MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The Trump administration canceled billions of dollars of grants that were supposed to help the country prepare for weather disasters. Towns, cities and tribes were counting on that money to protect residents from floods, wildfires, hurricanes. It's a particularly tough situation for small rural towns that do not have any other way to pay for such projects. NPR's Rebecca Hersher visited one such town.
REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: The Sun Valley Mobile Home Park in Rising Sun, Maryland, is at the bottom of a hill.
CALVIN BONENBERGER: So here's the trailer park right here, and you can see...
HERSHER: Calvin Bonenberger is the town administrator.
BONENBERGER: This is all low-income housing, and the flood level is up to the roof line of all of these properties. And so, remember when I was telling you...
HERSHER: This area has flooded over and over. In 2021, the flooding was so dangerous that people had to be rescued from their homes.
BONENBERGER: We're talking about water that was about this high. The water...
HERSHER: Like 3 feet.
BONENBERGER: Yeah, 3 feet.
HERSHER: The low-lying trailers aren't a safe place to live anymore. The town has a plan - help the remaining residents move to higher ground and turn the damaged area into a park. But fixing flooding problems in Rising Sun is expensive. It's not just the trailer park. The town's wastewater treatment plant also floods when it rains a lot and sends contaminated water into nearby streams. Fixing both problems would cost millions of dollars that Rising Sun just doesn't have. The town has fewer than 3,000 residents. It only collects about $1 million in taxes every year, says Bonenberger.
BONENBERGER: You know, not everybody's wealthy.
HERSHER: And so Rising Sun applied for federal grants, which took years of work, not only to get the application materials together, but also for Bonenberger and other town leaders to make the case to local residents, many of whom don't support federal involvement in local projects. This area voted overwhelmingly for President Trump.
BONENBERGER: I think it's safe to say that the people in this area, you know, they are conservative, and they do believe that there's too much government waste going on.
HERSHER: Bonenberger generally agrees with that. But in this case, asking for federal money made a lot of sense to him. The funds the town applied for were offered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, and they were for this exact purpose. FEMA's idea was to invest money before weather disasters to prevent even more expensive damage later. Studies have estimated that you spend $1 now to prepare, it saves about $7 later by preventing damage. And as the Earth warms up, extreme weather, like the heavy rain that causes flooding in Rising Sun, is only getting more common.
BONENBERGER: Our sewer plant is going to continue to overflow. And there has to be money to resolve it. We don't have the money to resolve it. That's what this money is for. This is an no-brainer.
HERSHER: Last year, Rising Sun won two grants - one to fix the sewer plant and another to fix the trailer park. It was a total of about $5 million, which was good news for people like Margaret Dunn (ph). She lives across the street from the Sun Valley Mobile Home Park.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: (Vocalizing).
MARGARET DUNN: Oh.
HERSHER: On a Wednesday afternoon, she was outside playing with her 2-year-old grandson and her son, Aaron (ph). She says, the floods have taken a toll on the area.
DUNN: We had a neighborhood with kids that played, and - you know what I mean? There was activity.
AARON: Yeah.
DUNN: Neighbors watched out...
AARON: Ice cream truck.
DUNN: ...For each other and stuff.
AARON: Yeah.
DUNN: That stuff is gone.
HERSHER: She points out that a lot of the trailers are still damaged. Warped coat hangers and waterlogged books sit on the porch of one. Another has insulation drooping from a giant hole in the siding. A lot of people have moved away. Some have stayed. The town was going to use the FEMA money to remove all the debris and turn the area that floods into a park instead, but now that money is gone. The Trump administration canceled the entire program. In a statement announcing the decision, FEMA called the grants, quote, "wasteful and ineffective." I asked Bonenberger what he thinks of that characterization.
In their eyes, this program was waste.
BONENBERGER: Right. I think I feel very strongly, and I think my personal belief is shared by a lot of people in this area. We all sort of suspected that probably our taxpayer money was not being used the way we would like it to be used. So with all this being said, I'm not looking to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
HERSHER: The baby in this case being the money for his town. He thinks FEMA was wrong to cancel Rising Sun's grants, but he still supports the larger effort to cut wasteful spending. The administration just needs to use a scalpel, he says, not a dull knife. At the same time, he's frustrated, and he's concerned about the safety of his residents every time it rains. If he had a chance to make his case to the administration, here's what he'd say.
BONENBERGER: Guys, this is dangerous. This is the whole reason why you put this funding out there.
HERSHER: FEMA did not respond to questions from NPR about why it deemed the grants wasteful or about the administration's larger approach to disaster preparedness. Rebecca Hersher, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
