The status of a $19.9 million grant that would fund eight Southwest Virginia projects remains unclear after a group of Senate Democrats said it appears on a list of federal grants slated for cancellation.

Among other things, the grant would help pay for a new community center in Dickenson County, energy-efficiency improvements for child-care centers and research to identify locations for telehealth hubs that could double as safe places during natural disasters.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded the money in January to the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. The school would lead a coalition focused on “local, on-the ground projects that reduce pollution, increase community resilience and build community capacity,” according to a UVa news release at the time.

Christine Mahoney, the Batten school’s chief innovation officer and a professor of public policy and politics, said that the school has received no recent communication about the grant from the EPA “other than that they are reviewing our project to ensure that it is in line with the Trump administration’s goals.”

“We are confident that they will find that it is; our project diversifies energy production, saves American childcare centers energy costs to direct toward childcare workers, advances workforce development, creates jobs, and creates disaster preparedness for a region that has been hit by numerous natural disasters,” Mahoney said in an email.

Without the money, many of the projects likely cannot move forward, she said.

According to UVa, other projects planned to be funded by the grant include:

• building 22 units of energy-efficient workforce housing in Buchanan County;
• research on the environmental health and biodiversity of the Clinch River Valley;
• research on using brownfields for renewable energy generation;
• a renewable-energy jobs training program led by James Madison University’s Center for the Advancement of Sustainable Energy; and
• climate-resilience strategic planning for 10 communities.

The EPA’s award to UVa was announced Jan. 17, three days before President Donald Trump took office. The money came from the federal Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

On March 10, Trump’s newly appointed EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, announced that the agency would cancel more than 400 grants totaling $1.7 billion to “rein in wasteful federal spending.”

“It is our commitment at EPA to be exceptional stewards of tax dollars,” Zeldin said in a news release.

The release did not provide details on the specific grants that the EPA would cancel.

The grant does not appear on a list of canceled grants on the Department of Government Efficiency website, which says it lists more than 9,500 canceled federal grants totaling more than $33 billion.

But on March 25, a group of nine Democrats on the Senate Committee for Environment and Public Works published a list that they said their staff “obtained exclusively” and which comprised the impacted grants.

Included in that list was the award to UVa to fund the Southwest Virginia projects, called the Appalachian Environmental Resilience Community Change Grants Program.

The senators sent Zeldin a letter of protest, saying the planned grant cancellations would violate federal law and the EPA’s own contracts.

“As he continues to deliver for the fossil fuel industry, Administrator Zeldin is escalating his assault on the Constitution, on the environment, and on the American people by gutting investments that would lower household energy costs, spur economic growth, and cut pollution,” the senators said in a news release.

When asked to confirm whether the UVa-led program’s grant is marked for cancellation, the EPA said in an April 11 email to Cardinal News that “the agency is reviewing its awarded grants to ensure each is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars and to understand how those programs align with Administration priorities.”

“The agency’s review is ongoing,” the EPA said.

Mahoney said that UVa received assurance from the office of U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, that the program would continue.

Griffith said in a statement to Cardinal News this week that his office has not received any communications from the EPA about the matter since he asked the agency in February about the “freezing of certain grant funds” and was told that previously frozen money was being disbursed.

Separately, the EPA in February canceled a $500,000 grant to pay for recreation and flood-resilience projects in five Southwest Virginia communities, according to the nonprofit Appalachian Voices.

EO — an organization that spun off from United Way of Southwest Virginia last year; the initialism stands for “endless opportunity” — is slated to receive $4.2 million of the UVa grant for a three-year program to analyze the energy efficiency of about 40 child care centers in the counties of Buchanan, Dickenson, Lee, Russell, Scott, Tazewell and Wise and the city of Norton.

Utility expenses, such as power and water bills, are among the largest costs for child care facilities. Savings achieved through energy efficiency could be used to increase worker pay, helping to attract and retain child care workers, said Travis Staton, president and CEO of EO.

“If we want to expand access to early care and education, we’ve got to help existing providers be really good at their operations and efficiencies and minimize costs and things of that nature,” Staton said.

If the grant money doesn’t come through, Staton said his organization will continue to work with regional child care facilities to help them improve their operations.

“This grant would really help us to do that even better, and if it doesn’t happen, then we’re going to keep doing it anyway and doing everything we can in other capacities to help them,” he said. “It may not be from the energy-efficiency lens. It may be accounting services and other things that we can do to help them look at their costs and where they’re allocating dollars that they may have savings and efficiencies.”

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