What might happen if the Education Department were closed?
By now, you know about the endless speculation on whether the incoming Trump administration might close the U.S. Department of Education. It remains just that: speculation. Congress would have to be involved, and even a Senate and House controlled by the same party as President-elect Donald Trump would not necessarily go along with this idea.
However, in a statement about his nomination of Linda McMahon for education secretary, Trump underscored his campaign pledge to disband the department, saying, “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort.”
The mere specter of shuttering an agency that commands more than $200 billion has led parents, students, teachers, policy experts and politicians to wonder about (and in some cases plan for) the possible effects on their children and communities. Collectively, state and local governments spend far more on education than the federal government does. With federal dollars connected to many rules about how that money can be spent, however, the Education Department does play a significant role in how schools and colleges operate. Deleting the agency would not undo federal law providing money for students in rural places, with disabilities or who come from low-income families, but doling out that money and overseeing it could get messy.
This week, Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota introduced a bill to unwind the Education Department and spread its work across other federal agencies.
The Hechinger Report tried to answer some of the questions raised by the possible dismantling of the department, consulting experts and advocates on student loans, special education, financial aid, school lunch and beyond.
Nothing is out of the realm of possibility, however complicated. A much smaller agency that guided Congress on science, the Office of Technology Assessment, simply had its budget set to zero back in 1995 — and just like that, it was gone. The Education Department, created in 1979, reaches far wider and deeper, into essentially every community nationwide. Its impact is felt not so much in what students are learning every day but whether their schools can pay for the special equipment or training that might be essential for some students with disabilities; if they can pay to have an extra teacher to work with struggling readers; whether a student from a low-income household can get federal grant money to pay for college; and whether a college student with a federally backed student loan might ever have it forgiven.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.
At the same time, many education programs, as well as some that touch schools, exist entirely outside of the Education Department. It doesn’t oversee the education of students whose parents live on military bases, for example, or students who attend school on Native American reservations. (Those programs are managed within the Defense and Interior departments, respectively.)
The Education Department also doesn’t run the school lunch or breakfast programs, which are overseen by the Agriculture Department. The nation’s biggest child care programs for low-income families? Those aren’t part of the Education Department’s job, either; they are managed by the Department of Health and Human Services.
We tried to explain all of that here. What questions do you have that we didn’t answer? Write to us: editor@hechingerreport.org. We will update this list.
Early education
What would happen to federal early education programs?
The most well-known and biggest federal early childhood programs, Head Start and the Child Care Development Block Grant, are not a part of the Education Department — they’re administered by the Department of Health and Human Services. So they would not be directly affected by an Education Department shutdown.
The Department of Education also is home to several research centers that focus on young children, many of which conduct long-term students or research aimed at improving the lives of infants and toddlers with disabilities. Those programs, if they were not cut, would have to move to another agency.
K12 Education
What happens to Title I and other money that the department doles out?
Closing the Department of Education would not undo it. Title I — a program established in 1965 that provides money to schools with large numbers of low-income students — is part of federal law. If the Education Department were to be eliminated, the most likely scenario is that Title I money would flow through another federal agency. Major cuts to the program are unlikely.
While Trump and others close to him have said they would like to cut federal education funding streams like Title I, any cuts would need to go through Congress — where that funding has broad political support among both Republicans and Democrats. That is especially true for Title I: Almost all school districts in the country get a share of that money.
So it’s unlikely Title I “would ever see an actual cut, and certainly not a substantial cut,” said Nora Gordon, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She said even members of Congress who are hostile to other federal programs that allocate funds for low-income families would be reluctant to defund Title I.
There would be bureaucratic upheaval if another agency took on oversight of education of students with disabilities, but the special education law itself, and the money allotted to it, would not change without an act of Congress.
The law now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was passed in 1975, four years before the Education Department was formed. At that time, it was administered by the department of Health, Education and Welfare (now known as the Health and Human Services department).
About 7.5 million children are now served under the IDEA. For fiscal 2024, the department oversaw about $14 billion in funding for school-aged children, with smaller pots of money going to infants, toddlers, and other special education-related programs.
Through the Education Department, the government sets rules for states, districts and schools about how children should be identified for possible disabilities and how families, parents and schools should work together to create a child’s “individualized education program,” a menu of the supports and services they should receive.
Does this mean everyone will get a private school voucher?
Regardless of the future of the Department of Education, Trump could, with the support of Congress, take some action to expand school choice nationwide. Republicans in their official party platform made universal school choice, in every state, a top priority. The idea didn’t go far under Trump’s first education secretary, but political headwinds may make it easier for him to achieve some policy wins this time.
During the first Trump administration, then-Secretary Betsy DeVos pushed to expand school choice, largely through charter schools and private school vouchers. Congress, however, ignored her budget request in 2018 for $400 million to fund their expansion. A year later, DeVos pitched $5 billion in tax credits for individuals and businesses that contribute to scholarships for students to attend private schools. Trump resurrected the idea in early 2020, and again as an option for parents frustrated with prolonged school closures during the pandemic. A bill to create the tax credits died in committee.
As part of the agenda for his next term, Trump has pledged to allow families with a 529 college savings plan to spend up to $10,000 a year per child on homeschool education. The GOP also wants to expand education savings accounts, or ESAs — a polarizing program that allows families to pull their children out of public school and use a portion of state per-pupil funding on private school tuition, homeschool supplies and other educational costs. At least a dozen states since 2020 have created ESA programs, with some offering universal enrollment regardless of a family’s income level and with few restrictions on taxpayer money being spent on religious education.
Rural opposition has stalled such legislation in states like Texas, and voters in November rejected school choice measures on ballots in three states. But in recent years, the Supreme Court has expanded the religious rights of parents and sectarian schools. Trump’s next education secretary is also likely to have an easier time clearing school choice legislation with Republican control of both the House and Senate.
What would happen to school lunch, and free and reduced-price school lunches?
Nothing. Eliminating the Department of Education would likely have little or no impact on the school lunch program. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, not the Education Department, runs the vast National School Lunch Program, although the data collected by schools about the number of students who qualify for low-cost or no-cost breakfast and lunch powers a lot of the education agency’s work. About 30 million kids participate in the program on a given school day — including students at public charter schools and some nonprofit private schools.
During Trump’s first term, as part of a collection of pandemic-related measures, he approved providing school lunches to all students, regardless of their household income. Several states have since kept up that effort since the pandemic option expired, offering free meals to all students no matter their family earnings. And a growing number of schools in other states now offer meals to all students if a large enough number qualify for free lunches. Earlier this year, a Republican budget proposal, called Fiscal Sanity to Save America, said that option should be eliminated.
Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, created by the conservative Heritage Foundation, but that document also calls for reining in spending on school meals. “Federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs that have strayed far from their original objective and represent an example of the ever-expanding federal footprint in local school operations.”
What happens to education research and the tracking of students’ academic achievement?
The work of the Institute of Education Sciences, the research and statistics arm of the Education Department, is mandated by law and would not disappear overnight even if the agency were abolished. IES collects and aggregates data from more than 19,000 school districts around the country to give the public a national picture of our decentralized educational system, from counting the number of students and dollars spent on schools to tracking class sizes and years teachers stay in the job. IES disburses millions of dollars each year to researchers to develop new ideas for improving instruction, and it evaluates programs afterward. One-fourth of IES’s $800 million a year budget goes to administering the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which is an important yardstick for measuring academic achievement among fourth and eighth graders.
All three of these functions — statistics collection, research and assessment — theoretically could be transferred to other agencies, according to former IES director Mark Schneider, whom Trump appointed to a six-year term during the former president’s first term. Education research could shift to the National Science Foundation, which already awards grants for educational research along with the Department of Education. The statistics unit, also known as the National Center for Education Statistics, could be folded into the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is the main statistical agency of the federal government. A new home for the NAEP test is less obvious.
Schneider said that talk of eliminating the department may invite more scrutiny into what its research arm does. Advocates could try to capitalize on this scrutiny as an opportunity to lobby for an overhaul of the research division, he said.
Higher Education
What happens to student loans if the Department of Education is abolished?
Student debt won’t disappear even if the Education Department does. The federal agency contracts with the loan servicers that manage nearly $2 trillion in student loan debt and oversees the programs that can lead to loans being forgiven, such as for teachers and people who work in public health. “The terms and conditions of the loans don’t change just because the agency changes,” said Betsy Mayotte, president of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors, which offers advice and guidance on student loans to borrowers. If there is no Education Department, it’s likely that student loan oversight and debt collection would shift to the Treasury Department. “I expect that at least initially the servicers wouldn’t even change.” Aside from that,Republicans in Congress, who will soon control both chambers, have proposed a College Cost Reduction Act, which would increase the amount of federal Pell grants for third- and fourth-year college students pursuing bachelor’s degrees in fields considered to be in high demand. It would also simplify the student loan repayment process and end certain kinds of loans available to parents, graduate students and low-income learners. It would hold colleges and universities, rather than taxpayers, responsible for loans on which their students have defaulted.
The Biden administration’s relentless and embattled attempts to forgive some student loan debt are almost certain to come to an abrupt end. Many have been blocked by courts anyway, and Trump and his allies have characterized them as an unfair transfer of wealth from people who didn’t go to college to people who did.
What about grants and aid for paying for college, and the FAFSA?
Even without an Education Department, it is unlikely that the Pell grant — which most low-income students use to help pay for college — would disappear. Congress controls who is eligible for Pell, so the Trump administration couldn’t decide on its own to change or take away the grant. Pell has long had bipartisan support in Congress, and it is very unlikely that a Republican-controlled Congress would get rid of a grant that is relied on by so many constituents.
House Republicans have, however, proposed changes to eligibility and the award amount. A version of the College Cost Reduction Act has a chance of passing since Republicans will soon control Congress. The bill would peg the Pell award to the median cost of a college program, instead of basing it on the particular cost of the program or college where a student is enrolled. In practice, this means students enrolled in a program that is more expensive than average, whether due to the price set by the institution or due to a higher cost of living in that area, could see their award reduced. In addition, the determination of financial need would no longer take into account a family farm where the family resides or a family-owned small business that has fewer than 100 employees.
McMahon, Trump’s nominee for education secretary, also supports changes to Pell. She wrote an opinion piece in September promoting what’s known as “short-term Pell.” Right now, for the most part, Pell can be used only to pay for education programs that last 15 weeks or more (about one semester). McMahon supports a bill, which has some bipartisan support, that would allow federal aid dollars to pay for short-term programs that train students for particular jobs.
Critics worry such an expansion could take Pell dollars away from traditional programs. They note many short-term programs (for example, welder and HVAC programs) are already Pell-eligible and that shorter programs, including many run by for-profit companies, often don’t have good results. A recent report showed no improvement in employment for students who used short-term Pell.
While last year’s FAFSA rollout was broadly criticized, there seems to be no appetite to further complicate students’ ability to access federal financial aid. In fact, the College Cost Reduction Act includes a requirement that would simplify and standardize college financial aid offers so that students have an easier time understanding and comparing them.
This story about the Education Department was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
As Starlink faces federal scrutiny, the internet company has become a lifeline in West Virginia — for those who can afford it
Two years ago, the DSL internet at Aeriell Turner’s home in rural Raleigh County grew increasingly unreliable as she began to rely on her phone’s mobile hotspot for work.
“The lines where I live are notoriously bad,” she said.
Aeriell Turner, a resident of Raleigh County who uses Starlink to work for home for an out-of-state insurance agency. Courtesy photo
But then, Turner, an insurance agent who works remotely, switched to Starlink.
Now, as she turns on her computer at the beginning of each work day, a sleek white router softly blinks in her living room reminding her that her internet troubles are far behind.
She now answers video calls and interacts with her clients without interrupted service.
“A good internet connection is a literal lifeline,” she said.
For West Virginians like Turner, Starlink promises a solution to their desperate need for fast and reliable internet access. Residents say they’ve turned to the company, despite the high price tag, while they wait for faster, more reliable internet from traditional providers.
However, federal regulators concluded that the company couldn’t meet promised speeds and rejected its application for nearly $900 million in subsidies in 2022.
Now, as West Virginians continue to search for answers, Starlink could soon be in line for more of the flood of federal dollars to expand broadband.
The company’s owner, Elon Musk, is not only the richest person in the world, but he spent $200 million to help Donald Trump get back to the White House. And Trump has already said he plans to appoint a Musk ally to run the Federal Communications Commission.
SpaceX, which owns Starlink, did not respond to a request for comment.
State officials are in the midst of a $1.2 billion push to bring high-speed internet to every corner of West Virginia by 2029. However, the roll-out has been hindered by disputes between utility companies and internet service providers on the ground.
