depend on.” 

Tyrrell fits the program’s target as a rural, historically underserved community.

With about 43% of its 735 square miles owned by state and federal governments, much of the county’s economy is still based in agriculture and forestry. But the tax base is shrinking, along with the population, which is currently 3,200 people, compared with 3,645 in 2016. The county is also considered one of the most vulnerable per capita to sea level rise impacts.

Clegg, the county manager, emphasized in his remarks that while Tyrrell might be remote and economically disadvantaged, its diverse ecosystems have outsize value to the natural world, replete with estuarine shorelines, pocosin wetlands, and agricultural vistas. For that reason, the county is primed to grow its ecotourism economy. 

“You can find bear, wolves, deer, wildcats, swan, duck, eagles, egret, beaver, otters, alligators, foxes, turtles, crabs, fish, quails, snakes, salamanders and raccoons,” he recited in one long breath, ending to applause.  

But Tyrrell County, despite its riches and challenges, is often lost in the shuffle when it comes to helpful government attention — making an important national official such as Haaland especially welcomed. 

“They say you don’t care about us,” said 1^st District Congressman Don Davis, a Democrat from Snow Hill, when addressing Haaland. “Well guess what? You’re here.”

Davis said his office works closely with the Interior Department and other agencies to assist local communities in meeting criteria so projects such as the Pocosin boardwalk can be completed.

“This is an awesome federal investment,” he said.

The Investing in America project also will partner with states and other recipients to address drought and wildfire resilience, recreational access, legacy pollution from former mines, invasive species management, and restoration of native plants and ecosystems.

More than half of the projects will also benefit historically underserved communities, as part of Biden’s Justice40 Initiative, an environmental justice effort that aims to direct 40% of certain federal benefits to “disadvantaged communities that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution,” according to the White House.

During a brief Q&A with media before she left, Haaland expressed appreciation for the Pocosin Lakes refuge and its staff, and she made a promise that Tyrrell no doubt hopes come true. 

“I never pass up an opportunity to tell the staff how much they mean to us,” Haaland said. “I couldn’t be prouder to stand here today and I’ll come back again.”

State officials announced Monday that they have published an online map showing the locations of the first batch of electric vehicle charging stations that will be funded through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program, or NEVI.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation said it published the map to help people wishing to apply for the federal NEVI funds the state received to build and operate a network of electric vehicle charging stations.

“The build out of the electric vehicle charging stations will help our state advance clean transportation and be a great economic opportunity for businesses of all sizes,” said Paula Hemmer, NCDOT’s Statewide Initiative senior engineer. “The map gives businesses an opportunity to determine where it would be economically feasible to build and operate EV charging stations. There are a lot of things to consider like whether a site is easily accessible to all travelers and a site’s proximity to amenities like restaurants and hotels.”

The map was released in late December so businesses would have sufficient time to plan if they are interested in applying for the NEVI funds to install and operate the first phase of charging stations.

Transportation officials expect to issue a request for proposals in February for people interested in applying for grants for charger installation.

NCDOT received $109 million in NEVI funds to develop the network along interstates, major highways and in communities. The funds are to be used to reimburse businesses for project costs, including procurement, installation and operation of electric vehicle charging stations. 

Phase 1 will involve installation of direct current fast chargers along interstates and major highways, along the alternative fuel corridors designated by the Federal Highway Administration. The DC fast chargers will be able to charge an electric vehicle in about 20 minutes.

Phase 2 will involve the buildout of community-based DC fast chargers and Level 2 chargers that take between four and eight hours to charge a vehicle.

North Carolina expects to build out the electric charging infrastructure over the next seven years.

The online map identifies the 11 locations along the alternative fuel corridor that will comprise Phase 1 of the project. NCDOT said it identified the 11 locations because they will fill the gaps where fewer charging stations currently exist and serve a more geographically diverse group of people in both rural and urban areas.

Each location on the geographic information system map represents a cluster of one or more exits along the alternative fuel corridor. Applicants must locate proposed charging stations within the designated clusters. There will be one charging station per cluster.

The proposed locations were also selected because they meet the requirements outlined in the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which established the NEVI program.

Under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, charging stations in Phase 1 must meet the following conditions:

• Deployed every 50 miles along the alternative fuel corridor.
• Deployed within a mile of an alternative fuel corridor
• Charging system ports that are capable of providing 150 kilowatts of direct current to four vehicles simultaneously.
• Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• Installed so they comply with local permitting and zoning requirements.

NEVI provides nearly $5 billion to help states create a network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations along designated alternative fuel corridors. NCDOT has been working with state, federal and local stakeholders for several years to plan for the build out of EV charging stations statewide. 

WILMINGTON – Officials are advising those who transit the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge that a project to extend the nearly 60-year-old bridge’s life is set to begin early next year — work that will include temporarily lane closures and possible travel delays.

Contractor Southern Road & Bridge LLC is to begin the $7.1 million project to repair the moveable bridge deck in early 2024. The North Carolina Department of Transportation awarded the contract Nov. 30 with incentives for the company to finish early, potentially earning an extra $500,000.

Built in 1967, the vertical-lift bridge is reaching the end of its lifecycle and must be monitored, inspected, and maintained on a more frequent basis, officials said. Daily inspections of the steel vertical-lift bridge have shown the need to conduct longer-lasting improvements.

Eastbound lanes heading into Wilmington are anticipated to close as early as Jan. 3, depending on weather and materials. Westbound lanes are to remain open to traffic. Drivers headed into Wilmington must detour via the Isabel Holmes Bridge to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to College Road.

The bridge is scheduled to be open in both directions April 1-7 for the North Carolina Azalea Festival in downtown Wilmington.

Tentatively, on April 8, contract crews will close the westbound lanes to traffic and reopen before Memorial Day, officials said.

State transportation officials are working with the Wilmington Urban Area Metropolitan Planning Organization in planning for a replacement bridge. The least environmentally damaging of four proposed options is expected to be identified around the end of next year.

Officials have said the new bridge will increase vehicle capacity, expanding from four to six lanes and including a protected 15-foot multiuse path to serve pedestrians between Brunswick and New Hanover counties.

Several of the people Gov. Roy Cooper appointed to boards and commissions, positions announced Monday, reside on the coast.

Cooper appointed Lacey Edwards of Havelock to the Catawba Indian Nation Foundation Board of Directors as an enrolled member of the Catawba Indian Nation. Edwards is a teacher in Havelock.

Virginia Gardner Vinson of Edenton was appointed to the Edenton Historical Commission as a member at-large. Vinson has worked as the director of adult education for the College of Albemarle, director of the commission’s Penelope Barker House, heritage tourism development officer, and executive director of the Chowan Hospital Foundation.

Ahoskie Mayor Weyling J. White was appointed to the North Carolina Forestry Advisory Council as a representative with experience in city and regional planning. White is also a practice administrator for the Roanoke Chowan Community Health Center.

Dr. Janet F. Davidson of Wilmington was appointed to the North Carolina State Historical Records Advisory Board as a member at-large. Davidson has been the Cape Fear Museum Historian since 2005. Previously, she was a historian and exhibition curator for the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution.

Jacob Harrison Joplin of Morehead City was appointed as chair to the Underground Damage Prevention Review Board. Joplin is the CEO and general manager of Carteret-Craven Electric Cooperative, where he has worked since 2000. Joplin was serving as vice chair of the board prior to this appointment.

The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries is accepting proposals for the Boating Infrastructure Grant, or BIG, Program for the coming federal fiscal year.

The 2024 request for proposals is for a grant program of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that reimburses up to 75% of costs for projects to build, renovate or maintain tie-up facilities and related amenities for recreational transient vessels that are at least 26 feet long. The deadline is 5 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 17.

The grant program was authorized by Congress in 1998 and is funded by excise taxes on fishing equipment and motorboat fuel.

The division serves as the liaison between projects in North Carolina and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the BIG Program. Proposals must be submitted to the division to be considered.

Some examples of potentially eligible activities include transient slips, mooring buoys, day-docks, floating and fixed piers and breakwaters, dinghy docks, restrooms, showers, laundry facilities, retaining walls, bulkheads, dockside utilities (water, electric, telephone, Internet), sewage pump-out stations, recycling and trash receptacles, navigational aids and marine fueling stations. Applicants must have or intend to construct dedicated dockage for transient vessels to receive funding for these eligible activities.

BIG funds are awarded each year. Grants are available on a two-tiered basis. For Tier 1 – State grants, all states may receive up to $300,000 per grant cycle as long as proposals meet the program’s guidelines. Tier 2 – National grants are reserved for large-scale, more expensive undertakings and are awarded on a nationwide competitive basis. For this funding opportunity, applicants may apply for up to $300,000 under Tier 1 and up to $1.5 million under Tier 2.

For information about grant availability, project eligibility, and proposal development, visit the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries’ Website, N.C. Boating Infrastructure Grant Program, or contact Vicky Pohoresky, federal aid coordinator for the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries, at 252-808-8016, or Vicky.Pohoresky@deq.nc.gov.

A proposed project to widen and deepen the Wilmington Harbor will be presented by the Army Corps of Engineers Wilmington District at an open house next month.

During the June 13 open house, the public may speak with Corps staff who will be at different stations to talk about the project.

The open house will be held at Cape Fear Community College’s Union Station Building, 502 N. Front St., Wilmington.

The North Carolina State Ports Authority wants to deepen the main shipping channel in the Cape Fear River from 42 feet to 47 feet and the ocean entrance to the river from 44 feet to 47 feet. It also seeks to widen the channel in multiple areas.

The proposed project is to make room for larger container ships coming to the East Coast from Asia, which would allow the Wilmington port to remain competitive with other East Coast ports, according to the ports authority.

The open house will begin at 4 p.m. with an introduction video following by two, back-to-back 30-minute presentations about the proposed project. The first presentation will be held from 4:30 p.m.-5 p.m. with a repeat representation to follow from 6 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.

The Corps is partnering with the ports authority to develop the Wilmington Harbor Clean Water Act Section 403 letter report and environmental impact statement, or EIS, which are estimated to cost $8.5 million and be completed in four years.

Various groups, including the Brunswick County Branch of the NAACP, have raised concerns about the proposed project’s potential impacts to the environment, the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, and environmental justice communities.

The Corps is accepting public comments at the open house and through June 30.

For more information about the project and to submit comments visit https://wilmington-harbor-usace-saw.hub.arcgis.com/

COLUMBIA – The long-planned replacement of the 60-year-old, two-lane, swing-span bridge that is the only direct link between Raleigh and the Outer Banks will come years sooner thanks to a recently announced $110 million federal infrastructure grant.

Gov. Roy Cooper, Federal Highway Administrator Shailen Bhatt and North Carolina Department of Transportation Secretary Eric Boyette joined Tyrell and Dare County officials Thursday at the west side of the Alligator River bridge on U.S. Highway 64 in Columbia to celebrate the grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation Mega Program.

