EPA kills $18.5 million grant
HIGH POINT — A federal agency has terminated an $18.49 million grant that was to fund workforce development, infrastructure repair and environmental cleanup projects in High Point.
Southwest Renewal Foundation Executive Director Dorothy Darr said the nonprofit received notice last week that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 'community change grant' that it was awarded last year had been canceled.
'Almost 800 EPA grants are being canceled by the new EPA director, even if Congress has not rescinded the Inflation Reduction Act, which appropriated funding for our ... grant,' Darr said. 'The projects are not wasteful but would have helped clean the water for our region's residents. These grant cancellations also wipe out five years of hard work by the SWRF to discover and then implement change in this district.'
The foundation was the lead applicant and recipient of the grant.
The EPA has not responded to requests for comment about the grant's status.
'The EPA Region IV program officer said they were being asked to 'scrub' some words from grants like anything related to DEI, disadvantaged, African American, and women,' Darr said. 'But he said our grant was very 'clean' and needed very little 'scrubbing' of the new administration's 'restricted words.' '
The grant had several subrecipients, the largest of which was to be $5.3 million to Guilford Technical Community College for improvements to its High Point campus. It planned to use the funds to convert a storage warehouse on S. Hamilton Street into a 'skilled trades center' offering training programs for students in fields such as HVAC technology, construction and possibly battery manufacturing.
GTCC representatives told the High Point Economic Development Corp. on Wednesday that they are looking for other ways to fund the project.
Another $5.06 million of the grant was slated to go to the city to upgrade sewer infrastructure in inner-city southwest High Point and install surveillance cameras in areas where there's habitual illegal dumping.
Darr said this aspect of the grant was designed to address sewer lines possibly leaking into Richland Creek, an impaired stream that's part of the watershed of the Randleman Regional Reservoir.
Other subrecipients were Guilford County Schools ($3.5 million for Fairview Elementary School) and the Macedonia Family Resource Center ($303,835) for new energy efficient HVAC systems, as well as the Southwest Renewal Foundation ($2.36 million) for various clean air, water and land projects in the district.
Darr said about $74,000 of the grant funds were withdrawn prior to its termination to cover administrative costs and reimbursements for grant-related expenses on the part of the foundation and some of the other eight organizations that were grant partners.
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