Attorney General Jeff Jackson and Hillsborough Mayor Mark Bell look out at the Eno River after it was flooded with wastewater. (Photo: Brandon Kingdollar/NC Newsline)
Attorney General Jeff Jackson traveled to Hillsborough on Thursday to visit a pumping station that flooded during Tropical Storm Chantal, spilling millions of gallons of wastewater into area rivers.
Jackson made the visit to the Hillsborough River Pumping Station to bring awareness to flood resilience funding that was frozen by the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), of which roughly $5.1 million would have gone toward the construction of a new pumping facility on a hill outside of the floodplain. Flooding from Tropical Storm Chantal on July 6 rendered the existing pumping station inoperable, however, leading to the sewage spill.
A photo of flooding at the River Pump Station on July 7 in the wake of Tropical Storm Chantal. (Courtesy of the Town of Hillsborough)“We’re talking about millions of gallons of untreated sewage being swept into the Eno River, which dumps into Falls River, which is the the river that I live next to. It’s the one that my kids get their drinking water from,” Jackson told reporters. “This is as clear an example as possible of why these funds were well-allocated and deserved to go where they were pledged to go.”
On July 16, Jackson joined a lawsuit with 19 other states challenging FEMA’ s decision to withhold funding issued through the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program. According to Jackson, the agency owes $200 million to North Carolina for more than 60 already-approved sewage, drinking water, and flood resilience projects in the state.
“You’re forcing us to sue you in order to make you keep your word,” Jackson said. “The town of Hillsborough jumped through an enormous number of hoops to be eligible for these funds from FEMA. They did everything that FEMA asked them to do, and at the last minute, after they were approved, FEMA went back on their word.”
Local officials also drew attention to a planned BRIC-funded water supply project that would have allowed Hillsborough to maintain access to drinking water during an emergency through the Orange Water and Sewer Authority — including the UNC Hospitals Hillsborough Campus. Like the new pumping station, the town received funding through the planning phase before it was cut off without warning in the construction phase.
“Hillsborough sought and was awarded two BRIC grants by FEMA to help strengthen our water and sewer infrastructure, only to have them canceled without warning,” said Hillsborough Mayor Mark Bell. “We are scrambling to identify alternative funding sources to stay on track with these two critical projects, but the easiest, the fastest, and most common sense thing to do is to restore the BRIC grants.”
Governor Josh Stein made a similar call on a trip last week where he surveyed Chapel Hill businesses and homes flooded out by the storm. “There’s federal funding called the BRIC program that is intended for resilience. Unfortunately, the Trump administration turned that spigot off,” he said. “We’re in court right now to try to get that spigot turned back on.”
The BRIC program was also the subject of controversy in 2024 in the wake of Hurricane Helene, when state officials determined that outdated building codes in North Carolina led the state to lose out on roughly $70 million in BRIC funding, about $18 million of which would have gone to the western part of the state for flood preparation.
Jackson said the harm to communities like Hillsborough from the Trump administration action is more evidence that North Carolinians benefit from having an independent attorney general with the ability to take the federal government to court — a power that Republican lawmakers in the General Assembly have sought to eliminate.
“If you believe in using this office in a nonpartisan way, then you’d better go to bat for water and sewer, because that is the definition of nonpartisan,” he said. “There’s nothing woke about this pump station, nothing DEI about this pump station, nothing Green New Deal about it. It’s in a place that floods.”
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