The competitive grant program, also known as the National Infrastructure Project Assistance program, provides money for “large, complex projects that are difficult to fund by other means and likely to generate national or regional economic, mobility, or safety benefits,” according to the program website. The North Carolina award also includes broadband funding.

The estimated $294 million project to replace the Lindsay C. Warren Bridge, which opened to traffic in February 1962, includes a new structure just north of the existing one and connect Tyrell County segment of U.S. 64 to Old Ferry Road in Dare County. Construction is now expected to begin as soon as winter 2024.

“It’s my understanding that this bridge has been accelerated by at least a decade,” Bhatt said during the press gathering, adding that, “Because while everybody’s trying to do their best, there wasn’t a lot of money sitting around.”

Bhatt said the project is one of the first Mega grants that USDOT had awarded and one of only nine awarded nationwide. Officials announced the award in January.

Boyette, when asked after his public remarks whether the project was now fully funded, said the state’s existing commitment was a significant reason why North Carolina was awarded the grant.

“We can show the gap in our funding. This is what we’ll need to complete it. That was one of the pluses for us,” he said.

The bridge is one of two highway corridors to the Outer Banks — the other being the Wright Memorial Bridge on U.S. 158 — but its importance is greater than a way for tourists to get to the shore. Tyrell County is one of the state’s most economically distressed, and a significant number of its 3,200 residents have jobs on the Outer Banks, a point Tyrell County Manager David Clegg underscored.

“It creates today easily 500 jobs between the two counties,” Clegg said.

The bridge’s swinging center span that opens 90 degrees for boat traffic sometimes fails to close and is one of the most apparent problems with the bridge. However, a 2021 NCDOT evaluation classified the bridge as structurally deficient with a sufficiency rating of 31.71 out of a possible 100.

“The existing bridge requires costly, heavy maintenance on a regular basis,” according to the report.

“It’s very clear the 60-year-old swing-span behind me is not supporting the community,” said Transportation Secretary Boyette during his remarks.

The replacement project, listed as HB-0001 by NCDOT, includes numerous improvements over the existing bridge. Perhaps most importantly, the fixed center span will provide a 65-foot clearance for boat traffic. The new two-lane bridge will include 8-foot-wide shoulders, enough for a bike lane. The existing bridge has 1-foot-wide shoulders.

Along with the planned improvements to the transportation corridor between Raleigh and the Outer Banks, Cooper highlighted another infrastructure improvement that is also funded in the federal grant.

“Part of what’s going to happen with this bridge is going to be high-speed internet all the way from Rocky Mount to Nags Head,” Cooper said.

Boyette also noted that the grant was a way to remember longtime Division 1 Engineer Sterling Baker, who died of cancer in April 2022.

“We named this grant application after Sterling, the STERLING grant — Strengthening Transportation Evacuation Resilience Lifeline and Improving our Network’s Gateway,” Boyette said.

WILMINGTON – No matter how incessant the public frustration or how desperate the pleas from mariners to fix clogged harbors, impassable channels or eroded shorelines, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is struggling to address worsening problems in coastal North Carolina, especially on the Outer Banks. 

Recently, a wicked nor’easter wreaked havoc in Oregon Inlet, choking it with sand and making navigation too hazardous even for heavy-duty dredges. While such events in the dynamic waterway on the north end of Hatteras Island aren’t unusual, their impacts seem harder to fix. There is concern that as the climate is changing, the hazards and costs of channel maintenance will increase, potentially becoming unsustainable in places.    

The Corps is not alone in coping with challenging maritime conditions from rising seas and intensified storms. Numerous private dredge companies as well as state and federal agencies, often the North Carolina Department of Transportation and the U.S. Coast Guard, partner with the Corps on projects.

A May 20 statement issued by the Corps’ Wilmington district blamed the storm, which pounded the coast for five days beginning May 8, for completely shoaling a portion of the federal marked channel along the Marc Basnight Bridge. With only 2 to 3 feet of water — barely enough draft for a skiff — the area was deemed impassable for most vessels.

Days before, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that it had marked a new channel in Hatteras Inlet, which is on the south end of the island, because the last marked channel had become irreversibly shoaled. Like Oregon Inlet, storms had made the previous passage so unnavigable that it was too dangerous to dredge.

The Coast Guard is also planning to remark the channel at Oregon Inlet, where local charter boat captains have found an alternate channel under the bridge to the ocean.

Such weather-created woes have become more frequent in the last decade or two, and it’s not just an issue on the 320-mile North Carolina coastline. Numerous waterways and shorelines where the Corps works, including along the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River basin and the Great Lakes region, also are experiencing more extreme conditions. 

On the Outer Banks, with its jutting geography exquisitely exposed at the northern end of the Atlantic’s hurricane alley, there have been dramatic differences in sand travel in the last two decades, requiring more nourishment on its beaches and more sand removal from its waterways. The fact that conditions at times have become too poor for a dredge to tackle is an indicator of the dire shift in coastal patterns.  

Prior to a series of severe storms starting with hurricanes Floyd and Dennis in 1999, Hatteras Inlet was stable and required little more than routine maintenance dredging for the ferry route. But since 1993, the passage from the Atlantic to Pamlico Sound between Hatteras and Ocracoke Island has widened from a quarter-mile to 2.3 miles, resulting in a precipitous increase in shoaling and dangerous exposure for vessels to wind and currents.

Still, with harbors, inlets, sounds, rivers and bays intersecting with the entire shoreline, North Carolina’s coast is exceptionally complex, environmentally and geologically. At the same time, it’s critical to the state’s maritime commerce, tourism and culture. 

“So it’s a very dynamic system we have to keep our eye on,” Kathleen Riely, executive director of the nonprofit North Carolina Beach, Inlet and Waterway Association, or NCBIWA, said in a recent interview. “And dredging is a key part of that maintenance. It’s absolutely necessary.”

Nationwide problem

Riely said that shoaling and erosion are becoming more problematic not just along North Carolina’s coast, but also nationwide. As a result, demand for dredges everywhere has increased. 

“I think with the dredges getting older that the Corps use, and having to go into repair shops is certainly an issue,” Riely said. “But there are a lot of private companies out there.”

Even in federal channels that the Corps is charged with maintaining, the agency is mandated by law to contract with private dredge companies when possible. The Corps can also work in nonfederal channels under formalized agreements. For instance, the agency is paid by Dare County and state funds under a memorandum of agreement to do work in Hatteras Inlet.

Numerous dredging projects nationwide were recently funded by the $1 trillion infrastructure legislation passed last year, which provided $17 billion to the Corps for work in harbors, ports and inland waterways, said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure during a congressional hearing in February.

“As we authorize new projects, the other side of that coin, as always, is ensuring that the Corps has the funding necessary to complete the work,” DeFazio said, according to minutes. “We all know of the $100 billion backlog of projects due to underfunding of the Corps for decades.”

Even with the flood of newly funded projects throughout the country, there will still be enough interest from the private sector in North Carolina projects, according to an email from the Corps’ Wilmington district in response to an inquiry from Coastal Review.

But beyond what the private dredges can do, the Corps’ small and aging dredge fleet that works in the district is stretched thin. 

“As you are aware, our fleet works on coastal projects from Maine to Texas, and at times, demand does exceed the capacity of our shallow-draft fleet,” Wilmington District Corps spokesman Dave Connolly wrote in the email.

“The coastal environment has been and continues to be dynamic,” he said. “Subject to appropriations and funding, the Corps will continue to use industry (private company) and government dredge resources to maximize maintenance of waterways, embracing beneficial use of material when practical.”

The Wilmington District has made major investments in the shallow-draft fleet over the past decade, he added, including replacement of the Dredge Fry with the Dredge Murden in 2012, and  completing a major shipyard overhaul for the Dredge Merritt in 2018. Currently the Dredge Currituck is in the shipyard undergoing major restoration that will be completed in 2023.

The 78-year-old Merritt, a side-cast dredge, mostly works in North Carolina, but it occasionally lumbers over to the Charleston, Norfolk and Philadelphia districts. The split-hull, shallow-draft, or hopper, Dredge Currituck, a comparatively youthful 48 years old, toils throughout the Atlantic and Gulf regions. And the hopper Murden, a young workhorse at age 10, also covers the Atlantic and Gulf.

“Within the District the shallow draft fleet is used on about 10 federal waterways routinely, from Lockwood Folly Inlet to Oregon Inlet,” the email said. “Nationally, the fleet is used on approximately 50 projects, although all are not dredged every year.” 

With dredging restricted during the spring and summer months along the North Carolina coast when protected sea turtles breed, it can be complicated scheduling dredging windows to match needs.

As the federal government’s primary agency in charge of civil works project with roots going back to George Washington, much of the maritime-related funding over the years has been focused on large harbors and ports, leaving shallow-draft projects competing for small pools of money. For that reason, hopper dredges that are typically used to maintain harbors are an important focus for Corps’ dredging operations. Use of hoppers, large vessels that can hold a lot of dredged material in their holds to be dumped offshore, has been subject to various constraints, with mixed results, as shown in a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report from 2014.

“The restrictions, however, help ensure the Corps has the ability to use these dredges to respond to urgent or emergency dredging needs when industry dredges are unavailable,” the report said. “It is not clear to what extent restrictions have affected competition in the dredging industry.” 

Although private industry hopper dredges are allowed to respond to urgent dredging needs, the report said, it added that it did not track how often that was done. 

According to federal law, the Corps is directed to contract with private dredge companies whenever possible rather than using Corps dredges. For that reason, the Corps does not plan to build or purchase new shallow-draft dredges, said Corps spokesman Connolly. 

A new dredge, he said, would cost roughly $25 to $30 million to build, although inflation could make any estimate a moving target.

“With the recent investment in the Dredge Merritt and Dredge Currituck, we are expecting several more years of useful service, and in consultation with our higher HQ (headquarters), will evaluate and analyze long-term options for replacement or future rehabilitation of these assets.”

An Aug. 2020 issue brief published by the nonprofit National Taxpayers Union Foundation found that the U.S. is lagging behind Europe and China in modernizing its equipment, resulting more expense and labor to remove less material.

“The longer dredging is not updated or improved with technology, the greater costs will be over time,” the paper said. “Despite the general trend of higher annual spending on dredging, by some measurements efficiency and productivity have lagged expenditures.”

The ongoing supply chain problems related to international shipping has brought more awareness to the value of waterways in commerce, but small harbors are still under appreciated for their value to local communities for tourism, fishing and recreation.

“There remains relatively little political action around the issue of dredging as it doesn’t occupy the top of Congress’s list of priorities,” the Taxpayers Union report said. “But those immediately impacted by the continued accumulation of sediment within American waterways have long been petitioning their representatives as well as the Army Corps of Engineers for relief.”

Miss Katie

Meanwhile, Dare County’s new hopper dredge, the Miss Katie, is expected to be delivered to Oregon Inlet in July and operating by August, said Barton Grover, administrator for Dare County Waterways Commission. He added that the dredge is just like the Murden, except it also has side-cast capabilities.

