By Morgan Blair, contributor
During Tuesday’s Harrisonburg City Council meeting, several council members outlined fears that federal spending cuts would reduce the grant money that the city distributes each year to local nonprofit organizations.
Harrisonburg Vice Mayor Dany Fleming said he was worried about cuts to what are called Community Development Block Grants, as well as funding reductions to housing programs and grants, economic development funding and money the city uses to purchase electric buses. Mayor Deanna Reed said local after-school programs would be hurt, and council member Laura Dent said she contacted the offices of U.S. Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine with a “bulleted list” of programs the city wants protected.
“[Federal funding is] what I keep bringing up,” Dent said. “How do we plan when we don’t know?”
Concerns about how federal funding cuts from Washington could affect Harrisonburg have been a refrain at council meetings this spring. It comes as President Donald Trump’s administration has cut or frozen federal funding across multiple facets of the federal government, including funding that goes to cities.
Dent said the city council asked the assistant to the city manager Brian Vandenberg, to come up with a list of federally funded projects in the city. One purpose of this list, Dent said, is so the council can bring up specific funding issues to officials in Washington, D.C., such as staff members she’s met with from the offices of Warner and Kaine.
The programs and projects on the list include building bike paths and fixing roads, as well as funding school lunches; these alone were allocated around $ 69 million in the 2024-2025 city budget. Dent said she worries about what possible solutions are available to fund these services.
“We may need to take some drastic measures or raise taxes,” Dent said. “I mean, those are our options at this point. Do we raise taxes or cut services?”
So far, that hasn’t been a choice the city council has had to make. It approved a budget for 2025-26 last month without tax increases or service cuts, in part because federal funds haven’t disappeared. Michael Parks, Harrisonburg’s director of communications, said in an email statement that the city is currently “unaware of any federal funds being rescinded.”
“We have not had to take any steps financially regarding any conversation at the federal level,” Parks wrote. “If something were to change, we would address it as needed, but we aren’t going to start getting into hypotheticals right now about what we would do if certain funding went away when we have not been given reason to do so at this time.”
But Dent said she’s worried, based on what President Donald Trump’s administration has done to halt or pull back funding spent through federal agencies. Dent said that, for her, cutting services is a last resort and something she doesn’t wish to see happen.
“We’re not going to stop paving the streets because of some chainsaw on Washington,” Dent said, seemingly in reference to now-departed Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk, who worked to cut a large amount of federal funding in the name of cutting waste and appeared on stage at an event with a chainsaw.
Gage Kivlen, a graduate student at James Madison University and Harrisonburg resident, said he has seen firsthand the good that the city’s funding does. He said he’s seen a path be built near his home, elderly neighbors get where they need to go via public transit, and the good of the city’s public education system for both his young daughter and his wife, an elementary school teacher.
“I’ve looked at some of the city’s [public project] plans … I was excited to see those plans,” Kivlen said. “[Cuts are] disappointing to see, and I know the spirit of these funding cuts is to shrink the size of the federal government, to eliminate, you know, ‘waste, fraud and abuse,’ but it’s just a real head-scratcher as to how investing in infrastructure, which is something that we all benefit from, is wasteful, fraudulent or abusive.”
Kivlen said he worries most about lower-income individuals if funding is cut. He said he grew up relying on programs such as food stamps — now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — and Medicaid, which covers health care costs for lower income Americans.
Cuts in funding for programs like those would be detrimental to those people’s lives, he said.
In Virginia, households with incomes exceeding twice the poverty rate are eligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, according to the US Department of Agriculture’s website. More than a quarter of the population of people who live in the 6th Congressional District, which includes Harrisonburg, relies on Medicaid to pay for health care coverage. The district has 217,684 people enrolled in Medicaid out of the 794,509 residents, according to the Association for Community Affiliated Plans.
“I just know those are a lifeline for a lot of people,” Kivlen said. “I worry that people’s quality of life is gonna go down, and people are going to be generally more unhappy.”
Fleming echoed Kivlen’s concerns, adding that, for him, the greatest worry is cuts to federal funding that go to individual citizens in Harrisonburg, specifically in the form of Medicaid benefits, something that has been proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives’ budget bill for this year.
The funding issues don’t just affect the capital improvement plan, which outlines what each department in the city government is hoping for in funding for the coming years, but they would also affect the budget, Dent said.
Dent compared the current planning for the budget to when the council had to plan a budget during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This budget process reminds me a little bit of when I first came on board in 2020,” Dent said. “We’re by law required to pass a balanced budget by May 31, so we passed a budget with the understanding that, depending on how things worked with the economy, with the progress of the pandemic, we could revise it. And we did.”
The council passed a budget for the 2025-2026 fiscal year at the May 27 meeting.
Fleming said he considered that budget to be “as safe as we can make it” given the uncertainties.
“We’re a city that is well run, and so we do have some reserves that we pull upon,” Fleming said. “We might have to rethink how we do things … That would be a large community effort, depending on where those cuts come from.”
One solution, Dent said, is for departments to look for alternatives. An example she used was expanding elementary schools instead of building new ones. Dent said she’s been encouraging alternatives like these as money-saving solutions and that she thinks they make even more sense now that funding may be less available.
“The sooner reasonable alternatives are proposed, such as expanding existing schools, the more likely such alternatives are to be implemented,” Dent said. “We might have to adapt some of the things that are under threat.”
Fleming said he is “100% sure” at least some funding will be cut from the city in the next year, and Dent said she sees it as a real possibility.
Fleming referred to the worries about cuts as a symptom of the “chaotic” nature of the cuts and freezes.
“I hope that the chaos in Washington subsides with a more stable and positive outcome,” Dent said. “If everything’s coming along nicely in Washington, it’s great. We get funding. We get grants. If there’s chaos, nobody knows how to plan, state, region, locality, anywhere. So I’m hopeful that things get better, even if I’m having a hard time finding the few moments of cautious optimism.”
For Kivlen, the issues of federal funding cuts cut right to the heart of what he thinks America stands for, and he said he hopes that people will help make positive change.
“We’re a nation that is supposed to help those and be the leader of the world,” Kivlen said. “It’s very unfortunate what’s been going on. I just encourage people to dig in and figure out what issues are important to them, and take a stand, because things are changing, and they’re changing quickly. I’m afraid that if we don’t speak up about something, it’s going to be too late. And I hate to see bad things happen to people that don’t deserve it, frankly.”
— City council reporter Lizzie Stone contributed to this report.
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