Starlink hasn’t released exact numbers for how many customers they have in West Virginia. The company is not required to share that information, said Del. Daniel Linville, chair of the House Infrastructure and Technology Committee.
But, the number of subscribers is increasing monthly in the state, he said.
Kensey Bergdorf-Smith, director of the West Virginia Science and Technology Policy Initiative, said despite its growing popularity, satellite internet still has challenges compared to other broadband options.
A dish must be properly positioned and be free of interference like trees and bad weather for the strongest service, she said.
“The concern with satellite internet is that it’s not super reliable,” she said. “It doesn’t always reach the speeds that it needs to, and it’s also pretty pricey compared to standard broadband options.”
Starlink was denied millions in federal subsidies
In 2022, Starlink’s long-form application for a $885 million contract from the FCC through its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund was denied. The fund was created to expand broadband to rural communities and the subsidies would have been released over 10 years.
The company was to deploy internet service to over 600,000 homes and businesses across 35 states with speeds of at least 100 megabits per second download and 20 megabits per second download upload.
Those speeds are defined as the bare minimum to qualify as broadband following new standards passed by the FCC earlier this year.
Federal officials determined the company would be unable to provide high-speed internet to the amount of homes it had proposed. The FCC affirmed that decision last year.
“The agency also has a responsibility to be a good steward of limited public funds meant to expand access to rural broadband, not fund applicants that fail to meet basic program requirements,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a press release.
Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the FCC, dissented from the agency’s ruling writing that the decision follows the Biden administration’s pattern of “regulatory harassment” against Elon Musk.
This week, President-elect Donald Trump named Carr as the new chairman of the commission. As chairman, Carr could exert influence over decisions with the potential to send hundreds of millions of dollars in federal subsidies to Starlink.
Starlink service is expanding from space, while internet providers hit snags on the ground
From outer space to deep inside a holler, high-speed internet can reach homes without traditional infrastructure like poles and cables using satellites that bounce signals as long as there is a clear view of the sky.
The company offers residential plans for $120 a month with unlimited data and charges a $349 upfront cost for hardware like the router and mountable disk.
In a 2023 survey of over 2,000 West Virginians by state broadband officials, 15% said they use satellite internet and generally paid more than people using other providers.
Alex Cain, owner of Country Roads Satellites in Clarksburg, said that his team travels across the state installing Starlink mounts on homes, and most customers have resorted to satellite service because they’ve had unreliable, slow internet connections.
“When Starlink came out, it was kind of a game changer just because the speeds are 20 times faster,” he said. “We’ve been doing five to six installs a week.”
Starlink’s satellites circle the planet in a much lower orbit than older satellite internet providers. That means Starlink satellites should be faster than competitors.
Elizabeth Stewart, a resident of Pocahontas County, who uses Starlink to work from home after switching from a traditional broadband provider. Courtesy photo
Outside of Durbin on the northern end of Pocahontas County, Elizabeth Stewart lives with her husband in a wooded area and uses Starlink to work from home.
They’ve put their dish in a clearing where there isn’t interference from trees in the yard. She said she’s been a customer for three years despite other providers offering cheaper plans and doesn’t mind paying the higher cost.
“You have to shell out about 500 bucks to get the service and a lot of people can’t afford to do that,” she said. “But, online is my life, and it’s how I’m able to work from home.”
In North Carolina, conservative clean energy supporters don’t think Trump will follow through on threats
Mark Fleming has a prediction for those terrified about the impact of a second Trump administration on the clean energy transition: “It’s going to work out better than folks think.”
Fleming is head of Conservatives for Clean Energy, a Raleigh-based nonprofit that brings together lobbyists, consultants, and politicians on the right who support clean energy. The group formed a decade ago, not long before Trump’s first term began, and is now active in six Southeast states. On Tuesday, together with the Chambers for Innovation and Clean Energy, it held its biennial luncheon in downtown Raleigh.
Coming just two weeks after an election most advocates see as a major setback for federal clean energy policy, the Raleigh event was not unlike past affairs, with congenial vibes, a half dozen awards to politicians and businesses, and presentation from leading Republican consultants assessing the political salience of clean energy.
“It was an election about the economy and immigration,” explained Paul Shumaker, one such pollster and a fixture at these gatherings. “Clean energy is never going to be the issue.”
Trump and his hostile, mostly fact-free rants on the campaign trail about wind energy and the climate crisis got little mention during the formal presentations. Side conversations showed conservatives seemed relatively unconcerned about the future president’s tirades and threats.
“Governing is different than campaigning,” Fleming said.
He and others believe much of Trump’s rhetoric was tossed as red meat to his base of supporters and won’t get meaningful follow-through. On technologies such as offshore wind — which the incoming president frequently lambasts — perhaps the administration and even the man himself can be convinced of its economic benefits, attendees suggested.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who supports offshore wind in the commonwealth, “will be at the top of the list of conservative policy makers in terms of encouraging the Trump administration to look at the positives on offshore wind,” Fleming said. “It makes long term economic sense, but there’s going to be some education there.”
Nine new projects announced in North Carolina the year after the measure’s passage, from lithium processing to vehicle-charging equipment plants, will spur tens of thousands of jobs and add $10 billion to the state’s GDP, the clean economy group E2 found.
Such data should be fodder for members of Congress like Sen. Thom Tillis, North Carolina’s senior U.S. senator and a Republican, to fight to keep most of the Inflation Reduction Act’s provisions.
“He has been such a thoughtful leader on energy issues,” Fleming said of Tillis. “He’s going to be a key decision maker in the U.S. Senate on these clean energy issues moving forward.”
‘We won’t agree on everything’
Jason Saine, a Lincoln County Republican who served more than a dozen years in the North Carolina House and now works as a lobbyist, was among the luncheon’s awardees. He says Trump’s rhetoric is just part of politics.
“Good science and good facts will rule the day, but in the meantime, we’ll suffer through a lot of rhetoric,” he said.
Like some of his conservative colleagues who focus on federal policy, Fleming hopes the closely divided Congress will have new reason to enact reforms to the permitting process that will speed approval of clean energy as well as fossil fuel projects.
And though he’s confident that much of the Inflation Reduction Act will survive, Fleming believes Congress will trim it — a “scalpel rather than a sledgehammer” approach.
Saine agrees. “It can always be recreated in a different format and voted on again,” he said. “What’s dead today is never dead tomorrow.”
One item in the climate law that’s ripe for repeal is the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles, Fleming said. That incentive is spurring plenty of economic development in rural areas in the form of EV and battery factories, but it’s perceived as benefiting only urban folk.
