By Enrique Saenz for Mirror Indy.
Broadcast version by Joe Ulery for Indiana News Service reporting for the Mirror Indy-Free Press Indiana-Public News Service Collaboration.

The first thing Patti Daviau sees when she opens the front door of her home on South Harris Avenue every morning is a thick bunch of weeds reaching through a 500-foot stretch of chain link fence across the street.

It's difficult to see what's beyond the fence in all but a few patches. But Daviau, 70, who has lived on the street since she was a child, says she knows what's back there now - a looming threat.

The site was once a foundry, a lead smelter and a lead battery recycling operation. It was the center of a large lead contamination investigation and cleanup in the 1990s. It's now known as the Avanti Superfund Remedial Site, an empty property covered with a large 2,500-square-foot concrete pad that covers tens of thousands of cubic yards of lead-contaminated soil.

The last owners of the Avanti site, which had changed hands many times over the years, essentially abandoned it. The site now belongs to the city of Indianapolis.

The property is top of mind again for neighbors with long memories who worry that more needs to be done to protect the people living nearby. They know that the presence of lead can damage the brains and kidneys of kids and adults and reduce the chance of successful births.

The EPA has started taking the presence of lead more seriously in recent years, too, adopting new rules to make it easier to launch investigations at hazardous sites. But that won't help neighbors near the Avanti site.

The EPA's new guidance only affects sites on the National Priorities List, the agency's list of sites with known or threatened releases of hazardous substances throughout the country that currently threaten human health. The shuttered westside smelter isn't on it.

Federal, state and local agencies, in fact, no longer see the Avanti site as a threat due to a 1999 cleanup of the site and hundreds of properties surrounding it. But soil testing done more than a decade after the cleanup found levels of lead both at the site and on nearby properties that would set off investigations under the new guidance.

Daviau and other neighbors want to be sure that their neighborhood is safe. They want their neighborhood tested again to find out if the threat of lead contamination is actually gone.

"We're not trash. We're working class people," Daviau said. "We should be treated with the same dignity and respect as other people in the city."

Decades of documented lead use

Daviau believes regulators should have known that she and her neighbors were being exposed to toxic lead for decades.

"It wasn't this huge secret," Daviau said.

She grew up in a house on the 300 block of South Harris Avenue, and when she got married in the 1970s, she and her husband bought a home just down the street for $9,000. Her home, like many of the houses on the street, was built in the early 1900s to house the workers at the American Stove Company plant.

By the time Daviau and her husband bought their home, the site across the street had changed hands and became the Oxide and Chemical Corp.

The plant turned bars of lead and other metals, called ingots, into pellets that could be melted down easily. Occasionally, residents would see yellow or white clouds of noxious dust drifting out of the plant.

"In the summer, I would have to mow our grass maybe once a month, because it didn't grow," she said. "We had bushes out front, but I never had to trim them because they didn't grow. We didn't have squirrels. We had no wildlife. You go out in your yard and there's no worms in the grass."

She said clouds of noxious lead dust from the plant would cover her entire neighborhood.

"The stuff would come out of the plant and it would go on your car," Daviau remembered. "If you wiped the top of your car, you literally would wipe the finish off your car."

Daviau would babysit kids from the neighborhood. She taught the kids to come inside her home if they ever saw the clouds. She remembers one particularly bad emission from the plant in 1976.

"One time they came running in the house, saying 'They're doing it again,' so we came in, put the windows down, and we'd stay in the house until things settled down," Daviau said.

Fighting contamination for decades

Concern about the plant's pollution grew. Neighbors distributed flyers, warning them to call the plant or other agencies to report the dust. Daviau and other neighbors reported the company to the Indianapolis Air Control Board, which regulated air emissions locally until the state took over the responsibility during the Gov. Mitch Daniels administration.

Neighbors who lived along Warman Avenue, two blocks away from the plant, told the board that emissions were so thick neighbors called the fire department believing there was a fire.

