Ask Steve Winter how many times a day he’s checked the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant funds portal since January 21 and he answers with a wry laugh: “I couldn’t even say.”
January 21st — one day into the Trump administration — he received a notification that the $20 million Community Change grant the City of New Haven had won, in partnership with a coalition of local groups, would be available for use.
But he has not been able to access the account.
“It’s maddening,” said Winter, who is the climate and sustainability executive director for New Haven, and now a first term state representative.
Winter learned a week before Christmas the city had been successful in its application. Then the grant was fully “obligated” on January 17 by the Biden administration.
The funds have never been accessible, and Winter subsequently got notification that the account is “unavailable for payment.” Then, on February 10 around noon, the notification changed to “suspended.”
That happened around the same time a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled, for the second time in ten days, that the Trump administration could not stop disbursement of appropriated federal funds. This time the judge noted the administration had violated his first order and on Tuesday, a federal appeals panel in Boston refused an administration request to put its funding freeze back in place while it appealed.
But the status of New Haven’s community change grant remains particularly worrisome.
The Community Change Grant Program falls under former President Joe Biden’s Justice 40 initiative — a government-wide program that directed 40% of certain climate and environmental funding streams be directed towards disadvantaged communities.
It is one of many diversity efforts — inside and outside of government — Trump has systematically not only eliminated, including Justice 40 specifically, but also used as a political and funding weapon since he returned to office. Tuesday morning, the EPA announced it has placed 171 diversity and environmental justice employees on administrative leave.
The components of New Haven’s project also address climate change, another subject Trump is erasing from the federal lexicon.
Those, combined with his day-one executive order directing all agencies to immediately pause disbursement of any funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) or the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), has left the New Haven program, which uses IRA funding, with three targets on its back.
In the wake of Monday’s court ruling, Winter said two other New Haven grant programs, also using IRA funding, that began operating again late last week after an initial freeze, reverted to “suspended” as well. One is an environmental justice program that helps people with oil convert to heat pumps and electric stoves. The other is a project to supply geothermal heating to an area near Union Station in New Haven. The redesignation as “suspended” may be a deliberate nationwide effort according to information Winter received from others who have been monitoring the situation.
The halting of the community change project, also referred to as the Elm City Climate Collaborative, has also left its 20 partners wondering if they will ever see the funding for what many call the most collaborative effort ever for the city.
Focusing on the 14 disadvantaged neighborhoods as designated by census tract data among its total 21, the project takes a holistic approach using an environmental and climate resiliency backbone to improve the quality of life for at-need residents.
That means classic improvements like new energy efficient low-income housing and upgrades for existing homes, tree planting to help cool heat islands in the city, and climate-resistant corridors for bikes, walking and other green spaces. But it also includes upgraded food rescue operations, plans for composting, green jobs development through many unique programs and ramped up efforts to meet demand for bicycles from residents who are transportation-challenged, while also contributing to reducing the city’s carbon footprint.
“It’s essentially focusing on the neighborhoods that have the deepest needs, the highest levels of poverty, the most air quality issues and associated health impacts,” Winter said. “And there would be staff from existing neighborhood development organizations to help with outreach, as well as two nonprofits.”
The individual participating organizations already exist. Their share of the federal grant funds would help increase their reach.
Haven’s Harvest is a food rescue operation that matches unused food from places like Trader Joes and gets it directly to folks who can use it: residents of elderly housing units, Headstart programs, faith communities, methadone clinics, sober homes and after-school programs, said Lori Martin, who founded it in 2019 and is now its executive director.
“The highest and best use of food kept out of the waste stream is to feed people. And so that’s our goal,” she said.
The challenge in the operation was that the organizations that could use the food didn’t have enough storage capacity if the timing of their needs and the food availability didn’t synch up. Haven’s Harvest didn’t have the space either.
The $850,000 it is slated to get over three years through the community change grant would buy three additional cold and freezer storage units, plus pay for staff to do more outreach to people in need of food. If the Trump administration manages to kill the grant it would hinder that work, Martin said.
“Certainly the part that every day I think about is that there is food in every community that’s going to waste because we don’t have the mechanism to capture it and keep it in the food system,” she said. “It’s really painful. It was such an amazing collaboration. We can really make a difference in this community.”
The Bradley Street Bike Cooperative, now in its 10th year, has been a self-funded operation that repairs donated used bicycles. About half it sells and the other half are donated to community partners who provide them to residents who have little or no access to transportation. And they provide ongoing repairs.
“We’re able to run our shop, but not able to expand or have any sort of very comfortable cushion for our monthly expenses,” said Catherine Lindsay who was the co-op’s operations manager when the grant was formulated during an intense four-month city-wide process last spring and summer. She said they provide about 300 donated bikes a year, but it would take 500 to fill all the requests they get.
The cushion the co-op would get from the federal money is $39,000 over three years to help fund what they call the Newhallville bike box, which is a shipping container turned satellite bike shop along the Farmington canal trail in Newhallville. It’s open a couple of times a month to provide free bike repairs to people in the community, and it has a bike riding education program.