“The administration will want wins,” Fleming insisted. “We won’t agree on everything. But I think we’ll have opportunities to work together to move the economy forward and move the clean energy cause forward in D.C.”
No matter what, most of the luncheon attendees remained focused on incremental reforms in North Carolina — where the power dynamics are largely unchanged after Nov. 5. Trump won the state, but Democrat Josh Stein trounced a scandal-plagued Republican to win the governor’s race. The GOP continues to control a heavily gerrymandered legislature and is just one vote shy of a veto-proof majority in the House.
Still, as “Trump II” approaches, Fleming acknowledged Conservatives for Clean Energy has an important role to play.
“It’s going to be better than folks think,” he repeated. “But the onus will be on all of us to make it happen. Now, groups like ours are more needed than ever. That thought leadership on these issues will be on the right. It’s not going to be from our friends on the left.”
Rural water utilities in North Carolina are still reeling from Helene
The most exciting part of the day at Spruce Pine Montessori School is when the truck arrives to empty the porta-johns. At that point in the afternoon, the kids abandon their toy dinosaurs and monkey bars, throw up their hands, and yell in excitement as they run to watch the truck do its work. It’s lucky that they find something to be so joyful about, Principal Jennifer Rambo said on a recent sunny afternoon, because things have been a mess for the past seven weeks.
The flooding that devastated western North Carolina during Hurricane Helene laid waste to communities all around the region, spitting up great torrents of mud and washing away homes, cars, and people. The landscape along the creeks and mountainsides has been forever changed.
Jennifer Rambo washes her hands at one of the portable sinks the school installed at a cost of $600. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio
Beyond the fallen trees, sliding hillsides, and damaged buildings, Helene took out critical infrastructure, like internet and electricity, water, and sewer. Everyone would have liked more time to get things in order, but working families were desperate for childcare and the desire to resume classes was too great. “We had to get open,” Rambo said. “The kids needed some routine and structure and consistency, and families needed to go back to work.”
Although folks in Spruce Pine were told Thursday they could finally stop boiling water before using it, the school still can’t flush its toilets because the sewers remain a mess. In addition to two portable toilets (and special seats so the smaller children wouldn’t fall in), it has had to buy water by the barrel and spend $600 to install portable hand-washing sinks. The bills continue adding up: $360 per week for the johns and $350 every time they need emptying. Everyone has had to adjust to these changes and more, even as they’ve dealt with similar problems at home.
The two portable toilets at Spruce Pine Montessori School needed seats designed to ensure the youngsters didn’t fall in. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio
It’s been that way everywhere. The storm killed 103 people throughout western North Carolina and surrounding areas. Many more were injured. All told, the wind and the water damaged as many as 126,000 homes, and dozens of roads and bridges simply washed away.
Helene also decimated more than two dozen water utilities. For weeks after the storm, people had to boil anything that wasn’t poured from a bottle, and many of them drew from creeks and ponds just to flush their toilets. Folks in Asheville, where taps ran dry for three weeks, were told just this week that their water is safe to drink without boiling it first, but thousands of people served by 16 utilities still deal with sketchy water, low pressure, and other frustrations. In an effort to make their lives a little easier, officials dipped into a $273 million relief package to dot this end of North Carolina with 650 portable toilets and 15 “community care stations” with showers and washing machines.
Asheville was lucky enough to have upgraded its reservoir last year, something that prevented even worse flooding and allowed the region’s largest city and the communities that rely upon it for water to recover sooner than they otherwise might have. But for towns like Spruce Pine, the financial and engineering challenges of repairing their water systems are as formidable as the hurricane that broke them.
Residents and business owners in Spruce Pine haul away some of the debris and mud that inundated downtown.
Steve Exum / Getty Images
The water that flows into the North Fork Reservoir, which serves Asheville and the towns of Black Mountain and Swannanoa, always ran clear and clean from its headwaters high in Pisgah National Forest. But mud and debris have turned it murky brown and damaged much of the equipment needed to pump it. Crews have worked around the clock to set things right, reconnecting pipelines in record time and drawing muck from the lake.
Repairing municipal water systems leveled by a storm that washed away distribution lines, overwhelmed intakes, and inundated treatment plants is no easy feat. The challenge is acute in mountain communities, where geography is a hassle. Much of the infrastructure required to draw, treat, and distribute water often sits alongside reservoirs, placing them squarely in a floodplain when the torrent arrives and increasing the likelihood of damage. Reaching anything needing attention can take days or even weeks because the lines that carry water to customers meander through valleys, over ridgelines, and along roadways, many of which remain impassable. Spruce Pine Water & Sewer has restored service to 90 percent of its 2,000 or so customers, but can’t do much for the rest of them until the roads are fixed.
The sewer system remains a mess too. Town manager Darlene Butler has asked residents to conserve water as she works with county officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to erect a temporary treatment facility. The equipment is only now arriving and will, at best, be a Band-Aid for a multi-year fix. “We had a lot of damage there, so we’re trying to encourage people not to use a lot of water and put it into our sewer system,” she said.
Darlene Butler, the town manager of Spruce Pine, has had to ask residents to conserve water while crews scramble to erect a temporary treatment plant. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio
A lot of these utilities struggled even before Helene. In many Appalachian towns, the companies that once paid to maintain water and sewer systems have shut down or moved on, and shrinking populations generate less revenue to keep things shiny and new. This is endemic throughout Appalachia. Residents in McDowell County, West Virginia — where one-third of families live in poverty — have for example given up on the often discolored water that flows from their taps and buy it by the case instead. Pipes in Martin County, Kentucky lose about 64 percent of what flows through them, a problem that started 24 years ago when a toxic coal slurry spill damaged them. The burden of these failures falls on customers who must adapt to the situation even as their rates climb. (Rates in Martin County, North Carolina, to offer one example, are among the nation’s highest.)
Yet other systems, particularly those in tourist towns, struggle to keep up with rapidly growing populations. The challenges are compounded by the difficulty of running new lines in the mountains and maintaining the complex pumps needed to maintain pressure over ridgelines. “This is a really, really great place to live,” said Clay Chandler, Asheville’s water resources information officer. “It’s beautiful. The people are amazing. But, man, it makes it hard to operate a water system.”
A broken water main lies alongside Lytle Cove Road in Swannanoa. Many roads remain impassable, hindering efforts to restore water.
