(The Center Square) – More than two months after a bicameral, bipartisan request led by two North Carolina Republican congressmen, states with 19 Democratic governors and one Republican are suing the Trump administration for FEMA money.
Attorney General Jeff Jackson added North Carolina as a complainant, he said Wednesday, calling the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program “a lifeline of our towns and cities trying to make sure every resident has clean and reliable water to drink, a functioning sewage system, and measures in place to prevent the next storm from devastating their communities.”
For evidence he provided a listing of projects impacted, from the $10.9 million infrastructure construction on 53 acres in Princeville – population 1,254 – to the $22.5 million for a pump station relocation in Salisbury – population 35,000 – along the Yadkin River. Princeville was drowned, literally, by Hurricanes Floyd (1999) and Matthew (2016); Salisbury got a share of Hurricane Helene last fall.
President Donald Trump’s first trip away from the White House after inauguration in January was to the mountains to see damage from Helene. The state had 107 fatalities and an estimated $60 billion in damage; 236 were killed in the South. He said then, and has since, that states often are better at disaster recovery than interlopers such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and he would seek a solution to help that might even lead to the 46-year-old program’s demise.
Though Jackson, a first-term Democrat, calls it “his lawsuit” the filing is in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and the complainants are co-led by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campell and Washington Attorney General Nicholas Brown in front of an alphabetical listing. Vermont is the lone state with a Republican governor (Phil Scott) on the filing.
FEMA, David Richardson, Homeland Security, Kristi Noem and the United States of America are the five defendants. Richardson is interim administrator of FEMA; Noem is secretary of Homeland Security.
The BRIC program, the Environmental Protection Agency website says, provides “grants to identify mitigation actions and implement projects that reduce risks posed by natural hazards, promote partnership to enable high-impact investments, support adoption and enforcement of codes and standards to facilitate community-wide risk reduction impacts, and to reduce disaster losses and protect life and property from future disasters.”
The complaint has 13 points of relief sought, including declaring termination of the program unlawful and getting funds to respective entities as previously designated. It seeks to have the program resume.
On April 4, all BRIC applications for fiscal years 2020 to 2023 were canceled. For funds not distributed to states, tribes, territories and local communities, the funds were to be returned to the Disaster Relief Fund or the U.S. Treasury. That led to the letter of U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards, R-N.C., and U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., to Noem and Richardson.
The agency, in a statement at the time not attributed to anyone, said the program “was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program. It was more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters. Under Secretary Noem’s leadership, we are committed to ensuring that Americans in crisis can get the help and resources they need.”
FEMA said approximately $882 million from the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 would be returned to the Treasury or reapportioned by Congress in the next fiscal year.