Construction of the 156-foot dredge, a public-private partnership, was paid for by a state allocation of $15 million from the Shallow Draft Navigation Channel Dredging and Aquatic Weed Fund. The dredge’s work schedule, which has yet to be determined, will be managed by the Oregon Inlet Task Force.

Riely, with NCBIWA, said that it is an interesting and creative idea that could make counties less dependent on the Corps. But she said there still are questions: How much will it cost to maintain? Where are the funds going to continue to come from? Where will it be housed when it’s not operating?

“So there’s some issues with it,” Riely said. “But I think if it can work out, having a dredge in North Carolina just for our coasts, let’s say there’s one southern going halfway or whatever, the other north coming down, I think that would be a good thing.”

Next in the series: Worsening shoaling and erosion, and other effects of climate change on coastal conditions, have been creating more difficult challenges for both dredges and ferries on the Outer Banks. That is especially a concern on Ocracoke Island, accessible only by boat or airplane, where hundreds of year-round residents and millions of annual tourists depend on the ferries for their transportation to and from the island. 

How do locks and dams control the flow of the Cape Fear River?

Dana Matics, assistant operations project manager with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, will explain the ins and outs at 7 p.m. April 19 during the Third Tuesday Lecture “Cape Fear River Locks and Dams: Past, Present, and Future,” presented by the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Southport.

The program, like all lectures in the series, will take place at the Southport Community Building, 223 E Bay St., downtown Southport. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m.

The museum has explored the Cape Fear River with Matics before. Museum Curator of Education Katy Menne rode through lock and dam No. 1 for Episode 26 of “Captain Meanies Maritime Curiosity,” which aired on the museum’s YouTube channel and Facebook page in December.

“Riding along with Dana was such a pleasure, and she has such a wealth of information and knowledge,” Menne said. “We couldn’t wait to have her in to discuss the history of the locks and dams in greater detail.”

That greater detail includes historic images Matics provided as background for the video project but did not make the episode and additional information Matics has acquired over her 20 years working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“I love how Katy’s use of digital education offerings like Captain Meanies Maritime Curiosity makes the museum accessible to patrons near and far,” Museum Manager Lori Sanderlin said. “Knowing that Dana is willing to share more historical background for our Third Tuesday is a behind-the-scenes treat.”

Seating is limited for the Third Tuesday program. Call 910-477-5151 or email at Katy.Menne@ncdcr.gov to reserve a spot. Registration can also be filled out online at ncmaritimemuseumsouthport.com/events.

Masks are optional to attend this lecture, and continued wear is encouraged for vulnerable populations. Disposable masks will be available.

The North Carolina Maritime Museum system is comprised of the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras, the North Carolina Maritime Museum at Beaufort and the North Carolina Maritime Museum at Southport. All three museums are part of the Division of State History Museums in the NC Department of Cultural Resources. 

This is the second in a special reporting series on federal infrastructure spending and North Carolina’s navigation needs.

Lacking high-volume marine traffic or large ports, North Carolina’s northeast coast typically qualifies for far less federal funding to help maintain navigational channels and inlets than do the state’s southern coastal communities.

But mariners in Dare and Hyde counties will be getting their fair share of benefits from the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that Congress passed in November, with nearly $60 million of it going to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for eastern North Carolina waterways, according to Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C. 

That’s on top of an additional $22.81 billion provided to the Corps in the 2022 Disaster Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act.

It’s also a nice break for the Corps, which has been advocating for funds to address smaller projects that may not rank high nationally, but are important to less populated regions and communities.

“We screamed and hollered up the line for funding, and that’s the reason we got funded,” Bob Keistler, chief of the Corps’ Wilmington District Civil Works Programs and Project Management Branch, said in a telephone interview, referring to the supplemental funds allotted in the infrastructure bill. “We’re getting a chance to come back and do some spring cleaning here on things that we haven’t been able to do in a while.” 

Northeastern North Carolina Projects

Shallowbag Bay

Funding of $6.4 million is set to go to dredge Manteo Shallowbag Bay, the inner channels at Oregon Inlet from the Basnight Bridge to Wanchese Harbor, to Old House Channel, out to the Pamlico Sound.

“We have about, I think, five or six spots that we plan to dredge where the shoaling is an issue,” Brennan Dooley, with the Corps, said in the same telephone interview, adding that the scope of the work is not finalized. 

Oregon Inlet’s inner channels are federally authorized, but the dredge work will be put out for bid to private contractors.

Although the amount of work for industry dredges has created more competition for Corps contracts, Dooley said preparation work is done before the bid is posted so that they can move quickly when a contract is signed. 

“Historically, we’ve been able to get someone in there,” Dooley said.

The main navigational channel that goes under the bridge to the ocean bar is a separate project that is maintained regularly by Corps dredges.

The Corps operates a handful of government dredges year-round to maintain waterways along portions of the Gulf and East coasts and the Great Lakes.

Work in the inner channels has not been funded for a while, said Barton Grover, Dare County Grants and Waterways administrator.

“Typically, they’re done every five to 10 years,” he said in an interview. “I’m not sure when they were last dredged.”

As Keister explained, the available Corps dredge is not always appropriate for the type of work needed, which for the Manteo channels would be a pipeline dredge. 

“We try to contract the majority of our work out,” he said. “If there’s a nonfederal contract dredge availability, we like to put it out for bid. That’s kind of our mantra.” 

The majority of the dredge material for the Manteo channels, Dooley said, will be deposited on a nearby existing disposal area known as “Island H.” Also known as “spoil islands” or “bird islands,” to describe where sand from past dredging projects has built up at certain spots in the waterway, areas such as “Island H” are running out of room for more sand.

Dooley said that with many Corps projects, the nonfederal sponsor has the responsibility for providing easements and right-of-way for disposal sites, which must be done before a project can move forward. “Island H,” he said, typically has been maintained and managed by Dare County and the state.

The Corps is coordinating with the county, which is seeking a permit to increase capacity. Dooley said that he expects no problem with obtaining the permits in time to do the dredge work. 

Dooley added that the Corps tries to deposit compatible sand at other areas where it can create habitat.

“When we can, we always like to do beneficial use of dredge material,” he said. “South of Wanchese, the material is pretty good sand for the most part. So where we can, we’re going to put that sand on adjacent bird islands.”

Silver Lake Harbor/Stumpy Point Bay

Ocracoke’s Silver Lake Harbor project, $4.37 million, and Dare County’s Stumpy Point Bay, $2.58 million, were funded as separate projects, but will be one contract.

Dooley said it is more efficient to do them in a single contract because they’re close together.

“Either one of those projects alone, it’s not a lot work,” he said. “So combining the work together makes it more appetizing for a contractor … We can share the cost between the projects to get the dredge there and then do work at both projects.”

There is an area in the Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry channel coming into Ocracoke where there is shoaling north of Bigfoot Island, an old bird island. That is the most important shoal the Corps is dealing with at the Silver Lake Harbor project.

At Stumpy Point Bay, which is one end of the emergency ferry channel between Rodanthe and the Dare County mainland at Stumpy Point, dredging needs to be done at the approach to the channel into Stumpy Point basin.

The state Ferry Division has also requested that while the Corps’ contractor is in Stumpy Point, to have it dredge an approach to the state ferry dock that is outside the authorized federal channel.

The additional work would be paid for by the state Department of Transportation, which oversees the division, under an updated agreement between the state and the Corps.

Avon Harbor

Federal funding of $1.60 million will go to dredge Avon Harbor. For years, the community has been requesting help with shoaling in the harbor, which is not a federal waterway, but it has been hampered by costs.

Even with the infrastructure funds, the project can’t move forward until there is a suitable disposal site for the dredge material.

A disposal area at the entrance to the harbor is currently at capacity, Dooley said.

As the nonfederal sponsor, Dare County has to provide the disposal area, he said. The Corps is working with Dare on finding options, potentially an upland site the material can be pumped to, or even exploring whether the material could be used on public land in Cape Hatteras National Seashore. 

The goal is to award the contracts before the end of the fiscal year, Keister said. But if the Avon issue is not resolved by then, there is still wiggle room, but he does not expect to lose the funds.   

“We don’t want to rush to failure because of a fiscal year,” Keistler said. “We have a little more leeway with (projects) like Avon Harbor that have some additional hurdles to cross that we’re not driven by the Sept. 30 date.”

Rollinson Channel

Federal funding of $1.43 million will go to dredge Rollinson Channel, which has been the only authorized federal channel in Hatteras Inlet for a long time, based mostly on it being the original channel for Hatteras-Ocracoke vehicular ferry, the state’s busiest ferry route.

Historically, charter and commercial fishing fleets had also depended on the route from Hatteras village to the end of the Hatteras spit, where they could turn toward Ocracoke or head out to the ocean.

But dramatic increases in shoaling in the channel, accompanied by rapid erosion of the spit after hurricanes Irene in 2011 and Sandy in 2012 eventually led to portions of the channel becoming impassable, and impossible to dredge. In 2014, the ferry division made a longer U-shaped channel the official ferry channel to avoid the dangerous shoaling.

Since then, additional shoaling in other inlet channels have hindered safe passage for vessels, but complicated agreements and permits were necessary to secure Corps dredging

Soon the Rollinson Channel will be realigned officially, which will expand the federally authorized area in the inlet where the Corps can dredge. Most significantly,  the South Ferry Channel and the Sloop Channel, used mostly by commercial vessels and ferries, respectively, will be allowed to be maintained by the Corps, making it easier for the government dredges to do the work when they’re already working in Rollinson.

Comparing unchecked shoaling to an overgrown lawn, Keister said that more regular dredging will also make it a lot easier to dredge. 

Once the realignment is finalized, he said, “that will allow us to be a little more creative and flexible where we can dredge and open it up.”       

First in the series: Federal dollars now available for North Carolina waterways

This is the first in a special reporting series on federal infrastructure spending and North Carolina’s navigation needs.

Millions in supplemental funds from the federal infrastructure bill signed into law last November will be spent unclogging shoaled hot spots in a handful of North Carolina’s shallow-draft inlets, giving a reprieve to the local beach towns and counties that, along with the state, have been footing much of the bill for dredging projects.

The additional funding is from the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a bipartisan bill that President Joe Biden signed into law Nov. 21, 2021. The 2022 Disaster Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act pumped an extra $22.81 billion to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ coffers.

A portion of the more than $84 million in additional funding funneled to the Corps’ Wilmington District will go toward cleaning out shoaled areas of shallow-draft inlets primarily from Carteret County south.

“What is cool about this infrastructure bill is we’ve got some projects that the federal government has not funded, has not been able to fund … for many years,” said Bob Keistler, chief of the district’s Civil Works Programs & Project Management Branch. “All those shallow-draft inlets have been federal projects for decades and decades and since about 2005 have not been funded very consistent. Many of these projects are just touching areas that we haven’t been able to touch because of funding availability.”

Shallow-draft navigation channels are defined as inlets no deeper than 16 feet, a river entrance to the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway or other interior coastal waterways. There are more than 10 shallow-draft inlet navigation channels along the state’s coast.

Other projects tapped in the central to southern part of the state’s coast include dredging portions of the Intracoastal Waterway and clearing out the Wilmington Harbor anchorage basin at the state port.

