Daniel Holloman can rattle off by memory the areas in St. Pauls that flood during heavy rainstorms.
East McRainey Road near Mercer Branch, a tributary of the Lumber River. East Broad Street. The parking lots at St. Pauls Elementary School on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The pond on Evans Road near the Faith Assembly of God church.
Holloman, the public works director for the Robeson County town, has been responding to high waters for almost three decades. But he says his job has gotten more pressing.
“There’s more urgency to deal with it,” Holloman said, “because we get bigger and heavier rains than we did 15, 20 years ago.”
Storms that dump six or seven inches of water regularly flood parts of town, according to Holloman. The last named storm to hit Robeson County, Tropical Storm Debby, dropped up to eight inches and caused sewer overflows in St. Pauls.
The county was walloped in 2018 by Hurricane Florence, which brought about 22 inches of rain to Lumberton, according to the National Weather Service in Wilmington. Countless homes and businesses were destroyed, including some of those damaged two years earlier during Hurricane Matthew.
North Carolina wants to help cash-strapped small towns like St. Pauls pay for flood-mitigation projects. The General Assembly established the state Flood Resiliency Blueprint in 2021 and allocated $96 million three years later for communities along six river basins– including the Lumber River that flows from the Sandhills into South Carolina. The blueprint includes new flood maps and an online tool that helps officials determine mitigation strategies.
In 2024, St. Pauls began construction on stormwater infrastructure improvements using the $200,000 it received from the blueprint. It also got more than $2.4 million from the N.C. Office of Recovery and Resiliency in 2017 to reroute floodwater away from residential areas near Elizabeth and Johnson streets in the southern part of town.
In 2019, the Golden LEAF Foundation, a nonprofit established by the General Assembly, awarded the town about $429,000 in a since-completed project to identify and make stormwater improvements along North Wilkinson Drive, Britt Street, and North Sanford Street.
But Holloman said the money hasn’t been enough to address all the flooding issues in St. Pauls, home to about 2,000 people in northern Robeson County.
Drainage ditches should be cleared of debris every 10 years so rainwater can flow away from town, he said. And the town’s old underground clay pipes should be replaced because they are too small and brittle to handle the increased rain.
“I’m thankful for what we do get,” Holloman said, “but there’s a lot of stuff to do.”
St. Pauls has a general-fund budget of about $6 million this fiscal year, according to Town Manager Stephanie Dollinger. That includes about $28,000 from a storm drainage tax the town started to levy in 2023 to pay for flood mitigation projects. Homeowners pay $20 each year, while businesses pay $50.
Since the tax has been in place, Holloman said his department aims to spend about $25,000 a year on clearing ditches and other efforts, but he went over budget this year by $11,000.
Property owners in St. Pauls pay about $1.34 per $100 valuation in county and town taxes, according to the N.C. Department of Revenue. Raising taxes would likely run some struggling families out of town, Holloman said.
Almost 38% of St. Pauls residents live in poverty, about three times the statewide average. A growing number of families are Hispanic; more than 30% of the town’s residents speak Spanish at home, according to the U.S. Census.
“It’s just harder for small towns because we have constrained budgets,” Dollinger said. “Resources are limited.”
Building a Blueprint
St. Pauls mostly relies on state grants for flood mitigation, according to Dollinger. She said the state has been “very helpful” in providing funding, but the process of applying for grants is arduous. She also said the gap between applying for and receiving funding often results in increased construction costs.
“Anytime there’s a significant lag in time between getting the money for a project and getting to the point where there’s a shovel in the ground, that’s when the costs change,” Dollinger said.
It took St. Pauls seven years to begin a stormwater project after getting money from the N.C. Office of Recovery and Resiliency, according to Dollinger and Holloman. Project costs increased by the time construction began, and town officials had to ask the office for an additional $800,000, Dollinger said. She said that brought the total cost to about $2.6 million.
The North Carolina Flood Resiliency Blueprint includes the development of action strategies for the Lumber, Cape Fear, Neuse, White Oak, Tar-Pamlico, and French Broad river basins. The state Department of Environmental Quality released a draft strategy for the Neuse River Basin in 2024.