"You can hardly breathe when the dust gets in your throat," one neighbor, James Pickett, told the board in 1976.

The company admitted to the city that its pollution controls sometimes failed. The plant shut down the following year and moved to Brazil in western Indiana. Indianapolis officials then established its first air emissions limits on lead, but the contamination problems weren't over.

Between 1978 and 1993, several light industrial businesses operated at the site. The site became an unofficial playground for bored kids whenever a business moved away.

David Alsup grew up next door to Daviau and remembers playing around loading docks on the south end of the site in the early 1980s. Now 46, he said he and his friends regularly came into contact with lead dust.

"I remember playing there and touching the door and having that yellow dust on my hand," he said. "I had no idea what it was, but I probably ate some of it by biting on my nails as a kid."

Finding evidence of a threat

Although it was a known source of lead, a widespread investigation of the site did not begin until the 1990s.

That happened after the Marion County Public Health Department discovered multiple chemical carcinogens and lead in the drinking water wells in a neighborhood to the south known as "The Bottoms." Lead there was found in private wells at levels up to 8.7 times the amount allowed by law.

Officials, though, did not immediately suspect that contamination was coming from the nearby Avanti site.

"The problem is that there are several companies that could be considered responsible for contamination of the groundwater," health department officials wrote in a letter to the mayor's office March 10, 1992.

Besides the Avanti site, the Bottoms neighborhood was near a former Chrysler foundry and various junkyards. It was also downstream from other industrial sites across Eagle Creek.

The health department expanded the contamination investigation, and soil samples were taken from the Avanti site. Investigators had stumbled upon a major source of lead as well as evidence of arsenic, mercury and cadmium contamination.

Initial testing detected lead at the site at 180,000 parts per million, more than 200 times the amount set by the EPA for authorities to justify an investigation at an industrial site. Blood testing of 225 kids and adults near the site by the Indiana Department of Health found high levels of lead in people's blood, including eight of 11 children tested along the road where Daviau lives.

As the agencies continued investigating, they found higher levels of lead on the site grounds and on the sidewalk outside the site. In a site assessment report, EPA investigators expressed concerns that children could be exposed to lead contamination and that runoff from the site could contaminate Eagle Creek and nearby homes.

By January 1994, the EPA ordered a cleanup of the site and in nearby yards under the federal Superfund law, which allows the federal government to pay for the cleanup and later recoup the money from responsible parties.

The agency estimated they would have to remove 10,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil from the site and remove lead from soil in yards near the plant at the cost of $1.2 million.

"They told me they were gonna do this quickly and that the magnitude wasn't going to be that big," Daviau said. "It was much worse than they realized."

A much larger problem than anticipated

The federally mandated cleanup would be split into two phases and take more than five years to accomplish, involve hundreds of homes and force agencies at all levels of the cleanup to deal with new problems.

The EPA began tracking down the companies believed to be responsible for the pollution.

By December 1994, the EPA had excavated and replaced the contaminated soil from 73 homes but kept finding more yards containing contaminated soil. Up to 300 more residences required cleanup.

"They were cleaning up and they had all these suits on. They looked like men from space. And my neighbor's kids were running up and down the street in their bare feet, riding their bicycles," Daviau said. "(The people cleaning) would ask us, 'Aren't you afraid?' I said, 'What can we do? You want to buy my house?'"

Eventually, more than 40 families sued 11 companies believed to be responsible for the contamination. They later settled the suit for $500,000 to be split among the families.

Daviau was part of the lawsuit and reluctantly agreed to the settlement.

"I said, 'You guys, we don't want to take this. You know, I really feel like there's more to be had,' but I was one piece of the huge puzzle," Daviau said. "I knew what $10,000 meant to some of my neighbors. That was millions to them."

By the end of the cleanup in September 1999, the price tag was $9 million, and tens of thousands of cubic yards of contaminated soil were removed and replaced with clean soil. Several companies that operated at the site agreed to pay for the cleanup without admitting they were responsible for the contamination.