Corps officials are in the process of hashing out the finer details of the projects — prioritizing which channels get dredged first, when they may be dredged and which ones may get pumped out more than once.

“We haven’t finalized the scopes and we also haven’t finalized the schedule,” Keistler said in a late February telephone interview.

And even then, he said, plans can change thanks, in large part, to Mother Nature. If a channel that is crucial to say, a ferry route or the U.S. Coast Guard for purposes of search and rescue, shoals up to the point it creates a navigational hazard, that channel could get bumped up the schedule.

“Every project is not equal,” Keistler said. “We can give you a schedule today and next week something changes and it may adjust. We try hard not to jump around too much.”

There are five North Carolina waterway projects, including Rollinson Channel in Dare County, that will be dredged by one of the Corps’ shallow-draft dredges.

The Corps owns three such dredges for operations from Maine to Texas. One of the dredges is undergoing maintenance in a Memphis, Tennessee, shipyard. It is unclear when that dredge will be back in the small fleet.

Wilmington District has a regional plan with a handful of other districts in the Corps’ South Atlantic Division to help streamline shallow-draft projects and eliminate scheduling conflicts.

“We try to be efficient so while we’re in the neighborhood we try to do projects that are close to each other so we’re not wasting money jumping around,” Keistler said.

Central to southern North Carolina coast projects

Bulkhead Channel

Bulkhead Channel is the federal channel that stretches between Morehead City Harbor to Beaufort Harbor in Carteret County.

A little more than $500,000 has been allocated to dredging the channel, something that will “more than likely” be a one-time event, Keistler said.

Kyle Garner, Beaufort’s planning and inspections director, said in an email that the town tries at least twice yearly to schedule dredging the channel to maintain cost and keep the channel at a consistent depth.

“This channel has been used for over three centuries for mariners and is critical to the economy of the Town of Beaufort,” he said. “Our waterfront docks handle hundreds of vessels each year and without an open channel would be devastating. Also, this is used daily by commercial traffic either heading out for a catch or bringing one in, carrying a long-standing tradition. So, yes, keeping the channel open is important financially and culturally to our community.”

The channel was last dredged in the fall, a project that cost $236,570, according to Garner. The town footed nearly $55,000 of the bill, with the state contributing a little more than $109,000 and the Corps $72,400 from funds remaining from previous dredging, he said.

“The Channel currently is at a depth of 13 feet on average and is permitted to be at a depth of 17 feet, which is what its depth was back in the fall of 2021,” Garner said in the email. “So yes, it has filled in 4 feet (in) a period of a few months and if not dredged will continue at this rate and limit traffic for both commercial (and) pleasure boats.”

Keistler said the channel will likely be dredged sometime this spring.

Bogue Inlet

Funds totaling $1.04 million will go to the dredging of Bogue Inlet.

“That’ll be three or four dredging cycles,” Keistler said. “When I say dredging cycles, it’s similar to cutting grass. You cut your grass today and then three weeks later or two weeks later you may need to cut it again.”

According to information from the Carteret County Shore Protection Office, the Bogue Inlet connecting channel, which links the inlet to the Intracoastal Waterway near Cedar Point’s shore, was dredged last fall.

New River Inlet

The New River Inlet project will entail dredging portions of the federal channel between the mouth of the inlet to Jacksonville in Onslow County.

A total of $3 million has been set aside for this project.

“We were funded to address speed bumps in what we call the channels of Jacksonville,” Keistler said.

Those “speed bumps” make navigation challenging for boaters, including a commercial fleet of fishing vessels based in Sneads Ferry.

This project has been tied into a pipeline contract for work in the Intracoastal Waterway.

Dredged material from this project will more than likely be placed on North Topsail Beach’s shoreline on Topsail Island.

“The scale of material that goes on the beach from this waterway contract would be a tenth of what they need for coastal storm protection,” Keistler said. “It’s a good place to put it, but as far as providing protection to the structures, that’s not what it’s designed to do. We’re dredging because of navigation and that’s a quality to place to put the sand.”

The Corps has permitted locations on which it may place the dredged material – roughly 1,500 feet from the inlet.

“And we start pumping sand away from the inlet until we either run out of sand or money,” Keistler said.

New Topsail Inlet

A little more than $500,000 has been budgeted for dredging in New Topsail Inlet at the south end of Topsail Island.

Those funds may allow for the inlet to be dredged twice, Keistler said.

Topsail Beach Mayor Steve Smith and chairman of the Topsail Island Shoreline Protection Commission said that, right now, the inlet — about 16 feet deep and 400 feet wide — is “in pretty good shape.”

“However, there are some connecting places like Topsail Creek that possibly could use some dredging this year,” he said. “That helps not only Topsail, but it also helps all the boaters docked in Hampstead and that area of North Carolina. We look at this as a one-time event that is going to allow us to take a look at the connecting channels and make sure they stay navigable year-round.”

Carolina Beach Inlet

The $1.04 million in federal funding allocated for the dredging of Carolina Beach Inlet should get that inlet “into really, really good shape,” before tourism season kicks off Memorial Day weekend and as long as the inlet is dredged in April, said New Hanover County Shore Protection Coordinator Layton Bedsole.

“We’re three months behind the eight ball now and so it’s going to be a significant hit on that $1,040,000 to restore that depth and width now,” he said.

The county’s target is to dredge the channel every eight to 10 weeks a year.

The inlet was dredged in December, which means that if it is dredged in April, nearly double the amount of time will have passed since it was last cleared of shoaling.

“The outer reach of Carolina Beach Inlet is the most challenging reach,” Bedsole said. “We still have to clean up the inside, but nothing to the degree of the outside shoals.”

The annual budget for maintenance dredging of the inlet is $350,000 from the county and $700,000 from the state’s Shallow Draft Navigation Channel Dredging and Aquatic Weed Fund.

Each year, the county budgets $350,000 for maintenance dredging of the inlet. That money is paired with another $700,000 from the state’s Shallow Draft Navigation Channel Dredging and Aquatic Weed Fund for an annual budget of $1.05 million.

Having that funding year to year allows the county to get on the Corps’ dredging schedule as soon as possible, which can be challenging.

“The Corps’ limited dredge fleet, and the Currituck (the Corps’ hopper dredge) being in the shipyard for the last year or so, prioritized callings from the Ferry Division, Department of Defense, Coast Guard up and down the East Coast, all play into us chasing the Corps’ schedule for the shallow draft inlet fleet. We’re always chasing the schedule,” Bedsole said, adding, “The Corps works really hard to provide shallow-draft inlet access in New Hanover County.”

Other projects

Funding from the infrastructure bill also includes about $4.5 million for dredging portions of the Intracoastal and conducting inspections and evaluations on upland dredge material disposal sites. The Corps is to identify “speed bumps” in the waterway that impede navigation.

“Usually they’re in the same locations year after year,” Keistler said. “We identify those, prioritize those, and then put them out for contract.”

Funding also includes the following:

• $250,000 to conduct jetty inspections and monitoring at Masonboro Inlet.
• $30,000 for environmental monitoring at Morehead City Harbor.
• $10.25 million to dredge the Wilmington Harbor anchorage basin at the state port and update the harbor’s dredge material management plan. Material dredged from the harbor is not beach compatible and therefore must be placed in a Corps’ maintained upland disposal area.

Money from the 2022 Disaster Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act, which includes additional funding for areas that have suffered loss due to hurricanes and other natural disasters, has been earmarked for the Wrightsville Beach Coastal Storm Risk Management project.

More than $11.5 million is being allocated to renourish the beach there to compensate for damage caused during Hurricane Florence in 2018. 

“This (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) is a three-year bill so this is FY22 money we’ve got and we’ve asked for potential projects for FY23 and FY24,” Keistler said.

Next in the series: Shoaling in Outer Banks waterways

RALEIGH –The Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Water Infrastructure announced Monday that public comments are being accepted on a draft priority rating system for ranking wastewater and drinking water construction projects for funding from the Viable Utility Reserve.

Comments may be submitted until 5 p.m. Nov. 1.

The North Carolina General Assembly created the reserve in 2020 to assist local governments with utilities that are designated as distressed by the State Water Infrastructure Authority and the Local Government Commission. Under the law, the division must rank each application for authority review. The authority must consider the division’s ranking when it reviews an application.

The division and the State Water Infrastructure Authority use a priority rating system for projects seeking funding through the State Revolving Fund and State Reserve programs. This priority rating system is being considered by the authority for use in ranking applications to the reserve. The authority tasked the division with seeking public comment on the use of this rating system for reserve-funded construction projects.

Officials said the proposed rating system prioritizes assistance to community applicants with greater socioeconomic constraints. Under Category 4 of the proposed rating system, applicants from local governments that are smaller in size, charge higher water/wastewater rates, and/or have at least three indicators worse than state benchmarks (lower median household income, higher poverty rates, higher unemployment, lower population growth, and/or lower property valuation per capita) score higher, as they receive additional points in their applications.

Comments can be submitted in the following ways:

• By email to Cathy.Akroyd@ncdenr.gov with subject line “Draft VUR Priority Rating System Comments.”
• By phone to 919-707-9187.
• By mail to Cathy Akroyd, Division of Water Infrastructure, 1633 Mail Service Center,       Raleigh, NC 27699-1633.

The draft VUR Priority Rating System for wastewater and drinking water projects is available at: https://files.nc.gov/ncdeq/WI/vur/Draft-Priority-Rating-System-for-VUR-projects-with-addtl-footnote-language.pdf.

Reprinted from the Carteret County News-Times

BEAUFORT — The Carteret County Board of Commissioners narrowly voted Monday evening to accept an offer from Carolina Water Service of North Carolina to purchase the county-owned water system for $9.5 million. 

The board voted 4-3 to accept the offer, with commissioners Mark Mansfield, Robin Comer, Jimmy Farrington and Ed Wheatly in favor and commissioners Chris Chadwick, Bob Cavanaugh and Chuck Shinn opposed.

A contract with Carolina Water, a private, for-profit company, has not been finalized, though county attorney Rob Wheatly and assistant manager Gene Foxworth said a draft contract has already been prepared. The deal must go through several more steps, including receiving approval from the North Carolina Utilities Commission, before it is finalized.

The decision followed a roughly hour-long discussion among the board members, including a previous motion to retain the county-owned system that failed 3-4. The board also voted unanimously earlier in the meeting to lower water rates by 25%.

A rate increase of 95% took effect at the beginning of the new fiscal year, July 1, for the county water system, which serves around 1,200 customers mostly along the Highway 101 corridor. Commissioners voted in June to raise the rates while tabling a decision on whether to accept the offer from Carolina Water to purchase the county system.

Commissioners tabled again in July, and Monday’s regular meeting was the first time since then the matter appeared on the board’s agenda.

Carol Traxler, who lives off Highway 101 near Beaufort and is a county water customer, said during public comment her water bill had risen significantly since the increase took effect.

Commissioners said they’d received numerous calls and emails from others complaining about the rate increase, as well, which factored into the move to lower rates slightly.

