Rep. McIntyre’s premature appropriation
Posted November 3rd, 2009 at 8:24 AM by John HoodLast month, Rep. Mike McIntyre announced that the Brunswick town of Calabash would receive a $2.6 million federal loan, along with a $137,000 federal grant, to build a new fire station.
Only, apparently no one asked Calabash about the idea. Last week, the fire department board unanimously rejected the federal loan:
“Everybody was in favor [of rejecting the money],” fire department board chairman Jennings Edge said following the Oct. 29 board meeting. “There’s just no way we can make that kind of payments.”
The department had applied for a grant through stimulus funding for the planned 17,301-square-foot station that will cost an estimated $3 million to build. The planned two-story station would be about double the size of the current, aging building on Persimmon Road.
Instead, “it came back with a loan and grant,” Edge said.
“There’s just a mix-up somewhere,” he said. “I don’t understand what happened. It’s just Washington politics.”
Unfortunately, this wasn’t a case of constitutionalists challenging the propriety of federal funding for local programs or of fiscal conservatives rejecting the need for more spending. Calabash had sought a stimulus grant to build the fire station and seems a bit peeved that other local communities got their requested gifts:
In September, AARA grants were announced for the Sunset Beach Fire Department, which is to receive $1,494,103 to build a second fire station, and the Navassa Volunteer Fire Department in northern Brunswick County, slated to get $1,607,950 to build a new station.
Edge expressed hope the Calabash department is still in line to receive a comparable grant but acknowledged it should have been notified by now. “We still haven’t been denied on our stimulus grant yet,” he said.
Edge said Calabash’s fire department needs the funding more than Sunset Beach does. “I’m not resentful,” he said. “Some things you can’t do anything about. They probably have bigger donors.”