About 15,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil from nearby homes - enough to fill four and a half Olympic swimming pools - were taken to a hazardous waste landfill in Danville.

About 39,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil from the industrial site grounds were buried, covered by 18 inches of clay and six inches of clean soil and surrounded by a second chain link fence within the property.

Continuing concerns

After the cleanup, questions still remained as to whether the site was free of contamination, so there was little interest in redeveloping it.

A site reuse investigation made by the EPA in 2006 found that the agency and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management still weren't sure whether some parts of the site were cleaned up sufficiently.

The companies that owned the site, Avanti Development, Inc. - which owned three out of the four parcels of land on the site - and Harris Corner LLC - which owned the northeast corner of the site - essentially abandoned the site soon after and stopped paying taxes on it. There were no buyers when the properties were put up for auction in 2006 and 2007.

According to the Marion County Auditor's Office, the companies together owe about $2.4 million in delinquent taxes and the site belongs to the city of Indianapolis.

Development options for the site are limited due to reuse restrictions. Potential developers wouldn't be able to dig up the land due to potential contamination and would have to incorporate the concrete building pad into their plans.

IDEM reassessed the site in 2011, finding evidence of PCE, a carcinogenic chemical used as a degreaser, in groundwater under the concrete pad. Cadmium, pesticides, metals and other chemicals were also found in the soil.

Despite the findings, the department determined that the Avanti site "does not appear to be a significant potential for harm to human health or the environment through the ground water, surface water, or soil exposure pathways."

But soil sampling in 2011 by then-IUPUI researchers found evidence that some remediated areas were actually getting worse.

Gabriel Filippelli, director of Indiana University Indianapolis' Center for Urban Health and executive director of IU's Environmental Resilience Institute, was part of some of those studies.

"That area still had really elevated blood lead levels in kids, so we took soil samples from a lot of those areas that were already cleaned up," he said.

In the 2013 study that resulted from the 2011 sampling, researchers found that samples from some homes whose contaminated yard soil was replaced with clean soil more than a decade before were showing levels at 200 to 250 parts per million.

That's nearly eight times the national average of lead found in soil naturally, at 26 parts per million, and even more than the national average when the most contaminated sites are factored in, at 185 parts per million. The formerly clean soil had been contaminated with lead from the site or, potentially, another source.

"They'd acquired a lot of lead since then, so clearly there were still some ongoing sources," Filippelli said.

In 2015, Filippelli was part of another sampling session when the city demolished the buildings still standing at the Avanti site.

According to the cleanup plan, soil from the Avanti site that exceeded 1,000 parts per million was supposed to have been excavated and treated with chemicals to prevent them from migrating, a process known as stabilization. Filipelli said he witnessed soil samples at much greater levels than what was supposed to be there.

"They just had a chain link fence around the site that was broken in many places," he remembered. "We saw kids playing there, and we took samples right at the fenceline and they were 7,000 parts per million. So, I think that plant was still a major source of lead."

EPA rule doesn't apply, but university offers testing

An EPA rule change earlier this year lowered the screening level for lead in soil at residential properties near Superfund sites and other active hazardous waste sites.

The lead threshold, or screening level, was 400 parts per million. It is now 200 parts per million - the amount detected in residential soil near the Avanti site in 2011.

Residential properties with multiple potential sources of lead have an even lower screen level of 100 parts per million.

With government agencies seemingly unwilling to help, the Harris Avenue residents' best chance for testing in the short term is through IU Indianapolis' Center for Urban Health, which studies lead and other contaminants.

Filippelli, the center's director, said the center is willing and able to test soil samples that are gathered by residents and delivered to the center.

"You don't know if you have a problem until you test," Filippelli said. "Fortunately, lead is super easy to test for and super easy to fix once you find it."

Daviau and Alsup said they would work to get their soil samples tested and convince others in the neighborhood to get it done, too.