Chadwick said he was in favor of exploring other options for the water system and waiting to see if the new rate adjustment had a positive impact.

On the other hand, Comer and others who voted in favor of selling said they felt rates would be lower and service would be more efficient under a private-run system.  

Following the decision to accept the offer, the board passed a motion 7-0 adopting a resolution that would allow the county to pursue potential grant funds to help pay for the water system should the deal “fall through.”

Patrick Kelly, one of the primary organizers of a group of residents opposed to the sale of the water system, said he felt “totally blindsided” and disappointed in the decision.

This story is provided courtesy of the Carteret County News-Times, a twice weekly newspaper published in Morehead City. Coastal Review partners with the News-Times to provide our readers with news of the North Carolina coast.

The Steelhead, a coastal patrol boat, arrived Aug. 6 at its new homeport at U.S. Coast Guard Station Fort Macon in Carteret County.

The 87-foot Steelhead has an 11-person crew and operates from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay near Cape Charles and Cape Henry, Virginia, to the South Carolina border.  

The Steelhead is a capable multi-mission platform designed for search and rescue, law enforcement, and fisheries patrols, as well as drug interdiction and intercepting those entering the country illegally up to 200 miles offshore. 

Steelhead joins Coast Guard Cutters Maple, Bayberry, Smilax, Richard Snyder and the Nathan Bruckenthal at Fort Macon. 

“We are pleased to announce the Coast Guard Cutter Steelhead has relocated to Fort Macon, North Carolina,” said Capt. Matt Baer, commanding officer of Coast Guard Sector North Carolina in a statement.

“As a multi-mission, maritime service with vast responsibilities and limited resources, we are constantly seeking ways to be more efficient and effective. Cutter Steelhead will conduct both law enforcement and search and rescue operations spanning the entire North Carolina coastline, providing an outstanding addition to the Coast Guard’s layered response strategy of shore-based boats, aircraft, and cutters,” Baer said. “The change of homeport will ensure critical mission support functions for cutter maintenance and personnel needs are met, while improving offshore response capabilities from the Outer Banks throughout the Crystal Coast and across southeastern North Carolina. The crew and families of the cutter Steelhead are excited to join the long-standing heritage of lifesavers who call the Coast Guard community of Carteret County their home.”

At U.S. Coast Guard Station Fort Macon in Atlantic Beach on Friday, Aug. 6, one breezy, blue-sky day before the 79^th anniversary of America’s Pacific Islands campaign in World War II, the U.S. Coast Guard convened a hundred officers, crew and family members to commission a new, fast-response cutter named for Chief Petty Officer Glen Harris, who was born in the Down East village of Stacy, married and lived in Beaufort. 

Harris, who spent much of his 25-year Coast Guard career here at Fort Macon, had also landed the first troops and run supply craft under heavy enemy fire at Tulagi, where the assault on the islands began, heroic service for which the Navy, by the hand of Adm. Chester Nimitz, awarded him the Silver Star.

On Aug. 6, a brass quintet — two trumpets, a trombone, a French horn and a tuba — set up a scant 20 yards from the gleaming white port side of the cutter Glen Harris, which was tied up at Fort Macon south wharf, and played tunes from a Sousa yesteryear for the crowd, while officers in dress whites and sabers moved forward midmorning to run through the serious steps of formally adding this ship to the fleet.

Few there knew of or mentioned service that the Glen Harris had already done during its pre-commissioned days, likely when it was on sea trials in April, suggested Coast Guard Atlantic Area Historian Dr. William Thiesen. A hurricane-like storm had blown up suddenly in the Gulf of Mexico, capsizing Seacor Power, a large 150-foot lift boat with a crew of 19 aboard, calling in Coast Guard vessels for search and rescue. The Glen Harris answered the call and saved a man, pulling aboard and rescuing one of the six crew members who survived the storm’s 12-foot seas and 100 mph winds.

Skip Bowen of Bollinger Shipyards spoke during the ceremony, acknowledging the scores of men and women who had welded and wired this 154-foot wondercraft together in Lockport, Louisiana, with its ability to run at 28 knots — “At least,” said historian Thiesen — and to launch and retrieve its own ship’s boat from a gated well in the stern at speed. 

Adm. Linda Fagan, vice commandant of the Coast Guard, by her presence conveyed the gravity of the ceremony. She declared: “This particular cutter is destined for Bahrain in the Arabian gulf where it will conduct national security operations in support of our (Department of Defense) partners in the region. We know this crew is ready and excited to get over there,” telling Lt. Reginald Reynolds that the Glen Harris was ready for service and for his captaincy and handing him his orders, which he then read aloud.

The protocols cascaded: the passing of the Long Glass, an honored telescope bound for the vessel’s bridge; the navigator’s setting of the watch …

Stacey Howley of Atlanta, the ship’s sponsor and Glen Harris’ youngest granddaughter, took the stage. A slender woman in a light-blue dress with warmth and authority in her tone, she was there “to share a little bit about Glen Harris and his energy and enduring spirit, which will no doubt be alive to help guide this incredible cutter on its future path.”

Calling him “one of the most honorable men I’ve ever known,” she described him as “an absolutely devoted husband to my grandmother, a loving and supportive father to two daughters and an extremely witty, fun-loving and sometimes mischievous grandfather to his four granddaughters … But above all, he was a man of the utmost character and integrity with a strong faith in God … an extremely humble man (who) rarely spoke about his time in World War II. But I believe if he were here with us today, he would most certainly say that his actions in the Tulagi Islands, as well as his crewmates that were by his side during the mission, were not heroic at all, but simply a reflection of the Coast Guard’s long tradition of lifesaving missions and of putting others before oneself.”

Howley closed simply: “I can hear my grandfather saying, ‘A job well done by all!’”

And then Lt. Reynolds stood, giving his first command as the commissioned Glen Harris’ captain, the order that had brought us all here this summer morning to bear witness: “Officers and crew of the Coast Guard Glen Harris, lay aboard and bring our cutter to life!”

From the men and women of the crew came the accepting shout in return: “Aye!”

And the two dozen in dress blues went marching briskly toward the edge of the wharf and up the gangplank, taking evenly spaced parade-rest positions along the ship’s port side, the newly broken and unfurled Union flag flying above them. These enacted protocols in sum sending not only a clear message but also a palpable feeling abroad: that the newly-commissioned ship had indeed come to life — and no one there in that moment was unmoved.

Reynolds spoke of Harris as “the chief” and “a surfman,” invoking the spirit and heritage of the Life-Saving Service that, melding with the Revenue Cutter Service in January 1915, then became the Coast Guard. He spoke of the crew and its training on the cutter, its journey to Key West and Mayport and on to Fort Macon. Saluting them, he said “I am honored to call them shipmates.” 

He acknowledged family members of the ship’s crew who were on hand, including his own from Hawaii who had brought him a lei to wear, and he noted as well the long separations all had accepted as their duty. Affirming with a special dignity accorded the heroic dead, Reynolds said the ship’s mission was “to preserve, honor, and be worthy of Glen Harris’ legacy.”

A single white skiff lay at the edge of the turning basin, a hundred yards or more astern of the Glen Harris; sea gulls flew over, squawking; a baby cried at the back of the crowd; and after a brief prayer of benediction, the brass quintet played the morning to a solemn close with the Navy Hymn:

O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea!

This vessel will be leaving home this fall, just as Carteret County’s Glen Harris once did to be in position in the Pacific almost 80 years ago, helping keep the forces of darkness from overrunning the world. Just as Glen Harris would do now, a sleek bright ship out upon the oceans of the world — semper paratus, always prepared.

After Greensboro reported to the state Thursday afternoon that high levels of 1,4-dioxane had been detected in wastewater discharge, Cape Fear Public Utility Authority announced later that day plans to immediately begin more frequent water sampling.

Greensboro staff reported the discharge of 1,4 dioxane into the Haw River in the effluent from the TZ Osborne Wastewater Treatment Plant to the North Carolina Division of Water Resources.

Greensboro staff alerted the authority late Thursday afternoon that 1,4-dioxane had been detected at approximately 615 parts per billion in discharge sampled Wednesday. The discharge flows to the Cape Fear River, where it would be expected to undergo significant dilution before reaching the utility’s intakes at Kings Bluff.

The EPA has identified 1,4 dioxane, a clear liquid that is highly miscible in water, as a likely human carcinogen. It has been used as a solvent stabilizer and is currently used for a wide variety of industrial purposes.

The Sweeney Plant, which treats water from the Cape Fear to produce drinking water for about 80% of utility customers, is among the few facilities equipped to treat 1,4-dioxane. Ozonation and biological filters at Sweeney typically achieve about two-thirds removal of 1,4-dioxane from raw water during treatment.

Utility staff began immediately sampling raw and treated water daily to monitor concentrations of 1,4-dioxane. Test results typically take two weeks. The utility has requested a more urgent turnaround from its contract lab and expects results early next week.

The utility has long conducted regular monitoring for 1,4-dioxane, with test results published online.

A solvent stabilizer, 1,4-dioxane is considered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to be a “likely human carcinogen.” Although 1,4-dioxane is not regulated, the EPA has established a drinking water concentration representing a 1-in-1 million cancer risk level for 1,4-dioxane of 0.35 parts per billion.

The roughly 1,200 customers served by Carteret County’s public water system will have to wait until next month to find out if commissioners will decide to sell the system.

In a unanimous vote during its regular meeting June 21, the board decided to table until its July 19 meeting a decision on whether to sell the system that has been the object of a bidding war between two companies since February. That’s when the possibility of a sale was first announced publicly.

The system, if not sold, will most likely be classified as a distressed system, or a system operated by a local government that is showing signs of failure to address financial or operating needs that will ensure the system is self-supporting.

Cary-based Aqua North Carolina and Charlotte-based Carolina Water Service each submitted unsolicited bids earlier this year after a study was performed on merging Beaufort and the county water systems. Beaufort declined the offer. Aqua’s $7 million bid was accepted as the high bid during the Feb. 15 meeting.

By the next meeting on March 15, a group of citizens — many of whom are water system customers– banded together to speak out against the sale to a private company. The group, Carteret County for Public Water, cited concerns with rate increases and water quality.

Contributing to the decision to wait is a new offer from one of the bidders that came in Thursday.

Chairman Ed Wheatly said during the meeting that the county received an offer from Carolina Water Service that guarantees a moratorium on rate hikes for five years and would do away with the existing special water district tax assessed by the county.

In June 2010, the county established a special tax district, the rate for which has been 5.5 cents per $100 of assessed property value since 2012. About 3,700 parcels, or taxpayers, are in the district but only about 1,200 are water system customers. The remaining 2,600 paying the tax are not served by the water system.

About $330,000 is generated annually from the water district tax and there’s an additional $90,000 in sales taxes generated annually.

Wheatly also noted that there has been a $5.5 million loss over the life of the system, which he called a liability, not an asset.

Commissioner Mark Mansfield’s motion to eliminate the 5.5 cent special tax and special tax district was approved. Keeping the tax in place would essentially guarantee distressed status.

