By John Spruill
Special to the Beacon
Eastern North Carolina, I want to tell you about two pallets sitting in the Roper Volunteer Fire Department bay right now. On those pallets is $134,000 worth of brand new, life-saving breathing equipment — air packs, bottles, gear that our firefighters need to walk into a burning building and bring your family members out alive.
It’s paid for. It’s been awarded. It’s sitting right there.
And Washington won’t let us have it.
Let me back up. The Roper Volunteer Fire Department applied for a FEMA grant to replace our self-contained breathing apparatus equipment. Our current gear is over twenty years old. As I’ve told our community directly, “a lot of them have already expired. They’re past their useful life expectancy, and really, we’re not supposed to be using them, but we don’t have anything else. We don’t have any other choice.”
Read that again. The volunteers who respond when your house is on fire — the men and women who strap on gear and walk into smoke and flames to pull out your children, your parents, your grandparents — are doing it with equipment that should have been retired years ago. We applied for relief. We were awarded that relief. We received the equipment and submitted the invoice to FEMA.
And then Congress decided it had other priorities.
FEMA falls under the Department of Homeland Security, which has been caught in a Washington funding standoff that has nothing to do with Roper, nothing to do with Washington County, and nothing to do with the brave volunteers who serve this community without a paycheck. There’s nobody there to process it. There’s nobody there to write a check to pay the invoice we’ve already received.
One hundred and thirty-four thousand dollars. Sitting on two pallets. Waiting for Washington to do its job.
And where was Congress while that equipment gathered dust in our bay? On Easter recess. That’s right — while Roper firefighters suited up with expired gear for every call that came in, the people responsible for this mess were back home, away from Washington, not working. “They should have their tails up there working and getting something done to help us in Eastern North Carolina,” I said publicly, and I will say it again as many times as it takes.
This is the dysfunction that Washington has perfected. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have spent so long treating the federal budget as a bargaining chip — a weapon to be wielded in whatever culture war is dominating the news cycle that week — that they have lost sight of what government is actually supposed to do. Fund the basics. Keep the lights on. Make sure the firefighter going into a burning building has air in his tank.
Folks, this is just plain and simple ignorance.
The people of Eastern North Carolina are not asking for much. We are not asking for earmarks or special favors or a seat at the table of power. We are asking for what was already promised to us — a grant that was applied for properly, awarded fairly, and is now being held hostage by a Congress that cannot find the basic competence to process a check.
This is not an abstraction. This is not a debate about policy philosophy or the proper role of the federal government. This is life-and-death equipment sitting sixty feet from where our firefighters sleep during overnight shifts, and Washington cannot be bothered to release the funds to pay for it.
I ran for the North Carolina House because I believe Eastern North Carolina has gone overlooked and underserved by its elected representatives for too long. We fell short in that race, but as I told the more than four thousand people who supported us, “we’re not going to stop because we didn’t win that election. We’re going to keep working for Eastern North Carolina.”
Part of that work is making sure people understand what Washington’s dysfunction actually costs at the local level. It costs us in ways that never trend on social media and never get covered on cable news. It costs us in expired air packs and unfunded invoices and volunteers doing dangerous work without the tools they were promised.
An informed public is the only check on this kind of failure. We need to be informed. An informed public will be able to keep an eye on our legislators so that they don’t do something that’s going to affect us negatively — which seems to be happening all the time.”
One hundred and thirty-four thousand dollars, folks. Two pallets. Our firefighters are waiting.
Congress needs to get back to work.
Formerly a Republican candidate for state House, District 1, John Spruill is chief of the Roper Volunteer Fire Department and a Chairman of the Washington County Commission.