Water and environmental groups in southwestern Colorado have not heard a peep from the federal government since their $25.6 million grant got caught up in a widespread funding freeze, officials say.
Southwestern Water Conservation District pulled together a unique collection of partners in 2024 to tap into an immense stack of federal cash for environmental projects in the Colorado River Basin. The partners were “ecstatic” Jan. 17 when they found out their application to fund 17 projects was accepted, Steve Wolff, district manager, said.
Three days later, President Donald Trump paused spending, and the district’s partnership has been in limbo ever since. Other Colorado groups are in the same boat with millions of dollars of awarded grant funding on the line.
“Everybody had heard that they were going to be looking at the funding … so it was no big surprise,” Wolff said March 26. “The confusion was nobody knew what was in or out of all these freezes, or pulled back, at all. We still have not heard officially anything.”
“Under President Donald J. Trump’s leadership, the Department is working to cut bureaucratic waste and ensure taxpayer dollars are spent efficiently,” an unnamed Interior spokesperson said in an emailed response from the Bureau of Reclamation. “Projects are being individually assessed by period of performance, criticality and other criteria.”
The uncertainty has impacted a slew of environmental projects across the Upper Colorado River Basin — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
Under the Biden administration, the Bureau of Reclamation awarded $388.5 million for water and drought-related projects across the Upper Basin on Jan. 17. Of that, Coloradans secured $177 million.
Coloradans wanted to use that money to help fish find shelter when the state’s rivers are at their lowest. They wanted to help farmers and ranchers have a more reliable water supply by fixing decades-old irrigation ditches. Some projects planned to remove dams or turn wastewater lagoons into wetlands.
One award for $40 million to help a Western Slope water district buy an old and powerful Colorado River water right tied to the Shoshone Power Plant.
In southwestern Colorado, the organizations that were awarded funding were wondering if they should try to wait it out to see what happens or seek funding elsewhere.
“It’s incredibly stressful,” said Danyelle Leentjes with the Upper San Juan Watershed Enhancement Partnership. “It’s really hard to move forward in this landscape. It’s super, super hard.”
A new collaboration
Southwestern Water Conservation District started pulling together partners in 2023. Staff knew a load of federal funding was coming down the pike, and they wanted to build collaborations so local groups could access it, Wolff said.
“I don’t think the district’s ever been involved in anything like this before,” he said.
Water districts, ditch companies, environmental organizations and others often have small staffs in the rural district, which spans nine counties. The groups have little extra time to take on the application or little experience with federal grants. They might not have extra funding to hire a grant writer. Some, like nonprofits, weren’t eligible to apply for the funding without a governmental agency — like Southwestern — to manage the money as a fiscal agency.
“We’d repeatedly seen places where individuals or small groups didn’t have the capacity to work on federal funding or even state funding,” Wolff said.
So the conservation district stepped in: It asked organizations to add ready-to-go water projects to a centralized list, dubbed the “pipeline.” About 30 entities joined the effort. The district got grants from the state of Colorado and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership to hire people to organize the process and write the grant application.
Without the grants, the application never would have gotten off the ground, Wolff said.
“There’s two of us here. Our plates are full,” he said, referring to the district’s full-time staff. “We could’ve never done it.”
And when the federal funding application finally opened in fall 2024, the partnership could whip together a successful 17-project application for $25.6 million in weeks.
Wolff didn’t think any of the partnering organizations had applied for a grant that size, he said.
“I was ecstatic we got the full award,” Wolff said. “It seemed like the previous 18 months of effort had just paid off.”
Funding uncertainty
The uncertainty for Southwestern, however, is tied to the funding source for their grant: the $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act.
The law included $4 billion to mitigate drought and prioritized the Colorado River Basin, the water supply for 40 million people. Of that total, $500 million was for projects that would address drought impacts or cut water use in the Upper Basin.
The Trump administration paused spending under the law Jan. 20, raising questions about which parts of the far-reaching policy were frozen, whether it was legal, how long the freeze would last and what happens next.
One executive order, called Unleashing American Energy, paused spending to give federal agencies 90 days to review whether funded projects aligned with the administration’s energy policies.
Past regulations have been burdensome and impeded the development of the country’s energy resources, according to the executive order.
That 90-day period ends April 20, but it was unclear Friday whether that deadline is still in effect or applies to the funding awarded to Colorado. Interior and Reclamation did not respond to clarifying questions from The Colorado Sun.
U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Colorado Republican, has generally supported the efforts to cut spending at the federal level, according to news reports. He did not respond to a request for comment Friday, but he has called for freeing up funding to purchase the historic Shoshone water rights on the Colorado River.
U.S. Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, both Colorado Democrats, have advocated for federal funds meant for Colorado to be released.
“Sen. Bennet believes President Trump’s shortsighted cuts to commonsense Colorado projects jeopardize rural communities, agricultural producers, and businesses across the state,” Bennet’s staff said in a prepared statement. “Grantees should receive the resources that were appropriated by Congress and promised by the Administration to complete their work.”
In early March, Southwestern and its partners had an open conversation about what to do with the regional director of Bennet’s office, John Whitney.
The strategy at the time, given the bipartisan support for the funding, was to have quiet conversations with Reclamation and Interior, Whitney told the gathering at the Southwestern Water Conservation District’s office in Durango.
“There may come a time when we have to stand up and raise our hand to be the squeaky wheel, to demand the money be released,” he said. “We don’t think that’s where we stand right now. We think an approach of quiet advocacy and outreach is the best.”
Impacts in southwestern Colorado
Members of the Southwestern partnership have stuck to that strategy so far, but the uncertainty has been hard to bear.
The Bureau of Reclamation awarded $2.2 million to the Upper San Juan Watershed Enhancement Partnership for a project that would clear concrete slabs and steel out of an irrigation ditch to help the agricultural community; fix damage to the Upper San Juan River from a landslide; and plant willows and reshape the river channel to help aquatic ecosystems.
“You can’t really proceed on anything. You can just hope that it goes,” Leentjes said.
Leentjes is paid to keep these projects moving forward — and without funding to make that happen, she spent a month wondering if she needed to look for jobs.
It is also one of the first big projects for the Upper San Juan partnership after months of working with community members to identify which priorities should come first.
Their reputation is on the line, she said.
The Webber Ditch Company asked for $2.1 million to finally repair a 113-year-old diversion that sends water from the Mancos River to about 75 farmers and ranchers. The ditch company has been doing quick fixes on the rickety headgate for decades, Mike Nolan, company vice president, said.
“It could fail us in a season. That’s always been our biggest fear. Say we get wild monsoon rains and the river picks up, we could potentially lose that structure,” Nolan said. “That could happen at a critical time for our water users. We could Band-Aid it, but that’s not something we want to happen.”
The Mancos Conservation District had several projects in mind. Staff wanted to cut back thirsty invasive plants, like Russian olive trees, and improve a river put-in next to a local school in Mancos. They had projects to help with fish passage when the river is low, district executive director Danny Margoles said.
“It’s been a complicated number of months for us,” he said. The district had to lay off an employee and halt work on a project after the Trump administration canceled a different federal grant that was already contracted, confirmed and paying out.
The organizations were concerned about rippling impacts to state grants. Local organizations often use federal grants to cover their funding “match” for state grants. Now those federal grants are uncertain, and they’re not sure what the impact will be.
Margoles said he can sense the feelings of stress and uncertainty among his staff.
“Everyone’s hanging in there,” Margoles said. “Everyone does believe in the work they’re doing, so that’s what is keeping everyone going right now too. But there’s a lot of uncertainty.”
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