Ripple effects: Connecticut River groups seek lasting funding for conservation

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Every year, Markelle Smith travels down to Washington, D.C. with a small booklet. In it lies an itemized list of every conservation and restoration project that could be happening on the Connecticut River watershed, if it just had the funding.

The Connecticut River watershed is the largest in New England, spanning 7.2 million acres across five states and a little bit of Quebec, Canada. The centerpiece of the watershed, the Connecticut River, is the longest river in New England and is fed by a network of 148 tributaries, including those familiar to residents of western Massachusetts, like the Mill River and the Deerfield River.

But while the Connecticut River holds an undeniable presence in western Massachusetts, advocates say its status as an irreplaceable resource for communities largely goes unnoticed.

Smith, who is the director of the Connecticut River Watershed Partnership, is hoping to change that. Alongside her network of organizations, U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-New Hampshire, and U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, whose district includes part of western Massachusetts, Smith is championing a legislative bill that aims to galvanize attention to the importance of the watershed and dedicate a steady stream of funding for conservation, restoration, education, and more.

Shaheen first introduced the Connecticut River Watershed Partnership Act in 2023, but it expired automatically at the start of 2025. Shaheen introduced a subsequent version of the bill in May of that year, and it is now awaiting review and a potential vote. Late last month, McGovern announced his intention to partner with Shaheen and reintroduce the bill into the House of Representatives, which he said he did last week.

“We have a model in New England for community-driven projects that make people’s lives better, and we respect the natural world. And it’s time that our model goes national, because conservation is more important than ever,” McGovern told The Shoestring.

The bill is a direct response to efforts by the Trump administration to slash conservation funds and staffing at federal agencies, including those that protect watersheds like the Connecticut River’s. Amid the administration’s sweeping cutbacks to programs that were already underway, environmental advocates say they’re hoping to establish more secure funding for conservation projects on the river and its watershed.

Smith said the act and its grant program are modeled on previously successful watershed bill initiatives, including the Delaware River Basin Conservation Act and the Chesapeake WILD Act. Both bills provide $15 million per year in grant funding to support on-the-ground conservation projects in their respective watersheds.

But the act also has a unique focus on partnership that sets it apart from its legislative counterparts, Smith said, which she hopes will be a strength in facilitating greater collaboration among parties and stakeholders who want to protect the watershed.

“There’s already a ton of great work happening by all sorts of nonprofit organizations, state agencies, and federal agencies,” Smith said. “What this will do is hopefully enhance the coordination between all those groups and elevate the profile and the identity of the Connecticut River watershed on a national scale.”

The Connecticut River Watershed Partnership is made up of 70 public and private organizations, including federal and state agencies, national and regional nonprofits, and other land trusts and groups dedicated to conservation in the watershed. This coalition, Smith said, was previously called the Friends of Conte and formed in 2005 to support conservation in the federal Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, which is defined by Connecticut River watershed boundaries.

Smith views their decades-long, private-public partnership as a real advantage in advancing the Watershed Partnership Act, and in addressing funding gaps spurred by growing anti-conservation initiatives at the federal level.

The core of the Connecticut River Watershed Partnership Act is the establishment of a federal grant program, administered by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, which would allow organizations and public agencies working on various conservation projects to apply for funding. According to Smith, the bill is intentionally broad in defining who can receive funding in order to accommodate a wide variety of efforts. Nonprofit organizations, Native nations, environmental education efforts, science research, and regional planning commissions are eligible to receive funding under the grant program.

In terms of cost sharing, the federal cost share cannot exceed 75% of the project’s total cost, except for those that serve environmental justice communities, which can receive up to 90%.

Regional nonprofit organizations like the Greenfield-based Connecticut River Conservancy say funding like the kind afforded by the Partnership Act is in dire need amid ongoing efforts by the Trump administration to slash conservation across the nation.

Rebecca Todd, the executive director at the Connecticut River Conservancy, said more funding would go a long way for the projects the group hopes to work on in the future.

“We have so many more critically important restoration and conservation projects in the watershed than we currently have the funding for,” Todd said. “If we had significant federal attention to the Connecticut River watershed, we could see significant improvements in economic and environmental parameters affecting the river.”

In the final year of the Biden administration, the Connecticut River Conservancy secured an $11.4 million Regional Conservation Partnership Program grant that would have guaranteed five years of funding for stream restoration. But as the conservancy was gearing up to start projects by early spring, Todd said their funding was suddenly cut short.

“As soon as this new administration came in, they froze it,” Todd said. “Despite the fact that it was completely obligated funding, everyone had signed off on it.”

The grant has since been released back to the Connecticut River Conservancy, but the ripple effects of the funding loss were significant.

Reimbursable federal grants, in which the organization must first pay its own approved expenses before the federal government reimburses them, have also been slow to reach them, Todd said, likely due to a significant reduction in staffing at nature-based federal agencies under Trump. At the Conte Refuge, Smith said staff numbers are half what they were in 2020.

Of the many projects the Connecticut River Conservancy hopes to fund through the grant program, Todd said the biggest and most expensive are the removal of obsolete or unsafe dams — work that provides a range of benefits from flood resiliency to the free passage of aquatic organisms upstream.

In addition to the Connecticut River Conservancy’s long list of projects, the grant program would also secure funding for many other organizations looking to expand their river connectivity and restoration efforts in the watershed, including The Nature Conservancy, Mass Audubon, and Trout Unlimited.

During her trips to Washington D.C., Smith presents all of these opportunities and their associated price tags — totaling $34 million — to show legislators that there is a willful demand and ready-to-go projects that can move forward with the right amount of funding.

“What we’re doing is basically saying to the delegation: ‘Thank you so much for giving us $2 million, but the need is much, much greater than that,’” she said.

And under the Partnership Act, organizations working in the Connecticut River watershed will have a much easier path to securing funding, but it isn’t guaranteed. Smith said the Watershed Partnership would still need to advocate to get funding for the program once the act is passed. Both the Delaware River Basin Conservation Act and the Chesapeake WILD Act, for instance, receive $15 million a year to fund their projects. There is currently no dollar amount tied to the Connecticut River Watershed Partnership Act.

Omitting a price tag was a recommendation made by Shaheen and McGovern, Smith said, to give the act its best chance of passing through the legislature.

The bill also has no Republican co-sponsors, something Smith hopes can change. According to Smith, the Watershed Partnership has made an effort to talk about the importance of the watershed in language that better resonates across the political aisle. This involves emphasizing universal concerns like clean water, recreation, and the economic benefits of the watershed.

The Watershed Partnership has also been talking to several House Republicans from New York, including U.S. Rep. Andrew Garbarino and Rep. Nick LaLota, in an effort to win a Republican co-sponsor. The Connecticut River provides 70% of the freshwater entering Long Island Sound, which Smith hopes will encourage New York legislators and their constituents to support the bill.

When asked about the bill’s chances of passing the legislature, McGovern said he wasn’t confident it would pass this year, given the Republican majority in Congress, but emphasized that it was “a step in the right direction.”

“I’m hoping the Democrats will be in charge after November, and this will be one of the items that, if we are in charge of the House, I will certainly be moving to the floor,” he said.

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Dylan Vrins is a summer 2026 intern at The Shoestring with support from the Nonprofit Newsroom Internship Program created by The Scripps Howard Fund and the Institute for Nonprofit News.

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