“I’m not sure what will happen with the water system, but in order to not be a distressed for system, I think we need to do away with a special taxing district and do away with the 5.5 cent tax rate,” he said.

The county system checks most of the several boxes that determine if a unit is distressed, such as serving fewer than 10,000 customers, not generating enough revenue to cover expenses, asset depreciation and debt payments, and has appropriated funds to supplement the system’s operation.

County Manager Tommy Burns reminded the board that now that the water tax has been eliminated, if the county sells or keeps the systems, there’s a year of due diligence during which time a rate is needed.

Commissioner Robin Comer made a motion to increase the rate by 95% for each meter size: ¾ inch, 1-inch, 2-inch and 4-inch, which was unanimously approved.

The fee schedule for fiscal 2021 water service states that the base charge for a 3/4-inch meter flat fee, which covers the first 1,000 gallons of usage, is $27.50 a month with each additional 1,000 gallons costing $6.90. For fiscal 2022, a 3/4-inch meter basic charge flat fee is $53.65 a month for the first 1,000 gallons and $13.45 each 1,000 gallons.

The State Water Infrastructure Authority and the Local Government Commission developed in November 2020 the criteria to identify a distressed unit.

If determined distressed, the local government must conduct an asset assessment and rate study, participate in a training and educational program and develop an action plan.

Carteret County commissioners are expected to decide Monday whether to accept a bid of $9.5 million from Carolina Water Service to purchase the county water system.

The meeting is set to begin at 6 p.m. in the Carteret County Courthouse in Beaufort. The agenda is available online.

The proposed sale of the system that serves about 1,200 customers outside Beaufort city limits has worried some residents it serves. The county announced the two unsolicited bids received for the system at the February meeting. Aqua North Carolina was in the bidding war with Carolina Water Service based in Charlotte.

By the time the March meeting was held, a group of citizens against the sale established Carteret County for Public Water. The group spoke out against a sale during public comment at commissioner meetings, met with elected officials and county staff, and posted on social media. The group argues that a for-profit company should not own and operate the utility.

“We are continuing to work on how we can stop our commissioners from accepting a bid from the upset bid process and ultimately selling the county water system. We would much rather pay an increase to the current system to make it sustainable rather than to send our money to large corporations and out of our county,” states Patrick Kelly on the organization’s Facebook page. He is one of the founders of the group.

If the system does not sell, it’s likely to be classified as distressed by the State Water Infrastructure Authority. To be classified as distressed, a public water system or wastewater system operated by a local government must show signs of failure to take steps to keep the system adequately funded and maintained.

The system contains eight parcels totaling 16.49 acres, three elevated water tanks, one ground tank, three booster pump stations, the Laurel Road water treatment plant, the Jonaquin Creek wellhouse, 57 miles of water line, 600 valves, 1,206 water meters and 175 fire hydrants.

Learn More

• Bids for Carteret Water System Prompt Anger
• Distressed status likely for Carteret water system, if not sold

WILMINGTON — The Cape Fear Public Utility Authority Board has named Kenneth Waldroup as the authority’s new executive director.

Waldroup, who has 27 years of experience in the water industry and is currently an assistant director at the Raleigh Public Utilities Department, is expected to begin here later this month and will succeed Jim Flechtner, who has been the authority’s executive director since 2013 and announced his retirement in August.aldroup is a licensed professional engineer and holds a bachelor’s in nuclear engineering from N.C. State University and expects to earn a master’s in public administration this fall from N.C. Central University. He is a former member of the N.C. Environmental Management Commission and is the 2020-21 chair of the North Carolina Section of the American Water Works Association & the North Carolina Member Association of the Water Environment Federation.

“I and the rest of the Board are pleased to have Ken joining us as CFPUA’s next executive director,” said the authority’s chairman Wesley P. Corder in a statement. “Ken’s background and skillset are particularly well-suited to the tasks of continuing the important, substantial progress accomplished under Jim’s leadership and leading our organization in the years ahead as we continue to improve our service to our customers and the community.”

As executive director, Waldroup will oversee an organization with a $92 million 2022 operating budget and more than 300 employees providing water and wastewater services to about 200,000 people in Wilmington and New Hanover County. 

The Viable Utility Reserve Committee of the State Water Infrastructure Authority will meet online 9:30 a.m. Friday to discuss distressed units, or utilities with customer bases less than 10,000 that not self sufficient, or costs more to operate than is bringing in.

The May 21 committee agenda is available. The public may listen to the meeting online or call 415-655-0003 and use access code 161 905 6211.

The viable utility program offers funding to local governments with distressed water and wastewater units to become viable utility systems using long-term solutions.

The authority is an independent body with primary responsibility for awarding federal and state funding for water and wastewater infrastructure projects. Other responsibilities include developing a state water infrastructure master plan, recommending ways to maximize the use of available loan and grant funding resources, and examining best and emerging practices.

BEAUFORT — Carteret County commissioners have two options when it comes to the county-owned water system that serves about 1,200 customers.

Commissioners can either vote to sell to one of two private companies, despite protests from numerous residents, or deal with a system that will most likely be identified as a distressed unit, or system that isn’t profitable enough to be self-sustaining and maintained, by the State Water Infrastructure Authority.

County Manager Tommy Burns told the board of commissioners during its April 19 meeting at the county courthouse that the authority discussed the county’s system during its April 14 meeting. The authority is an independent group that awards funding for water and wastewater infrastructure projects. Authority members decided to hold off due to the potential sale to companies that have been in a monthslong bidding war.

The board of commissioners is scheduled to meet at 6 p.m. Monday, May 17, for its monthly meeting but the agenda does not include discussion regarding the sale of the water system or its potential to be considered for distressed status. Opponents of the proposed sale say they plan to be there anyway to speak during public comment, including those from the Carteret County for Public Water group that believe a sale to a for-profit company could lead to higher rates and poorer water quality.

Selling the system was first discussed in December 2019 when the county received a grant from the state to study a potential merger of the system with the town of Beaufort. In March 2020, Beaufort told the county no on the merger, but two private utilities did express interest after learning about the study. Between last summer and January, county staff met with both parties and the bidding began with Carolina Water Systems Inc. of Charlotte submitting in January an unsolicited offer of $4.9 million and Aqua North Carolina an unsolicited bid of $7 million.

There has been a back and forth between the two companies on upset bids. Rachel Hammer, county clerk, received April 27 the latest upset bid of $9.5 million from Carolina Water, and ran a legal ad May 2 in the Carteret County News-Times with the latest amount, starting the 10-day upset bid process yet again. The upset bid expired at 5 p.m. Wednesday.

“The potential of selling the system has caused the State Infrastructure Authority to table designating the system as distressed,” Burns explained in April. If the authority does label the county water system as financially distressed, “there’s a lot of issues that we’ve got to go through as a community,” including commissioners undergoing special training to learn how to make the system more profitable and how to make it a truly user-fee supported system.

The authority determines if a system is distressed status, which is a public water system or wastewater system owned by a local government showing signs of failure to make enough money to be managed, operated and maintained, based on 2020 legislation and criteria adopted in November. Establishing criteria to determine if a unit is distressed, such as if it serves less than 10,000 customers and costs more to operate than it makes annually, is a step for the authority to distribute $9 million through the new viable utility reserve grants to help local governments with infrastructure, study rates, or look into alternatives that provide a long-term, viable solution.

Jon Risgaard, acting division director for the North Carolina Division of Water Infrastructure, told Coastal Review in an email last week that if the county sells, it removes them from the viable utility process simply because that only applies to municipal systems, not private.

“But they do not have to sell. For them, they have some inherent challenges (customer density, high rates, revenue doesn’t cover expenditures) and the viable utility process makes sure there is a plan to address those challenges,” he said.

Gene Foxworth, planning director and assistant county manager, told Coastal Review Monday that the discussion on the system being distressed revolves around the fact that the system is supported partially by a district tax, not solely by usage billed monthly.

The county commissioners may look at increasing the rates charged for usage to fully support the system, he said.

Currently, updates to the system discharge needs to be made but “With an approximately 20-year-old system, other upgrades will be required in the future as with any aging asset,” Foxworth said. The system has reached 50% of its lifespan, or depreciated by half since it was built 20 years ago.

Burns explained in April that the authority looks at the debt service coverage ratio, and “one of the things that is probably going to be a detriment to us is that the system should not be supported by other funds such as the water taxing district.”

He said that an enterprise utility fund should be self-supporting through user rates and fees but the county system, in addition to rates and fees based on consumption, relies on a water district tax subsidy.

The water district is assessed at 5.5 cents per $100 for all parcels in the district, regardless of whether the taxpayer is a user of the water system or not. About $330,000 is generated annually from the water district tax and there’s an additional $90,000 in sales taxes generated annually.

There’s about 3,720 parcels in the water tax district but only 1,208 are on the system, so 2,590 are paying a tax on system they don’t use.

The system operates at an average annual loss of $110,184. “Substantial rate increases will be needed to maintain the system,” Burns said, adding that there had been a 15% rate increase during the past year.

“I think for so many years the emphasis was just on providing the water service, as opposed to making sure it was fair and ethical for all the taxpayers in the county and not subsidized,” Burns said.

Another factor that would make the system distressed under the authority’s criteria is that the system serves less than 10,000. “So obviously we come up on the radar screen just because, you know, our system only supports about 1,200 customers,” Burns said.

Beaufort resident Patrick Kelly is one of the 1,200 customers and helped form the Carteret County for Public Water group to voice opposition after learning about the potential sale following the February board meeting, when it was first discussed in public.

Residents, including Kelly, spoke out against the proposed sale during the public comment portion of the March commissioners’ meeting and commissioners gave the group an expanded opportunity to address the board during its April meeting.

Kelly said in a follow-up interview with Coastal Review that he believes not selling the system, even if it becomes distressed status, would allow for time remedy the situation.

“I also believe that with a rate increase of less than would be possible under a private, for-profit company could keep the county from having a distressed system,” he said.

Kelly in a social media post Tuesday wrote that some members of the group met with two of the county commissioners where they discussed further ideas of “how we can all work together and keep the system maintained by the County” and they intent to meet with other commissioners.

“We still plan to attend the meetings and voice our opinion during public comment and ensure that the commissioners know we are still concerned,” Kelly said.

Burns reiterated during the April 14 meeting that the county had not agreed to sell the water system and at any time in the process the county has the right to reject any and all offers for any reason or for no reason. He added that the bids were unsolicited but the county decided to move forward with the upset bid process, per state law.

If the sale of the system is approved by commissioners, there would need to be additional appraisals, a purchase agreement negotiated and agreed upon and other due diligence executed by the high bidder, which involves inspecting the system. The final authority on the sale would come from the North Carolina Utilities Commission, Burn said.

If the system is not sold and the authority determines the county meets the criteria for a distressed system, the county would have to complete several steps, including special training for the commissioners making the system financially viable and self-sustaining as well as develop plans to maintain and repair the facility, he added.