Steve Exum / Getty Images
Spruce Pine’s system is so old that Butler has no idea when its pipes were laid, though she guesses it was 60 years ago. The pump station, recently upgraded with money from the American Rescue Plan, was built in 1967. It has seen overhauls as things broke, but rural utilities rarely make wholesale improvements because they are expensive and disruptive. “I think, like most small towns, we’ve struggled for the funds to be proactive instead of reactive,” Butler said.
Even as communities deal with the aftermath of so much deferred maintenance, others are facing the inescapable fact that rebuilding on a floodplain may no longer make sense. Spruce Pine is banking on hazard mitigation funding from FEMA and help from federal officials to move its wastewater treatment plant to higher ground.
The work needed to fully, and permanently, restore water and sewer service in these communities will by most estimates take two to four years and cost many millions of dollars. Meanwhile, crews continue playing whack-a-mole as aging lines break. Another one gave way in rural Yancey County last week, sending a geyser dozens of feet into the air.
About 2,000 people live in Spruce Pine, a busy place with water-intensive businesses that have been impacted by the disruption. There’s the mine that produces some of the purest quartz in the world and sent heavy equipment to help restore service. There are the restaurants and kitschy attractions that drive a burgeoning tourism industry. And then there are the two state prisons, each of which holds about 800 people (who were relocated after spending a week in flooded cells) and, like prisons everywhere, burden the local water and sewer systems.
The ongoing crisis also has made providing basic services a challenge. Blue Ridge Regional Hospital, which serves three counties, has long had a standby power supply but scrambled to cope with losing water. Trucks haul in what’s needed, and enormous bladders collect what’s been used. “We had backup generators to supply the hospital in case of an emergency,” said Alex Glover, chair of the hospital’s board of directors. “But we never dreamed we would lose water and sewage capabilities, and we lost them all at once.”
With water in short supply, the volunteer fire department banned burning the yard waste, brush, and other debris people have been clearing for weeks. “If we had a big fire and we needed to take several thousand gallons or more out of the system, we don’t really know for sure how long that supply would hold up,” said firefighter Chris Westveer.
Firefirghters Chris Westveer and his wife Barbara at the station house in Spruce Pine.
Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio
The department has experienced some close calls. Westveer recalled one frightening night when wiring in a damaged home sparked a fire. The road had been washed away, forcing crews to approach on an all-terrain vehicle. With no water on tap, they drew what they needed from a river and hoped the wind wouldn’t spread the flames beyond their ability to fight them.
Such strains on public services, already scarce throughout mountain communities, compound the stress felt by those who have gone nearly two months without reliable water. People in Banner Elk, a community of 1,000 or so that had to rebuild a road before it could repair water and sewer lines, couldn’t flush their toilets for a month. County officials worried that the raw sewage would flow into the Elk River. Meredith Olan, director of the Banner House history museum, has been hauling water from the creek and boiling it just to do the dishes. “I’m very adept at carrying buckets now,” she said ruefully. Anyone wanting to take a shower had to rely upon the goodwill of friends with wells to draw from. But even that was no guarantee. Some were inundated with floodwaters and might have been contaminated with E. coli and other pathogens, and the electric pumps that pull water from the depths aren’t any good when the power is out.
Meredith Olan, who leads the Banner House history museum in Banner Elk, stands next to some of the drinking water available in town. She has been hauling water from the creek and boiling it just to do her dishes. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio
Even as these communities work nonstop to restore service, local and state officials are looking ahead to the next big storm. Members of the state Water Infrastructure Authority, a body tasked with financial planning for the state’s water and sewer utilities, gathered last month to ponder updates to North Carolina’s water infrastructure master plan. The document, created in 2017, explored ways of ensuring the financial stability of water utilities. Members of the panel, which includes several utility directors, a water engineer, and the head of the state Division of Water Infrastructure, acknowledged that local officials often have little idea how water and wastewater work and need help navigating the aftermath of a disaster and applying for grants to recover from it.
Experts on the subject said consolidating the region’s patchwork of small systems may be the key to rebuilding and maintaining them. Some are doing just that. Four counties in southwestern Virginia are working together to install dozens of miles of water lines. Such efforts are easier among towns that are close together, like Mars Hill and Weaverville. These small towns, which are rapidly becoming suburbs of Asheville, have linked their water systems so they can ensure there’s enough to supply new housing. That connection allowed Weaverville to quickly buy and move water when the flood knocked out its municipal system. A similar arrangement proposed for nearby Marshall would cost about $15 million.
Teamwork can provide a backup supply of water, reduce maintenance costs, and allow small utilities to share these essential resources and collaborate on, rather than compete for, grant applications. Such efforts will grow increasingly important as development and a warming world further burden these systems. “I think the fiefdom of water supply has to change for everyone to thrive in an era of climate catastrophe,” said Will Harlan, the Southeast director of the Center for Biological Diversity and a resident of Barnardsville, another community not far from Asheville.
Even if a physical collaboration isn’t possible, an organizational one might be. “If you’ve got three tiny towns and nobody can afford to hire a public works or public utilities director, the three of y’all go in together and hire a qualified utilities director,” one member of the master plan committee said during a public conference call.
Repairing all of the damage the region’s water systems sustained could take many years and cost many millions of dollars. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio
Barring any changes, the region is at risk of simply rebuilding what it has, only to watch it all wash away in the next big flood, said Francis de los Reyes. He is an engineering professor at North Carolina State University who focuses on sanitation systems. He’d like to see communities move their water infrastructure to higher ground, as Spruce Pine is doing, and relocate flood-prone neighborhoods, as is happening in eastern Kentucky. “Your choices are mitigation, adaptation, or staying in fight-or-flight,” de los Reyes said.
But it takes more than a collaborative spirit and skilled leadership to repair a water system and harden it against future disasters. It requires communities to pool resources or seek federal support because they do not have the millions of dollars that work requires. Even before Helene struck, the bipartisan infrastructure law set aside $603 million to help North Carolina replace old pipes and other hardware. The fate of that money remains in question, however, because President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to undo much of the Biden administration’s climate work.
Back at Spruce Pine Montessori School, Jennifer Rambo is trying not to let uncertainty about the future get to her. It’s hard enough dealing with the present. Beyond the weeks without potable water, she is grappling with spotty internet access and electricity, and an inescapable sense of loss. In the days after Helene, she spent much of her time trying to determine if people were still alive. Her voice wavered as she said more or less the same words that so many in her community, and others like it, have echoed over the past two months: “Nobody was prepared.”