"Something's got to change," Daviau said. "There's no reason to leave this for a second and third generation farther down the road."

Many are concerned about potential sources of contamination under a large concrete pad that covers most of the Avanti site. In the last two decades since the cleanup the pad has developed large cracks, especially at the edge of the property. It's unclear how much contaminated soil is there and at what levels.

"My biggest concern is runoff," Alsup said. "When it rains, all that rainwater goes up in those yards. I'd like to see some of those yards get tested again, especially in the 500 block."

How to get your soil tested

Indianapolis residents can get their residential soil tested by IU Indianapolis' Center for Urban Health. All that's needed are three clear plastic Ziplock baggies, something to collect soil with, a marker for labeling the baggies and a small box or envelope to ship the samples in.

Collect the soil from three areas near your home:

• Somewhere near the street


• The middle of your yard


• Under the drip line, which is the two to three feet of yard closest to the foundation of your home

The full instructions on how to collect the soil samples and send them to the Center for Urban Health are at the center's soil testing site. For more information, contact professor Gabriel Filippelli at gfilippe@iu.edu or earth sciences program manager Angela Herrmann at aherrman@iu.edu.


If the instructions are followed correctly, the center will send an email report of what they found.




Enrique Saenz wrote this article for Mirror Indy.


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A new report found fossil fuel lobbyists in two states with strong transparency and disclosure laws were not making full disclosures, including Washington state.

Washington ranked eighth in the country with a "C-plus" in the report from F Minus, an advocacy group tracking fossil-fuel lobbying across the nation. The audit found fossil fuel lobbyists in Washington state made disclosures only 8% of the time.

James Browning, founder and executive director of F Minus, said the lobbyists frequently work for both fossil fuel and climate advocacy groups.

"Refusing to disclose their work for oil and gas companies shows that they're keenly aware that this can be bad for their image, that they can be seen as villains on climate and that's bad for business," Browning contended. "It's bad for their image."

Browning pointed to the Pacific Whale Watch Association and Chevron sharing a lobbying firm.

Browning noted the audit from F Minus has been sent to the state's public disclosure commission but he has not heard back. He was encouraged when the Public Disclosure Commission in October started asking lobbyists what legislation they worked on. However, preliminary filings are only slightly better, he added. In fact, Browning pointed out one lobbyist has been copying and pasting the same disclosure for all of its fossil fuel lobbying since 2018.

"Clearly the lobbyists don't take this seriously," Browning asserted. "It's really outrageous given the cascading climate impacts in Washington state; extreme heat, fires and just the fear we all have to live with of the climate crisis."

In the report, 27 states received failing grades over the transparency of their lobbyist disclosure laws.

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By Kristoffer Tigue, Dennis Pillion, Dylan Baddour and Marianne Lavelle for Inside Climate News.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Minnesota News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

When a rare tornado swept through the north side of Minneapolis, Michelle Neal scrambled for cover at a fast-food restaurant. "It was unreal-we could have died," she told Minnesota Public Radio. "McDonald's saved me."

It's the kind of scenario that Julia Nerbonne, executive director of Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light, wants to make sure communities are better prepared for as climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather. The faith-based nonprofit hopes to transform churches and other congregations into emergency shelters with solar power and battery storage to withstand power outages-especially in historically disadvantaged communities, like north Minneapolis, which have long been overburdened by pollution and underinvestment.

"We want to have a building," she said, "in which they can have a cooling place, in which they can refrigerate their medication-a place where they can be with the community in the midst of a crisis."

Around the country, nonprofits and other community organizations like Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light were hoping these sorts of projects would receive funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has $3 billion to spend on environmental justice community grants through Sept. 30, 2026. But the Biden administration has only been able to award about half the money so far, and experts say the unspent 50 percent can most likely be clawed back by President-elect Donald Trump-a blow to communities of color and poor rural communities that had long waited for help like this.