BEAUFORT — Residents who rely on Carteret County’s public water system are putting pressure on commissioners not to sell the system to either of two private companies currently engaged in a bidding war.

Two companies have submitted competing bids for the water system that serves more than 1,200 customers. The Carteret County Board of Commissioners is expected to discuss a potential sale when they meet April 19 in the county administration building in Beaufort. The public will have the opportunity to comment during the meeting and the county manager also plans to provide additional information, County Clerk Rachel Hammer told Coastal Review.

“No one ever reached out to the public. Shouldn’t we be notified at all?”

Clark Patton, Carteret County water customer

Although a possible merger with Beaufort’s water system had been discussed and declined by the town last year, word of a potential sale to one of two for-profit companies that had submitted unsolicited bids early this year came during the county commissioners’ meeting held Feb. 15, a surprise to many who depend on the system. During the board’s meeting in March, residents spoke out against the potential sale and what they described as a lack of transparency in the matter.

“No one ever reached out to the public. Shouldn’t we be notified at all?” asked Clark Patton of Shell Landing Road, about a mile outside of Beaufort.

Patton said he was one of the first to tap into the county system, which went online more than 15 years ago. He wanted to know why the board was considering selling a system the county valued at $12 million for millions less.

Assistant County Manager Gene Foxworth told Coastal Review that despite what residents had heard, commissioners had not voted to sell the county water system. Rather the unsolicited offers triggered a process defined by state law that is still ongoing.

“Without a special called meeting, which is not currently scheduled, the earliest the commissioners will consider accepting or rejecting offers on the water system would be the April 19 meeting. This is of course assuming the upset bid period has ended because we received no additional bids,” Foxworth said.

A county board can choose to accept or reject an offer to sell property to the highest bidder, according to state law. A sale must also be approved by the North Carolina Utilities Commission.

Bids, upset bids

Carolina Water Systems Inc. of Charlotte submitted Jan. 13 its unsolicited offer of $4.9 million. Around the same time, Aqua North Carolina, part of a national company based in Pennsylvania that serves more than 3 million water and wastewater customers in eight states, submitted an unsolicited bid of $7 million.

Both bids were presented to the county board of commissioners during its Feb. 15 meeting. The $7 million bid was accepted as the high offer for the upset bid process. The 10-day period for this first upset bid was Feb. 21-March 3.

On March 1, the county received an upset bid of $7.5 million from Carolina Water Systems, prompting yet another 10-day upset bid period.

Carolina Water Systems then submitted March 23 another upset bid of $8.5 million, an offer still well below the system’s $12.3 million value as determined in a December 2019 study on merging the county system with that of Beaufort’s. The county is still in the upset bid process for the system. A public notice was published in the Carteret County News-Times April 4 announcing the 10-day upset bid period.

According to the public notice, the water system is eight parcels or real property totaling about 16.49 acres. There are three elevated water tanks, one ground tank, three booster pump stations, the Laurel Road Water Treatment Plant in Beaufort, the Jonaquin Creek Well House, about 57 miles of water line, 600 valves, 1,206 water meters, 175 fire hydrants. The water lines extend to the Craven County line along N.C. 101 and into the Mill Creek area. Lines also extend from Beaufort town limits along N.C. 70 to East Carteret High School and along Merrimon Road to Laurel Road.

The county also owns and operates Merrimon Water System, a small water system about 20 miles north of the Laurel and Merrimon Road intersection that serves about 30 customers.

Study sparked interest

Foxworth told the board during its meeting Feb. 15 that in 2019, the county received a state grant to study merging the county water system with Beaufort’s system. He said that Beaufort officials, when approached in March 2020, were not interested in a merger.

“I said, ‘you know, well, we’d entertain an offer,’ and by law the statute says that we can receive, solicit or negotiate. So, if somebody brings us an offer, then I have a fiduciary obligation to present that offer to you, whether I think it’s ludicrous or not.”

Tommy Burns, Carteret County Manager

“Subsequently, two private water companies approached us about acquiring the system. That was Carolina Water Systems and Aqua NC. As with any other disposition of property, you all (commissioners) stated your preference for the upset bid process,” Foxworth told the county board in February.

Between June 2020 and January, County Manager Tommy Burns, Foxworth and Rob Wheatly, the county attorney, had multiple conversations with officials of both companies and provided detailed information on the water system, according to a timeline of events provided by the county.

During commissioners’ March 15 meeting, Commissioner Mark Mansfield asked Burns whether the county had solicited bids for the water system.

“We were actually approached by the utility companies,” Burns responded, adding that the companies wanted to know if the county was interested in selling the system. “I said, ‘you know, well, we’d entertain an offer,’ and by law the statute says that we can receive, solicit or negotiate. So, if somebody brings us an offer, then I have a fiduciary obligation to present that offer to you, whether I think it’s ludicrous or not.”

State regulation

Foxworth told Coastal Review that both companies bidding on the water system own and manage numerous systems around the state and are regulated by the North Carolina Utilities Commission. “If the water system were sold to either of them, they would be required to comply with those regulations pertaining to all water systems owned by private utilities.”

Bill Grantmyre is a staff attorney with the Public Staff of the North Carolina Utilities Commission, an independent agency not subject to the supervision, direction, or control of the North Carolina Utilities Commission.

“We represent the using and consuming public, that is the customers, in all cases before the Utilities Commission. We are the consumer advocate,” he told Coastal Review.

Grantmyre explained that statute, GS 62-133.1A, was passed in June 2018 to allow water and wastewater utilities to establish a rate base by using the fair value of the utility property instead of the original cost to acquire an existing water or wastewater system owned by a municipality, county, authority or district.

In December 2019, Aqua North Carolina and Carolina Water Service Inc., of North Carolina – the two companies that bid on the Carteret County system — filed a petition to establish rules on how to implement the statute. The rules were adopted in December 2020.

The fair value for rate-making processes under the statute is the average of three separate appraisals performed by appraisers representing the buyer, the seller and the Public Staff of the Utilities Commission.

“The original source of funding for all or any portions of the water and sewer assets being acquired is not relevant to an evaluation of fair value,” according to the statute.

The application must include copies of the appraisals, any identified deficiencies, a five-year plan for needed infrastructure improvements by the acquiring entity and projected rate impact for the selling entity’s customers for the next five years. The selling utility’s rates shall be the rates charged to the customers of the acquiring public utility until the acquiring public utility’s next general rate case, unless otherwise ordered by the commission for good cause shown, the rules state.

“We wanted the customers to know of a future rate case because the bigger the rate base, the upward pressure on rates. And you don’t want the customers being blindsided by this huge rate increase because it comes two or three years after the acquisition,” he said.

If the application submitted by the utility to the commission meets all the requirements, the commission must issue its final order approving or denying the application within six months of the date the application was filed.

The commission retains authority to set rates for the acquired system in future rate cases. The commission can adjust the fair value as it deems appropriate and in the public interest.

“All this is going to take months because they have to come to some agreement,” Grantmyre said.

Opponents’ concerns

Patton, who spoke at the board’s meeting in March, was one of numerous residents who showed up to object to the proposed sale and was part of a recently formed opposition group called Carteret County for Public Water. The group has published a website and a Facebook page.

Patrick Kelly, who also resides on Shell Landing Road, is an organizer of the group. He told the board that he opposed privatization.

“If you have no competition, you can charge whatever you want. And no one has a choice whether or not they’re going to pay that.”

Patrick Kelly, Carteret County water customer

“I’m not against private companies,” but when it comes to utilities such as water, “if you have no competition, you can charge whatever you want. And no one has a choice whether or not they’re going to pay that or not.” He said he was also concerned about the safety of the water if the utility is sold to a private company.

Later, in an interview with Coastal Review, Kelly said that the group is frustrated with the lack of transparency on the part of county officials.

“We don’t feel like they’re educating themselves enough to make the best decision for the citizens,” he said. “Not a single person that I’ve talked to or who has come forward for (the water system) not to be sold to a private company is asking for this to be subsidized by anybody else. We just don’t want to pay a private company, pay their shareholders, and whatever other profits they need to make. We would rather pay more to the county to make it sustainable.”

Steve Bolding has lived for 10 years in Deerfield Shores, a subdivision outside Beaufort. As a water system customer, he told the board in March that other alternatives should be considered.

“I oppose any municipal water system sale to a for-profit company,” he said.

Michael Dykstra, also a resident of Deerfield Shores, told the board he first heard about this proposed sale on Feb. 24. When he began looking for answers, including if it was for financial reasons, answers were hard to get.

“I believe that it is not in the best interest of the citizens of Carteret County to sell a nonprofit county water system to a for-profit, private company unless there are some really compelling financial reasons that have not yet been explained to the public,” he said. “I’d like to keep it in the county because I think the county people who run it are going to be more responsive to my needs and the needs of the rest of the people than some private company that’s business address is somewhere else.”

Residents paid in

Dee Meshaw, the county finance director, told Coastal Review that the system was built over several years with a combination of funding sources, including a special tax for residents served by county water.

“The capital investment is approximately $12,120,000, and is a combination of grants, loans, local funding such as tap fees and sales tax refunds, and developer paid infrastructure that was donated to the County at project completion,” Meshaw wrote in an email.

In fiscal 2003-05, the county built the first two phases of the water plant and distribution system using about $2.97 million in state grants and revolving loans totaling $3.39 million. Other sources totaled about $152,000 and included state sales tax refunds and tap fees, Meshaw said.

In fiscal 2013 and 2014, the county made a major system improvement with the construction of a water line looping project, and as part of that project, fire hydrants were installed. The improvement was funded by state and U.S. Department of Agriculture grants totaling about $2.19 million, a USDA loan of $1.05 million, and about $144,000 from other sources such as sales tax refunds and water fund reserves, she said.

In addition to their usage costs and property taxes, residents living in areas served by the county system have for years been assessed a special tax to pay for water supply and distribution services. The county established the special tax district in June 2010 and the tax rate in the district has been 5.5 cents since 2012. In addition, sales tax revenues in the district are used to support the water operations.

The special tax fund and sales tax revenues cover the operations of the water system as the county’s only enterprise fund.

The current water system budget is $1.16 million and about 1,205 customers are served by the system.

“The County understands the importance of an increased customer base and will continue efforts to add potential new customers. The County also understands the current system’s infrastructure is aging. It is important that funding start to be accumulated for preventative maintenance and repair of the main water lines,” according to the county’s adopted 2021 budget.

Reprinted from the Carteret County News-Times

They did not agree on a means to fully pay for it, but Beaufort commissioners agreed to accept a $23.6 million package of low-interest loans and grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a major overhaul of water, sewer and stormwater infrastructure.

The USDA Rural Development’s Water and Waste Disposal Loan and Grant Program offer, and a motion to accept the terms took place during a special board of commissioners meeting March 1.

Coupled with budgeted borrowing for around $6 million in street paving projects, the combined effort to repair and replace underground infrastructure before resurfacing streets totals around $30 million.

Commissioners John Hagle, Charles McDonald and Ann Carter said they did not support an increase in water rates or property taxes in town to accommodate the borrowing.