Why a West Texas county is building a new courthouse even after voters rejected the proposal
Officials took the extraordinary step of taking on new debt to replace the old courthouse, which has been plagued by rats and other pests, elevator breakdowns and flooding.
As apple and cherry trees burst with blooms months ahead of schedule, climate experts sound a warning
Apple and cherry trees in Southwest Virginia started blooming about three weeks ago — five months too early.
Orchard owners have seen handfuls of autumn blossoms pop open in their fields in years past, but the consensus is that early blossoming is occurring more frequently due to increasingly warmer weather. Experts say this phenomenon is tied to climate change and are concerned for the future.
A spent cherry blossom hangs from the top of a tree at Ayers Orchard in Cana. Phyllis Allan, who works with brother Donald Ayers at the farm, said these trees had “a bunch” of blossoms just a couple of weeks ago. Photo by Lindsey Hull.
Last week, orchards in Cana were quiet and empty. The harvest was over, the workers had gone home. Carroll County farmers were taking a rest before the holidays, before pruning and planting would begin anew.
The fields, though — they sat waiting, seemingly willing the season to go on. Though the calendar said mid-November, tall green grass was still growing between the trees. Immature, rosy-cheeked green apples still clung to summer-strong branches, and the trees were still covered in bright green canopies of healthy leaves. On and on this went … one row after another, one orchard after another.
There was a single row of apple trees, right next to a road. Though the orchard’s other trees were full and green, the trees in that row had begun to shed their leaves. The process was nowhere near finished, but through those bare spots, it became easier to see that these particular trees were doing something new: They were sending up crisp green growth.
The cherry trees at Ayers Orchard were mostly bare, but just a week or so prior, they had been hanging full of blossoms, according to packhouse operator Phyllis Allan, whose brother owns the orchard. She was readying things for the winter; that Saturday was the last market day until spring.
The packhouse sits on the edge of a hill. Just beneath the parking area, the cherry trees’ skeletal limbs waved their last bouquets of wilted blossoms. Swollen bulbs predicted that more blooms would be on the way, if a frost didn’t kill the buds first. Lower branches sported fresh greenery. The trees were readying themselves for spring.
These trees should have been preparing for their own winter’s nap, a period of dormancy in which cold-weather acclimated fruit trees stop growing.
Ricky Berrier is a sixth-generation farmer. He grows apples and peaches at his Carroll County orchard, which was started in 1853. Photo by Lindsey Hull.
“I’m not worried, yet,” said Ricky Berrier, a sixth-generation farmer who operates his family’s 171-year-old apple orchard in Carroll County. “Even 20 years ago, I would see a limb blooming this time of year,” he said, explaining that sometimes weaker trees get a little confused.
If the heat continues or blooms show up in even more apple trees, that’s a different story.
A couple of weeks ago, Bethany Schaepler’s wife, Cortney, was mowing Hill’s Orchard when she noticed blossoms here and there on the trees.
Schaepler’s father-in-law, Willie Hill, said he’d seen a few blossoms, too. But he had spoken with friends and neighbors who were experiencing entire blocks of bloom.
He ticked off the names of folks who have told him about premature blossoms over the last few weeks. Entire groups of Golden Delicious at one orchard just over the hill. Two rows of Pink Ladies had bloomed nearby, and another set of the same had broken open down in Wilkes County, North Carolina.
“For a whole lot of them to bloom? I don’t know,” he said.
When Tom McMullen has seen fall blossoms, they appear in clusters, he said — perhaps a dozen blooms per tree, not the thousands that people typically see in the spring.
“It’s not like you’re driving by and seeing a gazillion flowers,” he said, adding that the premature blooms are certainly related to the weather. McMullen co-owns Tumbling Creek Cidery along with three others; he is also a botanist.
Apples hanging in an orchard in Cana last week. Photo by Lindsey Hull.
‘Jack Frost is getting them’
Schaepler also attributed the out-of-season bloom to weather.
An off-season apple bloom. Photo by Lindsey Hull.
“We’re still very warm. I mean, right now I’m in my car running air. It’s 72 degrees,” she said Monday.
The weather in that area was unseasonably warm for much of October and into the beginning of November. There were some cold days during that period, including a freeze for some, but it wasn’t enough to trigger the trees into dormancy, when the leaves would fall and the sap would no longer pump into the tree.
This stage is critical because it protects the tree from cold weather damage. During winter freezes, fruit trees that are not dormant are at greater risk of structural damage, particularly if those trees are hanging full of blooms, said Kaden Kilgore, owner and operator of Appalachian Cider Co. in Scott County. That would impact the next year’s harvest.
These early November blooms will most certainly freeze; even if the bloom falls away, the parts of the flower that remain will be left to freeze.
This bundle, evidence that an apple tree has bloomed, is what remains after the petals fall away. Each star-shaped sprig is a baby apple, Ricky Berrier said. Photo by Lindsey Hull.
“A cold spell comes in and hits those buds and kills them. Then you get some frost damage. You won’t have any apples on those buds. The blooms in the springtime — those buds won’t bloom then,” Kilgore said.
“Jack Frost is getting them regardless,” Kilgore said.
One bloom isn’t a problem. Neither is a dozen. A treeful? A row? A block? What is the point of tolerance?
Apple trees respond to changes in temperature in order to fall into the dormant state, according to Virginia Tech researcher Sherif Sherif, who studies ways to boost fruit tree production and mitigate frost damage at the Alson H. Smith Jr. Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Winchester.
December, February and March were all warmer than average last winter. McMullen attributes the blooms farmers are seeing now to that warmth.
Every variety of apple tree needs a specific cumulative number of chill hours — hours spent below 45 degrees Fahrenheit — in order to produce fruit. Apple growers in this state tend to grow varieties that need between 800 and 1,100 chill hours.
The calculations become increasingly complex depending on the precise temperature of the orchard’s location. Trees perform better at some temperatures than others, and everything really depends on the variety.
Fruit trees that do not receive enough chill time during the winter months are adversely affected, according to research published in The Texas Horticulturist by Texas A&M researchers David Byrne and Terry Bacon. In conducting their research on peach trees, they found that insufficient chilling led to delayed foliation. When leaves appeared, they were only on the tips of the tree branches during the season following the affected year, and those branches appeared to be weakened.
As with the foliage, blooms were delayed in appearing following winters with insufficient chilling, the researchers found. At other times, the bloom season may have been extended, with blooms appearing throughout the autumn. When this occurred, the fruit failed to develop into full-sized fruit.
