ST. PAUL – Some Southwest Virginia localities are seeing grants cut off after earlier approval, and Virginia Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Warner said the situation is creating a lack of confidence in the federal government’s fiscal commitments.
Pound Town Council Member Leabern Kennedy and Russell County Supervisor Lou Ann Wallace both raised the issue to Warner during a town hall meeting in St. Paul Monday.
Pound, in Wise County, and Russell County’s Dante community had been part of an Environmental Protection agency funded Community Strong program for community improvements. Dungannon also was part of the program.
Wallace said the administration grant stoppage also halted planning to turn an old railroad depot into a resiliency center to provide shelter and resources in case of disaster or emergency.
Dungannon residents found in March that Community Strong grants money to plan for improvements around that town’s depot had been paused before cuts were announced.
“I can understand if they were pausing unawarded grants,” Kennedy told Warner, “but these grants had been awarded already.”
Trump administration cuts to the Community Strong grant and other funding streams have stopped a downtown project to replace a demolished bank building and stabilize a nearby slide area to build a park, Kennedy told Warner. The demolition has been done but the slide work is incomplete.
Halts on another EPA grant and a state Department of Emergency Management grant for the slide repair have stopped the Pound project and efforts to prepare for flood mitigation, Kennedy said.
“We’re watching flood waters rise all around us,” said Kennedy. “Letcher County in 2020, Pikeville and Tennessee recently, our time’s coming.”
“Communities assumed they had this money, and now they don’t,” Wallace added.
Warner said he agreed with Kennedy and Wallace’s concerns, adding that he was disappointed with the administration’s Virginia flooding disaster declaration two months after February’s round of floods.
“If Congress keeps sitting back and letting all power go to the president then what goes around comes around,” Warner said. “This is not how you save money. Speaking as a governor and a businessman, you save it for a short period of time and then you’ve got costs that come out of the fact you didn’t do it.”
“We’ve got enough lack of faith in this country,” Warner said, adding that other funds including $4.2 billion in federal broadband expansion funds are not being spent.
“We’ve got to have reliability that the government is going to keep its words,” Warner said.