Stuart Brown, blueprint program manager, said his team will deliver drafts for the other basins to the N.C. General Assembly this summer that will include “a list of prioritized projects as well as funding strategies for those projects.”
From there, he said, what lawmakers do “is out of our hands.”
“We’re trying to adapt to Mother Nature, because you ain’t gonna ever beat Mother Nature.”
Daniel Holloman, St. Pauls’ public works director
As of January, the blueprint provided over $34 million for 73 projects in 34 counties, according to NCDEQ’s report last month to the General Assembly’s Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Agriculture and Environment and Natural Resources.
More than $12.8 million went to efforts in the Lumber River basin, according to NCDEQ. Most are in Robeson County, and a handful are in Scotland and Columbus counties.
“We know that there is still a lot of flood risk and a lot of outstanding needs in the state,” Brown said. “So we need to be clear-eyed and understand that this is going to need to be a long-term investment and a long-term program.”
More Needs
The town of Red Springs, 20 minutes west of St. Pauls, also faces budget constraints as its two grants totalling $3 million from the N.C. Department of Public Safety will run out at the end of June, according to Town Manager Shanelle Harris.
Red Springs spent most of the money on cleaning debris along Little Raft Swamp, a tributary of the Lumber River that causes a lot of the town’s flooding issues, Harris said. She said the money also paid for the town to capture and relocate almost 100 beavers whose dams blocked water flow.
The funding allowed Red Springs to extend its flood mitigation efforts into Rennert, a town of 275 people about six and a half miles away. Once the grant money is gone, Harris said, Red Springs won’t have enough to work outside its limits.
“If we’re struggling with what we have, imagine how much more difficult it would be for smaller communities,” she said. “Who’s doing what for the swamp outside of our incorporated limits? I can’t tell you. The town of Rennert, or any of these little smaller areas—Shannon, Lumber Bridge—they’re probably struggling to keep up with this issue also.”
About 43% of Red Springs’ over 3,000 residents are Black, Census data shows. The median household income in town is $20,833, compared to $72,388 statewide.
The town’s budget of $4.44 million this fiscal year isn’t enough to cover all of its flood mitigation needs, Harris said.
“The town has identified several areas that experience significant flash flooding or several inches of standing water in as little as four-inch rain events,” she said. “Some of these areas required homes to be rebuilt after Hurricanes Mathew and Florence.”
Harris said the town has a little over $502,000 in unspent money from the state Department of Public Safety grants. The money will fund the remaining design process for a drainage project on East Third Street, which the county started in 2023 but ran out of money to complete. Town officials will then look for another grant to build the project, Harris said.
Federal Funding
St. Pauls is also looking to the federal government for additional assistance. Dollinger said the town wants to apply for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant Program, which supports projects aimed at making communities more resilient.
“We know that there is still a lot of flood risk and a lot of outstanding needs in the state.”
Stuart Brown, North Carolina Flood Resiliency Blueprint program manager
But President Donald Trump suggested eliminating the program in his budget for fiscal year 2027 as part of a proposed 13% decrease in overall HUD funding. Several grants fall under the Community Development Block Grant Program umbrella, including one for disaster recovery that provided $225 million to Asheville following Hurricane Helene.
It’s not the first time funding for flood mitigation and resiliency was threatened in North Carolina. Last year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would cancel $200 million in flood resiliency funds for North Carolina, including $11 million for Robeson and Columbus counties.
N.C. Attorney General Jeff Jackson was among 19 state attorneys general who sued the federal government over the canceled money. A federal judge ruled that the government had to reinstate the program and issue the funds. As of last month, FEMA still has not released the money, a spokesperson with the North Carolina Department of Justice told Blue Ridge Public Radio.
Close to home, Holloman said he hopes the St. Pauls Board of Commissioners will approve at least $90,000 in the town’s new budget for an excavator so crews can widen and deepen ditches.
“We’re trying to adapt to Mother Nature,” Holloman said, “because you ain’t gonna ever beat Mother Nature.”