‘Big, beautiful bill’ scraps conservation projects in northwest Michigan

• Congress rescinded $20 million earmarked for northwest Michigan conservation projects 
• Northwest Michigan groups already spent $450,000 getting ready for the projects
• Groups now are appealing the decision

A tribe and several conservation groups were gearing up to remove old culverts and rehabilitate 29 streams across northwest lower Michigan: shelling out for contracts with county road commissions, hiring construction crews and prepping sites.

Now, more than $20 million set aside for that work has been clawed back by Congress, leaving those involved $450,000 poorer and halting the project.

The Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians received the award in 2023 as part of a US Department of Agriculture program called the Regional Conservation Partnership Program, or RCPP. It was the only project in Michigan to receive money that year.

Since its inception in the 2014 Farm Bill, RCPP has dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars annually to collaborative projects that support conservation on farms and in rural areas.

The RCPP program is still intact. In fact, the “big, beautiful bill” upped the annual appropriation for the program starting in 2026. 

But a supplemental pot of money created by then-President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 was largely rescinded when President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, leaving places like northwest lower Michigan caught in the crosshairs.

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Neither the USDA nor US Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Watersmeet, who represents the area in Congress, could be reached for comment on this story.

The Grand Traverse Band appealed the termination of its funds late last week through the USDA’s appeals process, arguing the department didn’t follow the right process for axing the money. And it wants reimbursement for the $450,000 it spent preparing for the multi-year project.

“It's an enormous amount of time and effort that everybody has spent that has effectively been thrown overboard,” Petoskey said.

The extra pot of money from the Inflation Reduction Act made it so the Grand Traverse Band could ramp up conservation work the tribe and its partners have worked on for nearly a decade.

“It's a multi-purpose project for river restoration and land conservation, which we think are laudable goals for both the Indian community and the non-Indian community,” said John F. Petoskey, general counsel for the Grand Traverse Band.

The band’s main partners on the project, the Leelanau Conservancy, Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy and Conservation Resource Alliance, were raising matching funds for the award, which would have brought the total to a roughly $40 million investment in conserving land and waterways across a huge swath of northwest lower Michigan.

The strategy was two-pronged: the tribe and Conservation Resource Alliance would work on stream restoration, while the land conservancies would work with property owners to preserve prime agricultural acreage that might otherwise be developed.

Jennifer Jay, communications director with Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy, said millions of that funding was “direct funding for rural farmers, supporting land conservation, groundwater supplies, the generational farm transfer — all of those things that are so important to our agricultural heritage, to our farms, to our food security.” 

Conservancies were primarily working with farmers in Leelanau and Grand Traverse counties, with the possibility of extending into Benzie and Antrim counties. The work would’ve also focused on preventing soil erosion and fertilizer runoff.

Restoration work was set for more than two dozen streams spanning the region, including in Lake, Manistee, Leelanau, Grand Traverse, Kalkaska, Antrim and Charlevoix counties.

With the money gone, much of that work is stalled.

“The real bummer is that there's over $2 billion (nationwide) that's just been taken away from conservation,” said Kari Cohen, who helped administer the RCPP program for years and has since founded Nine Steps Consulting, a firm that helps organizations access USDA money. 

“Almost all that money is supposed to go out on the ground: to farmers, ranchers, landowners. It's not money that's going to organizations to do so-called climate work … It may have climate benefits or carbon benefits, but a lot of it is just standard conservation activities that (the USDA) does on a day-to-day basis.”

‘We just don’t know’

Cohen, the former RCPP administrator and current consultant, said winning an appeal might be tough.

“I don't know what USDA … can do about it, because the money is no longer there,” he said. “There's no money because Congress took it back.”

Still, Petoskey said the tribe and its partners are hopeful some of the money — if not the entire $20 million award — could be reauthorized through money set aside by Congress for RCPP in 2026. The tribe wants to continue working with the USDA through the program.

“The people involved in this are not defined by one political party. They are people that are interested in maintaining conservation values in the rehabilitation and restoration of northwest Michigan,” Petoskey said.

Suzie Knoll, executive director of Conservation Resource Alliance, echoed that sentiment.

“Despite this setback, the collaborative remains committed to finding a path forward,” she said. “We will continue working in good faith with federal agencies, local leaders, and landowners to advance our shared goals: protecting natural resources, supporting rural communities, and safeguarding the economic and ecological vitality of northern Michigan.”

But because that supplemental pot of money from the Inflation Reduction Act is now gone, future awards might be smaller.

“So those organizations like Grand Traverse (Band) that got a big, big old project won't have that opportunity again, but I imagine a lot of them will reapply,” said Cohen. “I'm sure the agency is going to hear a lot from those organizations that got their projects terminated and are expecting the agency to make them whole or at least do them a solid next time.”

The silver lining, Cohen said, is that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act increased RCPP’s annual funding from $300 million to $425 million, to be stepped up to $450 million starting in 2027.

“There's definitely near-term pain (and) long term — I wouldn't call it gain, because you've lost $2 billion and you're not getting that back. But at least the annual money has been increased,” Cohen said.

For now, what happens with the project in northwest Michigan is mostly wait-and-see, as is the case with many other federal shakeups.

“We just don't know," said Jay, with the Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy. “We don't know. This is unprecedented.”

This reporting is made possible by the Northern Michigan Journalism Project, led by Bridge Michigan and Interlochen Public Radio, and funded by Press Forward Northern Michigan.