BELHAVEN — A $500,000 grant from the North Carolina Department of Commerce may help put the Belhaven seafood industry back on the map in 2019, creating 25 jobs and attracting $1.7 million in private investment in the community.

Through the DOC’s Building Reuse Program, the half-million dollars will help fund the renovation of the waterfront building that once housed Seafood Safari. County Road Seafood, an affiliate of the Swan Quarter-based Newman Seafood, plans to install a state-of-the-art seafood processing plant in the building.

For Belhaven Mayor Ricky Credle, bringing the seafood plant to town will restore a piece of the Belhaven economy that he and many others in town experienced firsthand. Credle’s mother worked at Seafood Safari, and he picked up shifts there as a teenager to help earn extra money.

“This is what our town was built on, was the seafood industry,” Credle said. “To have it come back is great. A lot of the people that are here, their parents or grandparents worked in the seafood industry. At one time, we had four seafood houses.”

Credle says that having 25 full-time jobs come to town, plus the seasonal jobs the plant may generate, is tremendous for the town and its residents. At a time when the town’s economy has seen ups and downs, the plant promises to provide a shot in the arm to Belhaven’s workforce and the commercial fishing industry as a whole.

“It’s right here at home,” Credle said. “Most people in Belhaven are two-to-five minutes away from the location … You don’t have to drive to Washington or Greenville — you’re right here at home like it used to be.”

According to Beaufort County Economic Development Director Martyn Johnson, County Road Seafood will seek to provide a ‘sea-to-table’ market for local seafood to be processed for restaurants.

While the new jobs and investment will be a significant boost for the town’s economy, this is not the first time Belhaven has benefited from an RIA grant in recent memory.

In 2016, the state approved a $500,000 loan to support the redevelopment of two vacant buildings in downtown Belhaven for expansion of Spoon River Art Works and Market. The loan was a collaborative solution between the Community Development Block Grant program and the Downtown Redevelopment Fund of the North Carolina Main Street Center.

“If you look at that project and this project, that’s a million dollars of public funding into projects right here in Belhaven,” Belhaven Town Manager Lynn Davis said. “That is huge for a town this size that certainly needs that investment. Hopefully, the public money will then spur additional private money as well.”

The effort to secure the grant came through cooperation of many community partners, including the Town of Belhaven, Beaufort County Economic Development, the Mideast Commission, the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, the Small Business Technology Development Center, Tideland EMC, the Region Q Workforce Board, N.C. Works and Beaufort County Community College. In addition to the state grant, Beaufort County will also provide a $50,000 economic development grant for the project.

“It was really a team effort to work with the project to locate it in eastern Beaufort County,” Johnson said.

Moving forward, Johnson says that once the paperwork is submitted, a letter from the N.C. DOC will give the green light for the project to begin. Construction is expected to start this spring, with a goal of completion sometime in the fall of 2019.