“There seems to be an insatiable demand for access to this sort of reliable, safe transportation mode in New Haven. We have a constant stream of requests from our partners,” Lindsay said. “It’s just disappointing if it turns out that we aren’t able to use this opportunity to really give back more to our service populations. It’s just really too bad to see the disinvestment from directly being able to help people in our community.”
Other partners include the well-known Urban Resources Initiative, which has done tree-planting in the city for years, and CitySeed, the nonprofit which runs the New Haven farmers market and other programs. It would use its part of the grant money to expand food waste collection and education, and also to venture into a compost operation.
Then there are lesser-known partners like MakeHaven, a nonprofit with wood, ceramics, textiles, electronics and metal shops. It would get about $100,00 to train people to do their own repairs as a way to save money and be more self-sufficient.
“This program, and other programs like it have been caught up in this rhetoric around the Green New Deal,” Winter said, referring to the policy platform that was formulated by progressive politicians but never enacted, but that is cited by Republicans to discredit climate change policies. “The things that we would be focused on completing would help improve people’s day-to-day lives and help improve the health and resiliency of our city. These funds were appropriated by the U.S. Congress to do just that and signed into law by the President of the United States. We have a legally binding obligation to access this funding, and I think we ought to be able to move forward with it and complete the work that we set out to do.”
A spokesperson at the EPA regional office in Boston did not respond to a question on the status of the grant, nor any of the many other grants and funding streams for Connecticut programs that are either frozen or face potential jeopardy.
A spokesman for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) offered a blanket general response to inquiries about which of its federal grants were and weren’t functioning: “DEEP remains fully committed to carrying out the important work funded through our federal grants. We continue to operate under approved awards for various funding streams and are implementing projects in accordance with those awards.”
But the court filing on Friday that resulted in Monday’s ruling by the judge in Rhode Island provided a detailed look at two programs that had been frozen – together valued at nearly $535 million. One was Solar for All, a national program that provides solar systems to low-income people. Another was the Climate Pollution Reduction grant program with a planning component and a program called the New England Heat Pump Accelerator — a $450 million program of which Connecticut’s share is about $100 million.
Other EPA programs include the Clean School Bus rebate program. In May six communities were awarded a total of $21.5 million. Of the six — Bridgeport, Branford, West Hartford, East Hartford, Ridgefield and Fairfield — only East Hartford responded to inquiries about the status of their funds.
A spokesperson emailed: “The EPA awarded East Hartford Public Schools a $400,000 rebate through the Clean School Bus Program. Separately, the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection awarded East Hartford Public Schools an $80,000 rebate. East Hartford Public Schools has not received these funds and therefore has not yet moved forward with any purchases. As the status of these funds remain uncertain, EHPS will continue to pursue grant opportunities to meet the state’s clean school bus mandate.”
In November, the ports of New Haven and New London were awarded nearly $40 million in clean ports funding to replace heavy diesel equipment with electric versions as well as solar and battery systems for the ports. Gateway Terminal did not reply to inquiries about the status of that grant.
And there is also a $248.9 million Clean Corridor Coalition grant awarded in July and led by New Jersey to provide charging infrastructure for medium and heavy duty electric vehicles. Connecticut would get $56 million from that grant.
On Thursday, the Federal Highway Administration sent a letter to state transportation departments that they were rescinding the policies for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program and therefore “immediately suspending the approval of all State Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Deployment plans for all fiscal years.”
A spokesman for Connecticut Department of Transportation said based on that letter, they have paused their NEVI program. They were to have received $52 million over five years — an award that was announced few years ago. $1.5 million of that has actually been used.
“As we await further federal guidance, we notified the 12 Phase 1 awardees that the funding is paused. We also notified those who applied for Phase 1b grants that the funds are paused,” he said.
There are also at least three groups of grant funds from the federal Department of Energy that may be in limbo: A Grid Resilience and Tribal Formula Grant for $3 million in fiscal year 2024 and $6.5 million from fiscal 2023, and a $389 million regional Grid Innovation Project called Power Up New England. It uses funds from the bi-partisan Infrastructure Act and is designed to facilitate interconnections for offshore wind and energy storage infrastructure for the region. And there are three smart grid grants to private companies for projects in Connecticut: for $27.5 million, $49.5 million and $10.9 million. None of the companies responded to inquiries.
The DOE did not respond to inquiries about their status.
In addition to the existing grants, there are at least three funding streams that began accepting grant applications during the Biden administration where the application periods are due to end during the current administration. One set of grants is for flood mitigation assistance and the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program – administered through FEMA. Another is habitat restoration and coastal resilience grants run by NOAA. And there is also a Clean Water Act nonpoint source pollution grant that DEEP is handling with EPA funds that closes this week.
Several news organizations are reporting that the Commerce Department, which oversees NOAA, has specifically asked NOAA officials to search its grant programs for terms that reflect climate change-related issues. It’s not clear what that might mean moving forward.
A spokesman from NOAA, when asked about the current grant solicitation, responded by email: “NOAA financial assistance obligations and disbursements are proceeding including planned new awards.”
Neither FEMA nor EPA responded to questions about whether their grant programs would continue. DEEP would only say it is running the EPA grant.