The entire town of Enfield was “reenergized” Tuesday, Mayor W. Mondale Robinson said following an emergency board meeting which immediately went into closed session for consultation with the town’s attorney.

Following the approximately one hour, 15-minute closed session meeting, which took place after a storm Saturday knocked out the town’s entire power grid, the mayor opened the Zoom meeting up for questions.

“The entire town has power at this moment,” he said. “That progress addresses the issue of people staying in their houses without power. So power outages are not a thing right now.”

He said, however, “We still have the ramifications of trying to make sure that people are refunded for the foods they lost, the medication that may have soured when there was no refrigeration, and other issues associated with that.”

While the town is not completely in the clear, Robinson said, “ … Our residents need to be made whole. We are still trying to figure out the next steps and we need to bring in engineers to look at our systems.”

Asked about the possibility of an upgrade to the system, the mayor said, “Unfortunately, we live in an unknown when we have a federal government that is cutting all programs that were designed to address these very issues.”

The Justice40 initiative was a program designed to take care of issues such as these as well as other infrastructure rebuilding programs “that are no longer available to small towns like Enfield because of this new (federal) administration. So we are in an unknown but we are working diligently with our federal partners through the office of (Congressman) Don Davis, through our state partners through the governor’s office, and our county to figure out what’s available to address these problems.”

Addressing a resident’s concerns about the rollout of any reimbursement programs, Robinson said, “Those programs don’t come through the town directly … We did our part. We said we are in a state of emergency. I have not lifted that state of emergency.”

Through the state of emergency, he said, the county is required through social services to get food replacement foods for anyone receiving SNAP benefits. “Beyond that, it is up to the state to mark us as a disaster area. At this point, it’s out of the town of Enfield’s hands. We’ve done everything we can and we’re making these calls. We’re pushing, trying to force the hand of the state and county people to understand that we still have unmet needs so that these programs can be rolled out.”

He said those funds don’t come from the town. “It comes from the state government.”

The mayor could not give the commenter a specific timeline for any possible rollout. “There’s no usual. Each specific incident or disaster has to be measured for itself and there are thresholds that have to be met. So there’s no usual when every disaster is different.”

Currently the requests are making their way “through the bureaucracy — that is the state government to figure out if we meet that threshold or what that threshold is so they can mark us as a disaster area. Once we are, then it runs through DSS programs.”