Finally, the fruit quality itself was reduced, they wrote.
Dewey Martin (left) purchases produce from Willie Hill at Hill’s Orchard & Farm Market. Photo by Lindsey Hull.
“It’s kind of like jet lag for a human. It can really mess you up, you don’t know what’s going on, right?” McMullen said.
Not getting enough chill hours does the same thing for a tree. As Berrier would say, “It confuses it.”
“We still have a kind of winter that is cold enough to achieve the chilling requirement for most of our deciduous trees,” Sherif said. This includes apples and stone fruits.
“It is a concern for some southern states, like Georgia, Florida. With the warm winter, they might have some issue with achieving the chilling requirement, but not us,” Sherif said.
Sherif is more concerned that farmers will continue to follow their traditional pruning schedules without regard to the state of their trees.
Farmers absolutely should not prune their fruit trees until they are positive that the trees are dormant, he said — and the trees currently are not dormant. Any Virginia farmer who is planning to prune their trees right now should wait, Sherif repeated adamantly.
Trees that are pruned before they are acclimated to the cold will have a greater risk of suffering extensive damage from a hard freeze or a hard frost. That alone would jeopardize future crops.
While this may seem to be advice for novice gardeners, pruning an entire orchard is a big job, one that requires a team of employees and a couple of months’ time to complete. To prune Berrier Farms’ 20,000 trees, a team of eight must complete 400 trees a day. It takes about two months.
Farmers hire crews of seasonal workers to help out. Once employees arrive on the farm, they must work 40 hours a week. A farm with no chores is dead in the water.
The impacts of Hurricane Helene
This is the second time in a matter of months that farmers have needed to realign their traditional farming calendars to align with Mother Nature.
At the end of September, the remnants of Hurricane Helene rushed through the state. Twenty-one Southwest Virginia counties reported suffering agricultural damages in the weeks following the storm, according to a report compiled by the Virginia Cooperative Extension.
In Carroll County, a declared disaster area, Cana farmers found rows and rows full of fallen apples — the ground was so covered in fruit that you could hardly walk from one tree to the next.
“It hampers your picking when everything’s on the ground,” Berrier said.
Berrier left the apples to act as fertilizer for next year’s crop. Other farmers swept them into a pile, like the one at Ayers Orchard, where a massive hill of apples rots into compost. The heap smells like the strongest apple cider anyone will ever encounter.
Berrier had a block of Golden Delicious that he had half picked before the storm; that half totaled about 1,500 bushels. After the storm, his crews picked only 20 bushels from the remaining half of the block. A smaller harvest meant fewer days in the fields and fewer days in the packhouse. He kept his seasonal employees on as long as he could, he said. Still, the packhouse employees lost a couple of weeks of work at the end of the season.
According to Virginia Cooperative Extension data released Nov. 7, Southwest Virginia apple farmers suffered an estimated $836,175 in direct losses from Helene — the losses immediately attributable to the storm, a number that includes apples that could not be sold from wind-related fruit drop, damage and loss from power outages, said extension agent Ashley Edwards.
Farmers lost the apples that fell from their trees. They lost the ones that were banged around, bounced into each other and left too battered to be sold. They lost limbs; they lost entire trees.
Depending on which varieties they grow, Carroll County apple farmers lost 25% to 50% of their crop during the storm, Edwards said. Their direct losses totaled $617,000, or nearly 74% of the state’s total estimated direct losses to apple farmers.
Virginia Tech agricultural economist John Bovay found that Helene’s current estimable indirect effect on apple farmers is likely between $1.2 million and $2.8 million, in addition to more than $1.4 million attributable to direct losses and future losses.
On Tuesday, Gov. Glenn Youngkin submitted a request to President Joe Biden, President-elect Donald Trump and Congressional appropriators for $4.4 billion in additional support for recovery efforts. The request includes $630 million to repair and rebuild agricultural producers.
New growth indicates that this apple tree is not yet dormant, though it should be preparing for winter at this time of year. Photo by Lindsey Hull.
‘It was just warm all along’
But still, the weather still won’t cooperate. The farmers seem to be taking it in stride, saying all will be well. The elders reassure the younger generation: This has all happened before.
Bert Drake, emeritus scientist and plant physiologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, has been plant-watching for over 40 years. He pioneered a decades-long research project that sought to understand how plants react to temperature and carbon dioxide concentrations.
He didn’t specifically study apple trees, instead focusing more generally on the nation’s crops and crops around the world. He wanted to know how the foods we rely on would react to rising carbon dioxide concentrations. It turns out, plants don’t mind higher carbon dioxide, he said.
The problem comes when the concentration of the greenhouse gas causes the temperatures to climb, which is what he believes we are seeing now. Many crops that we depend on don’t do well when exposed to high heat for long periods of time, he said, referring to temperatures of about 90 degrees.
If those high temperatures eventually encroach too far into Southwest Virginia’s winter, then the apple trees will not meet their required chilling hours.
“Winter isn’t nearly as long. It’s shortened on both ends,” Drake said.
Early springs induce flowers blooming too early in the spring, thus becoming susceptible to frost, Sherif said.
This is what Ayers Orchard encountered last year, said Phyllis Allan.
“It was just warm all along. We had one frost we thought would surely kill them, but it didn’t.” Allan said of the fruit trees.
“What’s hurting, is they’re blooming about a month or so early. In February, if the blooms start, you can forget about it,” she said.
Once the danger of frost passed, the fruit all ripened earlier than expected, Allan said. Cherries started early in May. Peaches came two to three weeks early, in June. Then apples continued that trend on through, starting on the backs of the peaches.
Drake sees environmental trends such as irregular tree blossoms as key indicators of what a region’s climate may look like not so many years into the future.
“We can only see [changes] in retrospect because it’s been so slow. When we see the trends, it’s very clear now that things have changed a great deal,” he said.
These graphs show that Carroll County’s maximum, minimum and average yearly temperatures have all steadily increased since 1895. Based on data from NOAA National Centers for Environmental information, Climate at a Glance: County Time Series, published November 2024.
According to the 2022 State Climate Summary released by the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Virginia’s temperatures have increased by more than 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the beginning of the 20th century.
While the state climate summary report recognizes that temperatures in the more mountainous regions tend to be cooler than other parts of the state, data from the U.S. Climate Divisional Database shows that the average minimum temperature in Carroll County is on an upward trajectory.