Among the threatened initiatives is the EPA's Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program, which dedicated $600 million in block grants for projects aimed at tackling climate and environmental justice issues in disadvantaged communities. The money has been hailed by advocates as one of the most important federal investments ever made in closing the nation's long-standing socioeconomic and racial gaps.

The Biden administration has so far awarded nearly $266 million, according to an EPA database, leaving more than half-or just over $334 million-vulnerable to reversal efforts from Trump officials or Republican lawmakers. "EPA continues to work through its rigorous process to obligate the funds under the Inflation Reduction Act, including the Thriving Communities Grantmakers program," said Nick Conger, the EPA's communications director.

Last week, the EPA opened up the first round of applications for the Thriving Communities program, giving hopeful applicants like Nerbonne less than two months to navigate the complicated federal grantmaking process before Trump is sworn in. In fact, several EPA regions have yet to open their application processes, leaving some groups worried they won't be able to complete their applications on time.

"It just seems like an incredibly missed opportunity. I'd feel disappointed about that," Nerbonne said, when asked how she would feel if the program's funding was rescinded under Trump. "Congregations aren't talking about politics. They're ready to get to work serving their community and they're tired of politics, especially after this election."

Republicans Target Environmental Justice Funding

The IRA's idea for addressing historic environmental injustice through a community grant program was taken from the sprawling Environmental Justice for All legislation originally introduced in 2020 by Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz) and the late Rep. A. Donald McEachin (D-Va.).

"We approached it with the fundamental belief that communities know what communities need best," said Grijalva in an email.

But Congressional Republicans have been vocal about their intention to cut or limit the environmental justice grant program, characterizing it as a form of cronyism, providing support to political allies of Democrats and opponents of fossil fuels.

"The EPA is awarding taxpayer dollars to special interest groups committed to a radical energy agenda," wrote U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) in a House Energy and Commerce Committee report, released just before Election Day. "Enriching nonprofit organizations to spread radical, left-leaning ideology is an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars. These programs demand rigorous scrutiny and meticulous oversight."

Trump himself suggested in a 2023 campaign video that he could "simply choke off the money" allocated under the Inflation Reduction Act.

Typically, Congress would have to pass new "rescission" legislation to take away unspent money that Congress previously appropriated. Republicans could use the appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2025, which began in October and now appears likely to be in the hands of the newly elected Congress and Trump, to do so. But in order to avoid the threat of a filibuster in the Senate, they instead could use a budget reconciliation bill that only needs a simple majority-the approach Democrats used to pass the IRA. Republicans are aiming to embark on a reconciliation bill soon after taking office in order to extend and expand Trump's 2017 tax cuts.

Ending environmental justice grantmaking is also part of the vision laid out in Project 2025, the policy roadmap that conservative groups drew up for Trump's second term. Although Trump professed no familiarity with Project 2025 during the campaign, he has named authors of the plan to key positions in his new administration, including tapping Russell Vought, his former budget chief, to head the Office of Management and Budget again. Project 2025 called for pausing and reviewing all environmental justice grants in light of the Supreme Court's recent decisions against affirmative action.

The Thriving Communities grant program has become a particular target of Republicans, who singled out one of its recipients and accused it of being "radical" and "anti-American." The Climate Justice Alliance, a California-based organization, is one of 11 regional grantmaker organizations that were initially awarded $50 million each from the Thriving Communities program. Those groups would then disseminate $40 million of their funds as subgrants to community organizations in their regions.

The Climate Justice Alliance is the only regional grantmaker that has not received any of its funding, sparking speculation that GOP rancor could be to blame. In May, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the highest ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, criticized the group for its support of Palestinians in Gaza and its opposition to Israel, calling its members "radical," "anti-American," and "antisemitic."

Conger, the EPA spokesperson, said the "EPA continues to review the grant for the Climate Justice Alliance," but provided no further details.

KD Chavez, the Climate Justice Alliance's executive director, said that the group's pro-Gaza advocacy is constitutionally protected speech that is separate from the work it would fund under the Thriving Communities program. "This grant money would only be used as intended by Congress, going towards things like air quality and asthma, water quality and lead, asbestos contamination," she said.

