Projects designed to help restore the Chesapeake Bay watershed are being affected by the termination of federal grants, and the Choose Clean Water Coalition warns that could have detrimental effects.
Director Kristin Reilly said 300 nonprofits are members of the coalition, and a survey of the group’s membership showed 80% of respondents saw two or more of their federal grants paused.
“We have always relied on the federal partnership and funding for the restoration effort,” she said. “We would not be able to move forward without it.”
Reilly told WTOP that farmers are among the groups most affected by frozen federal grants. Farmers have been instrumental, she said, in bay restoration efforts for decades.
“We’ve been working very closely with folks like farmers to install practices on their land that not only reduce pollution runoff, but are increasing wildlife habitat … improving their bottom line,” she said.
All of that, Reilly said, “is in service to healthy local waterways and, eventually, a healthy Chesapeake Bay.”
The work includes preserving wildlife habitats and preventing pollution runoff into the Chesapeake Bay. Reilly said the freeze on grant money also affects rivers, from “the Anacostia to the Potomac.”
In many of the cases involving the coalition’s members, Reilly said the grantees are awaiting reimbursement. But because of the freezes, elimination or pauses of federal grants, she said, they “are unable to receive reimbursement for work that they’ve already done, for work that farmers have already done, that they have paid for up-front.”
The Choose Clean Water Coalition has been lobbying lawmakers on Capitol Hill and urges people concerned about the Chesapeake Bay to contact their legislators.
“It really does make a difference and it can also help people feel like ‘I did something today, and I spoke up and made my voice heard,'” Reilly said.
The Trump administration has frozen grants at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as it conducts its review of federal spending. Reilly said a number of the grants affecting the Choose Clean Water Coalition member organizations are tied to those programs.
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