In case you haven’t heard, the Trump administration issued a sweeping order Tuesday that “froze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans and sparked mass confusion across the country,” in the words of the New York Times. This order was then blocked by a federal judge, and then rescinded by Trump — but not before causing chaos among “schools, hospitals, nonprofits and other organizations scrambling to understand if they had lost their financial support from the government.” Including many here in Sonoma County and Healdsburg, according to the Press Democrat.
The PD reports that local programs running on federal grants include the Meals on Wheels service that feeds Sonoma County seniors and the Northern Sonoma County Fire Protection District’s controlled burn program in the countryside surrounding Healdsburg, along with a handful of important Healdsburg city initiatives.
Our city manager, Jeff Kay, told me over email Wednesday:
The order pertaining to grants was rescinded today, so there does not appear to be an immediate threat to any of our federal grants. Prior to it being rescinded, nobody had a clear sense of how It was going to be implemented as far as I can tell. Lots of uncertainty.
If a comparable order were to come down at some point, we’ve been taking stock of projects that could be impacted. This includes funding for major streetscape projects on Healdsburg Avenue and Grove Street, an aquifer storage and recovery water resiliency project funded by FEMA, and possibly USDA funding for farmworker housing as part of the Dry Creek Commons affordable housing project. We also have some smaller federal grants for police and fire equipment and a couple of applications in process.
You can read more about said streetscape projects in this week’s print issue of the Healdsburg Tribune. In short, they’re very ambitious, and they’ll need all the federal funds they were promised. (As will that Eel River-to-Russian River water diversion project I wrote about in my last newsletter, which has big implications for our local water supply.)
So what now? While yesterday’s funding-freeze order from President Trump is on ice for the moment, his team is reportedly still reviewing ways to eliminate “woke” spending in government. No one knows quite what that means — but as I understand it, they’ll likely target spending on projects they see as having a liberal bent. How that will play out at the local level is anyone’s guess, at this point.