If the group's political views are the reason for the holdup in funding, Chavez said it could put at risk any social justice or progressive work that receives federal funding. "This could really be setting up a horrific First Amendment precedent moving forward for any type of organization across civil society," Chavez said.

Other groups involved in the EPA grant program pushed back against the GOP attacks as well. In addition to the 11 regional grantmaker organizations, another 18 institutions were chosen to act as technical assistance centers-known officially as Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers, or TCTACs-to help community organizations navigate the often complicated federal grant application process.

Bonnie Keeler, a University of Minnesota public affairs associate professor who runs the Midwest region's TCTAC, said it's a misrepresentation of her center's work to say it channels federal funding to "left-leaning activist or extremist organizations," adding that the program deserves broad bipartisan support.

"The TCTACs do not advance a particular policy agenda, we respond to requests for assistance wherever they come from," Keeler said. "To date, we have responded to over 400 requests for technical assistance from urban, rural and tribal communities seeking assistance with everything from energy efficiency goals, to cleaning up brownfields, to managing hazardous waste, to reducing indoor air pollution."

How Far Will Trump Go?

In the early 1970s, then-President Richard Nixon had a problem. A Democratic-controlled Congress wanted to fund highway improvements, drug rehabilitation and a number of other initiatives that the Republican president believed were "undisciplined" and "fiscally irresponsible."

So Nixon decided to withhold funds in the budget that he didn't agree with, sparking a constitutional struggle that resulted in the passage of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. That law, which is still in effect today, prohibits a president or other government officials from refusing to release congressionally appropriated funds and essentially substituting their own funding decisions for those of Congress.

The legislation also defines when federal funding has been "obligated," a legal term for when a contract has been signed between a federal agency and the recipient of federal funds, such as an organization applying for a grant, said Jeremy Kalin, a finance attorney for the law firm Avisen Legal. That means the $266 million dedicated to environmental justice under the Inflation Reduction Act, which Congress passed in 2022, and already obligated is protected from being rescinded, Kalin said.

But legal experts, including Kalin, aren't sure if Trump and his officials will respect that federal law and refrain from trying to seize or rescind obligated funds, pointing to statements made by Trump and Vought.

Vought and members of right-wing think tanks he is associated with have argued that the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 is unconstitutional, saying that Article II of the Constitution, which obligates the president to "faithfully execute" the law, also allows a president to forbid enforcement of the law.

Trump appears to agree with that interpretation. In a statement announcing Vought's nomination last week, Trump bragged about Vought's experience as a deregulator, saying, "Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government."

"Russell Vought," Kalin said, "may stretch the bounds of the Impoundment Control Act ... and just force people to stop it through the courts."

If that's the case, Kalin said, some funds-even those protected as "obligated" funds under the Impoundment Control Act-may be subject to reversals by the Trump administration, and only funds that get fully dispersed to organizations before Trump takes office may be safe from those efforts.

Trump has already tested this theory. During his first term in office, he withheld nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine while pressuring President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open a corruption investigation into Joe Biden and his family. The U.S. Government Accountability Office, or GAO, later ruled that Trump's actions violated the Impoundment Control Act.

Trump will have an opportunity to appoint a new head of GAO next year when the 15-year term of the current Comptroller General ends, giving him a chance to choose who will have direct oversight of any decisions he makes to withhold funding.

If Trump decides to withhold funds, it will most certainly trigger legal fights that could go all the way to the Supreme Court. The high court has never directly weighed in on the subject, however, but the court's conservative majority has indicated it is willing to take an expansive view on presidential power.

"Time Is Just Not on the Side of the Grantees"

The short amount of time, roughly seven weeks, before Trump takes office, could also be discouraging some community groups from applying for federal environmental justice grants at all. In some cases, nonprofits see it as a reason to rely less on federal support to do their work.