“Everything has moved north, and it’s moving north in a fairly regular fashion. During the American Revolution, the climate of Richmond, Virginia, was similar to present-day Toronto,” Drake said.
“One of the things we clearly showed with our study was that the increase in crop productivity, or in the growth of plants, is overwhelmed by increases in temperature.
“If I was a farmer, my whole existence depended upon growing apples, I would take that as a warning that that future is not to be had. Doesn’t have a good outlook for me,” Drake said.
Cardinal News weather journalist Kevin Myatt contributed information to this story.
Great Falls commissioners pass cuts to library to support public safety
GREAT FALLS — The Great Falls City Commission has approved a reduction in funding for the Great Falls Public Library. The new agreement, struck Tuesday night during an often contentious meeting, is a compromise after months of negotiations between city and library stakeholders.
The agreement cuts 3.5 mills of funding from the library budget from fiscal year 2026 until fiscal year 2029, which ends on June 30 of that year. Based on projected mill values, that amounts to a cut of about $471,413 from the 2026 budget and $499,088 by 2029. The library has warned that this will result in cuts to services, staff and a day of operation.
The cuts are the direct result of two contrasting levy measures in 2023: the library’s successful levy in the spring and the much larger public safety levy and bond that voters rejected last fall. Throughout 2024, the debate over funding positioned a library with a $3.1 million budget against a much larger public safety budget that has fallen far behind the city’s needs.
“I knew that a compromise was the only way to ensure some level of funding would remain in the management agreement,” said Commissioner Susan Wolff, who was on the city’s negotiating team. “My fear was that we would lose all seven [mills].”
The cuts come from a batch of seven mills that the city approved in 1993 to support the library. Those mills were separate from the funding approved in last year’s levy election, though library supporters have said that their campaign relied on those seven mills as part of the foundation on which to build.
During their meeting on Tuesday, commissioners first voted to cancel the 1993 agreement before moving on to consider the new agreement, which passed on a 4-1 vote with Commissioner Rick Tryon voting against.
“I’m glad this is coming to an end,” Mayor Cory Reeves said. “This has not been a fun project.”
It was a long road to Tuesday’s meeting. The first of eight negotiation sessions was on April 25 and continued even after the city offered a “last, best and final” offer that would eliminate all seven mills by 2027.
The library’s board of trustees countered in September with its own proposal, which was for a smaller reduction of 2.5 mills through 2029.
In this latest agreement, passed by the city commission on Tuesday, the city agreed to maintain reduced funding through 2029, at which point the library and city would discuss renewal. But with the reductions passed, Library Director Susie McIntyre has warned that services would need to be cut, staff positions would be in jeopardy and the library could close for one day each week.
The city’s agreement still requires approval from the library board of trustees. Whitney Olson, the library board chair, told Montana Free Press on Wednesday that this will likely take priority at one of their next meetings. In the months leading up to the next fiscal year, the board will also need to decide how to realign its services with funding levels.
“The board is going to have to make some hard decisions about what we are going to have to cut,” Olson said. “Because it’s not feasible to keep our current level of service with the amount of money the city has granted us.”
Public comment and commission discussion on Tuesday focused a lot on Great Falls’ strained public safety resources. The city has vowed to reallocate the library funding to public safety needs, though the money is less than 1.5% of the $32 million public safety budget for courts, legal, police and fire.
The library negotiations in 2024 have been juxtaposed against the successful library campaign of 2023 and the public safety levy that failed later that same year. The public safety levy would have raised some $13 million annually to fund firefighters, police officers, 911 dispatchers, legal staff and more. It also included a $21 million bond request for building and infrastructure.
Library supporters gathered in the lobby of the Mansfield Theater prior to a city commission meeting on Sept. 3 to protest potential funding reductions. Credit: Matt Hudson/MTFP
Early in Tuesday’s meeting, the audience heard from Great Falls Police Chief Jeff Newton for a regularly scheduled update. Newton opened his remarks by mentioning the failed 2023 levy.
“Despite the failure of the public safety levy and bond, the workload has not subsided and the challenges have not gone away,” Newton said.
Officials have described the lack of resources at police and fire departments in Great Falls as dire. The city has grown in the 50 years since the last expansion of public safety funding, increasing the number of fire, police and medical calls. The lack of additional funding has increased fire response times, left departments unable to cover unstaffed positions and left the police department in a reactive position, as Newton described.
During a Nov. 6 city meeting, Great Falls Fire Rescue Chief Jeremy Jones said the department had reached the limits of the adjustments they’ve made to maintain its level of service.
Following the failed levy, the city created a Public Safety Advisory Committee. Aaron Weissman, vice chair of that committee, urged commissioners during Tuesday’s meeting to keep library funding and address public safety separately.
“The citizens of Great Falls support public safety,” Weissman said. “It was just a really big ask.”
After some debate earlier this year, the committee submitted a set of public safety recommendations that included the drawback of up to seven mills of the library’s funding. Jeni Dodd, another member of the public safety committee, advocated for removing all seven mills from the library coffers.
“The 1993 agreement for the seven mills was never guaranteed in perpetuity,” Dodd said on Tuesday. “Each year it was subject to nonrenewal by either party.”
Positioning library funding against public safety needs was key for those who supported the reallocation of library funds.
“I can’t in good conscience support library expansion over public safety,” said Tryon, who was the lone vote against the agreement.
Tryon announced he would vote no after reading off a list of insults he received in his email inbox and holding up a printout of a sticker that said, “Don’t rob our readers! Hands off the GFPL!”
Those who lobbied to maintain the same level of library funding couched their arguments against the library’s successful levy campaign.
“Our voters supported enhanced library services, not replacement funding,” said Brianne Laurin, Great Falls Public Library Foundation executive director.
As part of its levy campaign, the library agreed to return a $350,000 annual general fund subsidy. Added to the reduction approved on Tuesday, the city will recoup around $821,410 from past library funding for the next fiscal year.
The library board of trustees’ next meeting is Nov. 26, and the funding agreement is likely to be on that agenda.
It’s likely that city officials will regroup and coordinate another public safety levy request in the future, though it’s unclear what that will look like at this time. The city will determine how to use the roughly $470,000 that will return to its general fund in the next fiscal year.
“We’ve been asked several times: So how will we use these funds that come back?” Commissioner Wolff said. “And I will be recommending to our city manager and our fellow commissioners that this money be used to support our courts and our legal department.”
In-depth, independent reporting on the stories impacting your community from reporters who know your town.
