North Carolina’s Attorney General Jeff Jackson highlighted the impact of recently cancelled Federal Emergency Management funding in a visit to Pollocksville on Tuesday.
FEMA cancelled more than $200 million in storm resiliency funding for the state, and the small Jones County town was supposed to get $1.1 million of it. Jackson has sued the federal government over the funding cancellation – saying FEMA doesn’t have the authority to cancel congressionally appropriated spending.
"Congress gave that money to FEMA and told FEMA how to spend it,” he said. “They said, ‘We want you to spend it helping small towns like Pollocksville defend themselves against the next flood.' That is exactly what Pollocksville was doing with this money.”
When Hurricane Florence hit in 2018, Pollocksville experienced severe flooding, with about 75 buildings sustaining major damage. Pollocksville Mayor Jay Bender said the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities funding would have been used to elevate the floors of commercial buildings to help prevent future flooding.
“It was going to elevate or raise five to six to seven commercial properties that are currently vacant,” he explained, “And we have no business, and so the idea was to entice people to come with a building that was flood-free.”
But just days before the first step toward those improvements, he said the project was left in the lurch.
“We lost money in the process,” Bender added. “We spent money, we got a contractor, we got CDDL as our administrator, and four days before we were assigned the document, starting the work, the rug was pulled out from under us.”
The mayor of a neighboring small town in Jones County, Maysville Mayor Wayne Sayland, said $3 million in BRIC funding for a ditch project meant to prevent flooding in about half of the town was also pulled.
“We were told, 'Yes … it's been approved,' but now it's gone. So, we’ve got to get it back,” he said, “Maysville needs it desperately.”
Other cancelled grants in eastern North Carolina include more than $9 million for drainage improvements and stream restoration in Greenville and nearly $300,000 for an assessment of the Duffyfield Canal in New Bern.