The borrowing would not affect sewer rates, currently more than double water rates and higher for those on the system outside of town.

The work will include sewer collection system repairs, rehabilitation and replacement, water distribution system main replacements, and stormwater collection and transmission pipe replacements and upsizing.

The town applied for $9.03 million in grant funding for sewer upgrades, to be coupled with a little more than $3 million in loans. The USDA’s return offer included a sewer package with $5 million in grant funds and $7 million in borrowing, for a total of $12 million.

The proposed areas for sewer work include stretches in the southern side of town, some on N.C. 101 and along Live Oak Street corridor.

The town hoped for $830,100 in grants with $7.2 million in loans for water upgrades. The USDA’s offer included no grant funding but offered more than $8 million in borrowing. The water project, mostly focused in the southern part of town, comes in at $8.03 million.

For stormwater improvement funding, the town sought $3.43 million in borrowing. The USDA offered $500,000 in grants to pair with a loan of more than $3.5 million.

The funding for stormwater, sewer and water totals $23,579,000. Financing will be at a rate of 1.25% over 40 years. Town Manager John Day said the lifespan of the new infrastructure is likely 60 years.

According to staff, the full borrowing exceeds the amount the town budgeted for the effort. Under the adopted five-year plan, Beaufort has $350,000 available annually for debt service for water and sewer and $120,000 annually for stormwater.

The stormwater grant means the town can take on the borrowing for that work, but the water and sewer offers require an additional roughly $151,000 annually in debt service.

Staff made several suggestions to close the funding gap. The board is set to discuss covering the borrowing deficit at its March 22 work session.

The start of water, sewer and stormwater upgrades is still some time off. Day said the town has to finalize the funding agreement and other administrative steps, in turn allowing engineering firm Rivers & Associates to preparing engineering and construction documents prior to sending out the work for bids. That design period is expected to last around a year.

Once a contractor is approved, the sewer improvements are expected to take up to two years, while the water project is estimated at 18 months.

This story is provided courtesy of the Carteret County News-Times, a tri-weekly newspaper published in Morehead City. Coastal Review Online partners with the News-Times to provide our readers with news of the North Carolina coast.

Nearly $300 million in loans and grants will help pay for almost 100 drinking water and wastewater projects across the state, including a handful on the coast.

Gov. Roy Cooper announced Tuesday that $282 million for 94 projects was approved at the State Water Infrastructure Authority’s Feb. 10 meeting. The authority is an independent body that awards federal and state funding for water and wastewater infrastructure projects.

“North Carolina’s communities need resilient, viable water infrastructure systems to support economic development. Funding these projects helps counties and towns with aging water infrastructure deliver clean, safe water to attract new jobs and keep people healthy,” said Cooper in a statement.

Projects on the coast include the following:

• Brunswick County will receive a $2,852,818 grant to pay for extensive rehabilitation of the sewer system in Navassa. Brunswick County will also receive $2,218,967 through a Drinking Water State Revolving Fund loan, with 100% principal forgiveness, for extensive rehabilitation of Navassa’s drinking water system. Navassa recently consolidated with Brunswick County.
• Surf City will receive for water system resiliency projects a total of $2,805,000 and $2,370,553 total for wastewater treatment plant resiliency improvements.
• The Rocky Point Topsail Water and Sewer District will receive for reverse osmosis wastewater treatment plant and associated improvements a total of $3,750,000 in funding.
• New Bern will receive $855,000 in total funding for Duffyfield Stormwater Enhancement.
• The Cape Fear Public Utility Authority will receive $4,590,308 in total funding for rehabilitation and replacement of a gravity sewer.
• Washington will receive for pump station flood protection and sewer rehabilitation a total of $2,500,000 in funding.
• Chocowinity will receive $150,000 for an asset inventory and assessment.

A list of all projects funded statewide by town and/or county is available at February 2021 State Water Infrastructure Authority Funding Award Summary.

Studies show that the state needs from $17 billion to $26 billion in upgrades to its water and sewer infrastructure. The funding award summary document shows that the amount of funding requested by towns in this round alone is $850 million, significantly more than the $282.3 million in available.

Funding is through Drinking Water State Revolving Fund loan program, Clean Water State Revolving Fund loan program, the Drinking Water and Wastewater State Reserve programs, and the Additional Supplemental Appropriations for Disaster Relief Act, 2019, or ASADRA, which funds resiliency-focused projects at drinking water facilities and wastewater treatment works impacted by Hurricanes Florence and Michael. The state provided more than $17 million in required matching funds.

Also during the February meeting, the authority approved the distressed unit designation for Askewville in Bertie County, as well as for Robersonville, Ronda and Wilkesboro in western North Carolina, bringing the total to eight. The authority in November deemed Bethel, Eureka, Kingstown and Cliffside as distressed.

The authority will consider 110 more local government units for the designation. Designations are based on distressed unit criteria, a first step in a closer evaluation of the utility’s status and a factor in the allocation of $9 million in funding made available through Viable Utility Reserve legislation, Session Law 2020-79, signed into law by Cooper in July 2020.

Kim Colson, authority chair and director of the Division of Water Infrastructure, emphasized that for any unit identified in the assessment, that town may be experiencing issues that are widespread in the state.

“Many municipalities are struggling, and that struggle is symptomatic of the overall condition of the rural economy and the challenges of managing aging infrastructure issues and associated costs. The number of units that initially met the criteria is indicative of the significant need for funding,” Colson said.

The application period for the next round of funding for water and wastewater infrastructure projects ends April 30. The division will conduct training sessions virtually March 2 and March 5 for applicants interested in applying. Instructions for registering and attending virtually through WebEx are at https://files.nc.gov/ncdeq/WI/2021-Spring-Training-Announcement-FINAL-1-28-21.pdf

WILMINGTON – A public utility will soon toss in a bid to become the new owners of the locks and dams on the Cape Fear River between Fayetteville and Wilmington.

Fayetteville Public Works Commission, or PWC, was expected to submit a letter of intent this month to take ownership of three locks and dams currently owned and managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“That’s our plan,” Carolyn Justice-Hinson, the commission’s communications and community relations officer, said last week in an interview. “I think the plan will be (to submit a letter of intent) in the next one to two weeks, but I know everything is in the works to prepare it.”

If the federal government relinquishes ownership of the system of three locks and dams to the commission, the commission would transfer possession and management of Lock and Dam No. 1 to the Lower Cape Fear Sewer & Water Authority in Leland.

The Corps released in January a draft disposition study of the locks and dams system and is recommending the deauthorization and transfer of the structures.

That study was initiated in 2018 because the locks and dams, built decades ago to maintain a navigable channel for commercial barges traveling from Wilmington to Fayetteville, are no longer needed for the purpose in which they were constructed. Commercial use ceased in 1995.

Transfer of the locks and dams would be free with the new owners accepting responsibility for all future maintenance costs.

Fayetteville PWC is following the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, which submitted its letter of intent Feb. 28 on behalf of the state.

“We don’t see this as a competition, we want the interests of all basin stakeholders addressed,” Justice-Hinson said in an email following a telephone interview. “PWC has met with state leaders on the issue and as mentioned, we see this as a collaborative effort to protect the interest of the Cape Fear River Basin.”

From a local standpoint, the stakes are high because, if the locks and dams were to be abandoned that would jeopardize the drinking water supply to thousands of customers.

The William O. Huske Lock & Dam No. 3, which is about 17 miles southeast of Fayetteville, is “critical to our water supply,” Justice-Hinson said.

PWC provides water to a population of about 200,000 Cumberland County residents, including Army base Fort Bragg, she said.

Jerry Pierce, interim executive director of the Lower Cape Fear Sewer & Water Authority, said the utilities simply want to protect their regions’ water supplies.

“A representative of the state has told us on numerous occasions that there are five stakeholder groups and that water supply is equal to the other four,” he said. “We believe that water supply is more important than recreation and some of the other things they talked about.”

In December, DEQ hosted a meeting where community organizations, local utilities and leaders discussed their priorities and concerns.

Division officials met again last month with local utilities “to further discuss their interests and reinforce that the state would continue to prioritize protecting water supply for the communities that rely on these areas for their drinking water,” according to a DEQ press release.

What troubles local officials is a bill the North Carolina General Assembly enacted more than a decade ago to accept, with conditions, the transfer of the locks and dams.

House Bill 2785 allows the state to accept transfer of the locks and dams and all federally owned adjacent lands with the stipulation that all three structures be “properly refurbished” and rock arch rapids fish ladders constructed at each one.

“If the state can’t meet this requirement, the L&D would be abandoned if another entity (like PWC) wasn’t granted ownership,” Justice-Hinson said in the email. “If the L&D are abandoned, it jeopardizes the water supply and other interests are not addressed so our Letter of Intent provides options to prevent this from occurring.”

Lock & Dam No. 1 at Kings Bluff, about 39 miles above Wilmington on the river, is the only one of the three structures with a rock arch rapids designed to allow migratory fish such as shad, river herring, striped bass, Atlantic sturgeon and shortnose sturgeon to travel upstream.

“We’re happy with the rock ladder,” Pierce said. “We certainly wouldn’t take it out.”

Sarah Young Perkins, Division of Water Resources public information officer, said in an email that the state is studying the costs to install fish ladders at the other two locks and dams.

“The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has deemed all three locks and dams substantially safe and currently in acceptable condition,” she said. “The State continues to have productive conservations with our federal, state and local leaders about anticipated costs and the need for dedicated appropriations from the General Assembly in the coming years. Locks and Dams 2 and 3 continue to be studied for associated costs with modifications that will be necessary to ensure fish passage.”

Cape Fear River Partnership Coordinator Dawn York said a project study is back underway to evaluate a preferred model for a fish ladder at Lock & Dam No. 3.

“To add to that is recent discussions and thought processes of what to do at Lock and Dam No. 2 considering there isn’t a major water intake there,” York said. “So, there is some consideration and evaluation of data to analyze whether Lock and Dam No. 2 removal would be feasible. If Lock and Dam 2 were to be removed it would open up approximately 56 miles of riverine habitat for federally managed and listed anadromous fish. That’s a lot of tributaries opened up.”

What’s next?

The Corps’ Wilmington District will send its final report to the South Atlantic Division on May 22, according to Dave Connolly, the district’s public affairs chief.

That study will not recommend which entity should receive ownership of the locks and dams and accompanying property, he said in an email.

“The decision will ultimately be made by the General Services Administration, or GSA,” Connolly said.

The process, he explains, generally goes like this:

1. A report and recommendation of excess, or RROE, will be submitted, along with environmental and cultural resources clearances, to Corps’ headquarters in Washington for approval.
2. Once the RROE is approved, the Corps will determine whether the Department of Defense has any interest in the property. If not, another report will be prepared and sent to the appropriate GSA regional office.

“GSA would perform the entire disposal process including screening with HUD, and other-than DOD Federal, state and local governments,” Connolly said. “Congress also has the ability to transfer the locks and dams to an entity through special legislation.”

State officials estimate a transfer will take between two to five years.