Critics decry Rocky Mount's plan to build new home for resident using $200k of taxpayer funds
The city of Rocky Mount will spend more than $200,000 to build a new house for one of its residents after the city council approved the plan.
Critics have called the project a waste of taxpayer money, and the interim city manager now tells WRAL News this type of undertaking will never happen again.
Council members agreed on June 27 to send a contractor out of Raleigh to tear down and rebuild a home at 623 Branch Street owned by 88-year-old Ethel Harper.
The home has been boarded up since 2020 when Harper moved out due to safety concerns.
Voicing his opposition before the vote, councilman Lige Daughtridge said that price per square foot of the new home would be $242, exactly double the median cost of a home in Edgecombe County.
"We are here discussing a home to be built in Rocky Mount at twice the amount of the median home price in Edgecombe County," Daughtridge said. "It doesn’t make sense to me."
Community members have also voiced opposition to the project.
Developer Adrienne Copland told WRAL News that for $200,000, the city could have used its smaller Urgent Repair Grants to make improvements to more than a dozen homes in the area.
"It’s ridiculous, it should not have gotten to this point," Copland said. "At some point, someone should have looked and said — what are we doing, and at what cost? But no one did that."
WRAL News took those concerns to Interim City Manager Peter Varney.
Varney said the process began in 2019, when homeowner Ethel Harper was approved for an Urgent Repair Grant on her home in the amount of $12,500.
The past several years saw the plan and cost change drastically, with Varney blaming the pandemic and supply chain issues.
"Nothing happened until late in the year 2020, and they at that point had apparently reopened the case and somebody had decided to do a complete rehab of the house," Varney said.
At some point in 2020, the city committed to completely repair Harper’s historic home. He said that initial estimates for the rehab project came in at up to $260,000.
But because the city had officially accepted Harper as an applicant, Varney said they had no choice but to move forward with the project.
"If you could wind the clock back to the very beginning, I don’t think we would be in this position where we are building a brand new house," Varney said. "But I can’t wind the clock back."
Varney said the city eventually decided that rather than rehabilitating the home, it would be cheaper to simply knock down the house and build a new one.
He said that a series of unusual circumstances had led Rocky Mount to this point, and he didn’t expect to see this type of spending replicated.
"This is something the city has never done before, I dare say would never do again," Varney said.
WRAL News was able to contact Ethel Harper by phone for her reaction to city’s decision to build her a new home.
She said she was "very happy" with their choice, saying structural problems with the home’s foundation necessitated a complete demolition.
