NC AG Jeff Jackson points to sewage spill as reason to restore federal grants

Tammy Grubb, The News & Observer (Raleigh) on Jul 24, 2025

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Attorney General Jeff Jackson leaned in to get a closer look Thursday, while visiting a Hillsborough pump station that spilled millions of gallons of raw sewage into the Eno River this month.

“I had heard about what happened here, but when you finally see it up close, you get a sense of how high the water rose and how dramatic the impact was,” Jackson said after touring the 50-year-old River Pump Station on Elizabeth Brady Road.

The visit followed a July 16 lawsuit that Jackson and 19 other state attorneys general filed against the Trump Administration over $4.5 billion in canceled FEMA grants. The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program was authorized by Congress to pay for 2,000 infrastructure and economic development projects nationwide.

Hillsborough was supposed to get $7 million to relocate the River Pump Station and build a water booster pump station to bring emergency water from the Orange Water and Sewer Authority in southern Orange County.

The national lawsuit asks a judge to stop FEMA from using the money for other purposes, while restoring the program and the grants. In North Carolina, $225 million in grants would have supported projects in 72 communities, including Hillsborough’s pump station.

“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,” Jackson said, noting the lawsuit has bipartisan support.

Work halted, scramble for money

The River Pump Station is Hillsborough’s largest and oldest facility, overlooking the Eno River, but in a floodway at the bottom of Elizabeth Brady Road.

Heavy storms have caused problems before, but the July 7 flood reinforced the need to replace it, Hillsborough Mayor Mark Bell said. The storm dropped over 8 inches of rain in a few hours, flooding the pump station and a raw sewage wet well.

Electrical power was cut to the wastewater pumps, shutting down the system that carries sewage to a higher elevation so gravity can feed it into the wastewater treatment system. Roughly 75% of the town’s sewage was washed into the river in the storm.

Town employees have since installed three temporary bypass pumps and are making repairs, which could take about a month.

The town had already received over $870,000 from the BRIC program for design and permitting, and was prepared to pay $1.8 million of the cost. The grants cut in April by the Department of Government Efficiency would have funded construction.

The “sudden and unlawful cancellation of BRIC grant funding” struck a major blow to the town’s long-term plan to sustain and expand its water and wastewater system, Bell said during Jackson’s visit.

“We are scrambling to identify alternative funding sources to stay on track with these two critical projects, but the easiest, fastest and most common-sense thing to do is to restore the BRIC grants that were duly authorized by Congress,” Bell said.

Public utilities cannot use tax revenue to pay for water and sewer expenses, he noted.

DOGE cut BRIC program

The project is not just about getting the pump station out of the floodway, but also part of the town’s plan to grow its wastewater infrastructure, which now limits residential and commercial growth and requires expensive repairs to keep aging equipment online, officials have said.

More debt could affect the town’s finances and delay other big-ticket purchases and projects. It also could force Hillsborough’s 6,910 water and sewer customers to pay even higher rates.

Federal officials justified the cuts in April by saying BRIC is “another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program,” according to the Associated Press. Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated that stance in a WRAL interview this week.

Jackson said Hillsborough needs the promised FEMA grant.

“If you want to make FEMA more efficient, do it. If you want to make sure that local towns have more power over how that money is spent, do it,” Jackson said Thursday. “Here’s a local town telling you that they have a major risk with this infrastructure, and the reason we know that they are being serious is because it just flooded about two weeks ago.”

Jackson’s office has posted a list of projects that lost BRIC funding in North Carolina online.

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