Caleb Roberts applied for a $1.5 million grant earlier in November from another IRA-funded environmental justice program. He hoped to use the money to hire more employees at his nonprofit, Dallas-based Downwinders at Risk, to conduct door-to-door screenings to check residents' homes for conditions that cause asthma. But now he's unsure he'll ever see that money.

"We think we'll definitely run into some funding issues," he said. "Starting day one after inauguration, those things are probably under fire."

Another nonprofit, Alabama-based We Matter Community Association, said it plans to apply for a Thriving Communities grant to purchase 1,200 acres of land in the city of Prichard, on which it plans to build community amenities, including a community center, athletic fields, commercial space and affordable housing. But Carletta Davis, the group's president, said the organization will likely rely less on federal support in the future.

"[The election] is the reason why We Matter is really solely focused on trying to create a way to sustain itself without having to go through governmental grants," she said. "I think that our model is probably going to be the model going forward for EJ organizations."

Some organizations aren't sure if applying for a federal environmental justice grant is worth the effort at all. Applications for the Thriving Communities grant program, the largest single program of federal environmental justice block grants, haven't even opened in the EPA-designated area that includes Texas and Louisiana, home to the nation's largest petrochemical complexes and environmental justice communities.

"At this time, the groups we know of that may be interested still need more time to understand the grant program and whether they will apply," said Vanessa Toro Barragán, a senior program officer at the Houston-based Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice, which isn't involved with the grant program.

But time may not be a luxury community groups can afford at the moment, should Trump officials and Republican lawmakers follow through with their threats.

Employees of organizations that work closely with the Thriving Communities program, also expressed concern that community groups would struggle to complete a complicated federal grant application before Trump takes office in just seven weeks, agreeing to comment anonymously to safeguard their prospects as potential grantees.

"Time is just not on the side of the grantees," one employee told Inside Climate News.

Still, organizations involved with the federal grant programs are encouraging community groups to apply and hope to see a big turnout.

"The fact is that this program, it still exists, and it doesn't make sense to turn away from an opportunity that is still there while it is still there," said Chandra Taylor-Sawyer, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, one of the partner organizations helping to recruit applicants to the Thriving Communities program.

Keeler, who runs the Midwest technical assistance center at the University of Minnesota, expressed a similar sentiment. "The future of these programs is uncertain," she said. "That said, all we can do is continue the work we've started. We get new requests for support every week and we'll keep responding to those requests for technical assistance as long as we are able."


Kristoffer Tigue, Dennis Pillion, Dylan Baddour and Marianne Lavelle wrote this article for Inside Climate News.


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A new report says fossil-fuel lobbyists in two states with strong transparency and disclosure laws are not making full disclosures - including in Maryland.

Maryland ranks seventh in the country and gets a grade of C-plus in the report from a group called F Minus - which tracks fossil-fuel lobbying efforts across the U.S.

James Browning, executive director of F Minus, said Maryland has strong laws requiring lobbyists to disclose their salaries and the bills they're working on.

But its audit found these disclosures are being made less than 50% of the time. Browning said some lobbyists also appear to have major conflicts of interest.

"What we also found is this rampant culture of lobbyists being sort of double agents for oil and gas companies," said Browning, "at the same time they're working for climate-conscious institutions."

Browning pointed to Johns Hopkins University's lobbying firm actively opposing a climate bill on behalf of the American Petroleum Institute. The lobbying firm didn't disclose that conflict.

Browning said the audit from F Minus has been sent to the state's ethics commission. He said he hopes that will spur additional audits on lobbying practices in the state.

He added that new policies on reporting would help keep their activities during legislative sessions transparent.

"There has to be a reality check in the middle of Maryland's three-month session - let's say at the end of February - where everyone has to disclose what they're doing," said Browning. "The way the law is written now, lobbyists can wait until May. The session is over in April."

Twenty-seven states received failing grades in the report for the overall lack of transparency in their lobbyist disclosure laws.



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