A Trump veto leaves Colorado Republicans parched and disoriented

John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, flew to eastern Colorado in 1962 to celebrate a pipeline project, already planned for 30 years, that he said would bring clean water to farming towns whose groundwater was contaminated by salt and radiation.

It was never completed. Many people in the region still cannot safely drink from the tap. And now the 47th president, Donald J. Trump, is leaving many people wondering if they ever will.

Last year, Congress unanimously passed a bill, sponsored by Representative Lauren Boebert, a conservative Republican with close ties to Mr. Trump, aimed at helping communities in her rural Colorado district pay to complete the pipeline.

Then the president, fresh off adding his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, added his own disruptive stamp to another piece of Kennedy’s legacy: He killed the pipeline bill.

His veto in late December — the first of his second term — left many residents and leaders in a staunchly pro-Trump part of Colorado perplexed and shaken, feeling like they are victims of much larger political forces they cannot control.

Democrats have accused Mr. Trump of punishing the state because its Democratic governor failed to release from prison a Trump ally convicted of tampering with voting machines. The water project veto was just one of the administration’s many blows to Colorado.

State water agencies insist they will continue the project anyway. But without the preferential lending terms and lower interest rates that the legislation would have provided, it is unclear how they will achieve this.

“I can’t believe he would do this to us,” said Shirley Adams, Republican mayor of the small farming town of Manzanola, whose groundwater is contaminated by natural uranium. She said she had voted for Mr. Trump and still supported him, but felt stung by the veto.

Manzanola, about 40 miles east of Pueblo, must test its water every few months and send letters to its residents warning them about tap water that can make Geiger counters chirp. Some owners have installed filtration systems. Others buy bottled water. Some simply drink from the tap, ignoring concerns about increased cancer risks.

Ms. Adams said the pipeline project, known as the Arkansas Valley Conduit, was their best hope for a steady supply of clean water, delivered from a reservoir near Pueblo at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. The project would serve 39 small towns and rural areas east of Pueblo in the southeastern plains of Colorado. about 50,000 people in all.

“It’s not political,” Ms. Adams said. “That’s our only answer.”

Manzanola tries to reassure her residents that the municipal water she now has is suitable for bathing or washing dishes. But Brandi Rivera, 25, said her family “won’t even use the water to brush our teeth or wash our faces.”

She gets bottled water once a week from a Walmart 25 miles from home and has spent most of her life hearing about and wondering about the pipeline.

It’s easy to feel forgotten in a place like Manzanola, she said. The small town was once a hub of apple orchards, but good jobs are now scarce and the town is struggling to retain its fewer than 500 residents. Ms Rivera said Mr Trump’s veto was like another blow.

“People don’t think about small towns,” she said. “We worked so long for this.”

The Trump administration previously announced the pipeline project, when construction began near the end of Mr. Trump’s first term. By last month, however, Mr. Trump’s tone had changed. He derided the pipeline, whose estimated cost has doubled to $1.3 billion since 2019, as a waste of taxpayer money.

“Enough is enough,” he said in his veto message.

The federal government already covers 65 percent of the cost of the pipeline. The bill that Mr. Trump vetoed would have given Colorado agencies more time to repay federal loans for their part of the project, as well as pay lower interest rates on the loans. The bill also allowed the federal government to forgive some of these loans.

The water agency building the project says it has already buried 12 miles of pipeline and will continue moving forward despite the veto.

Mr. Trump tried to reduce federal funding for transportation and child care in Colorado; decided to dismantle a leading science and climate research center in Boulder; and moved the headquarters of US Space Command in Alabama from Colorado Springs.

Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, has so far resisted pressure to release Ms. Peters from her nine-year prison sentence, although he recently called the sentence “harsh” in an interview with CBS Colorado, hinting he might commute it. Ms Peters’ lawyers are challenging the sentence in court.

In southeastern Colorado, residents and local officials in melon-growing towns and cattle ranches said they had no part and wanted no part in the battle over Tina Peters. They said they just wanted clean water.

“I’m very disappointed,” said Benita Gonzales, 55, as she finished her lunch shift at a senior center in the town of Swink, about 14 miles east of Manzanola. “There are some things you don’t politicize. Water is the most fundamental thing.”

Ms. Gonzales, a Democrat, said she crossed party lines in 2024 to vote for Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican who represents parts of the state along the pipeline route.

Mr. Hurd supported the failed effort to override Mr. Trump’s veto of the pipeline bill, telling the House that “rural America voted for this president and for an agenda that will not be forgotten.”

Ms. Gonzales was not convinced. She blamed Republicans for acquiescing to Mr. Trump’s bullying and said she would vote Democratic in the midterm elections to protest the pipeline veto.

But if Colorado Democrats are hoping for widespread Republican defections, they will almost certainly be disappointed. Many Republican voters in the region who disagreed with the veto said they no longer questioned their support for Mr. Trump.

Toni Hughes, a cattle rancher who was in the spotlight one recent morning at a Manzanola show, said she held her tongue last year when other ranchers criticized Mr. Trump for his decision to import more beef from Argentina. She said she would give him the benefit of the doubt on the veto.

“I don’t understand why” he rejected the bill, she said, but “I guarantee you he did it for a reason.”

At the far eastern end of the planned pipeline route, some conservatives even embraced Mr. Trump’s veto.

Dave Esgar, a fifth-generation resident of the small ranching town of Wiley, 100 miles east of Pueblo, said the government had already wasted decades and hundreds of millions of dollars on the pipeline and it was time to abandon the project.

“It’s a total waste,” he said. “Most of us will be dead before that happens. »

Running water in Wiley exceeds federal limits for radium, so city residents install filtration systems in their homes or fill bottles at a tap outside the local water supplier.

Two or three times a week, Chandra Forbes, 37, and Jason Francis, 32, walk the block from their house to the public tap to fill multi-gallon containers. They said the tap water was so hard it stained their clothes and tasted like pennies.

They said they were disappointed, but not surprised, that their small town had become the breeding ground for a political struggle beyond their control. “We’re used to it,” Mr. Francis said.