MOSS LANDING, Calif.—Vernon Trindade learned the water from the well he was digging wasn’t safe to drink around 1985 when he and his wife were building a live-work space with enough room for a wood shop, two painters’ studios and his nine-foot canvases. Trindade, a master woodworker and abstract painter with shoulder-length gray hair and a beard, built the house from the ground up with his wife on an acre lot in Moss Landing, looking out across strawberry fields to Monterey Bay.

After the couple finished the rough frame of the house on Bluff Road, they installed a high-tech water filtration system in the kitchen, but it clogged around the mid-1990s. And, after years of working on the place, Trindade lacked the funds and the will to replace it.

His marriage broke up around the same time the filtration system backed up, and for decades, Trindade had to buy and haul several five-gallon jugs of water to his home every week for drinking and cooking. For the past several years, a state-funded program has delivered jugs to his door free of charge, but the challenges have continued.

Moving the 45-pound carboys of water didn’t bother Trindade when he was younger. But now, at 78, after losing 40 pounds during a month-long hospital stay to recover from heart surgery in March, he can barely lift the jugs.

So when Trindade heard about a project to pipe safe drinking water to the taps of homes in Moss Landing and other unincorporated agricultural communities in northern Monterey County, he signed on. He’d have to figure out how to pay the water bill later.

In December, the Biden administration awarded a $20 million Community Change grant designed to help disadvantaged communities address environmental and climate justice challenges to the nonprofit Community Water Center, founded 20 years ago to help underserved rural communities without access to clean drinking water. That grant, combined with funding from the state, would have finally provided safe drinking water to Trindade and thousands of others like him who had contaminated wells or were hooked up to failing public water systems in the low-income Pajaro, Sunny Mesa and Springfield communities.

But the project barely had a chance to get off the ground.

On May 1, the same day Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin claimed the Trump administration was “ensuring America has the cleanest air, land and water on the planet,” the EPA canceled the Community Water Center’s grant.

Now, community organizations are scrambling to find ways to fill the gap.

The State Water Resources Control Board really came through for the first phase of the project, said the Community Water Center’s communications manager, Maraid Jimenez. State funding will allow about 400 residents to get safe drinking water by upgrading the Springfield Water System, which has struggled with unsafe levels of nitrates and the cancer-causing chemical 1,2,3-trichloropropane, or 1,2,3-TCP, a contaminant in pesticides.

The grant would have helped build the infrastructure to link residents served by tainted wells or failing water systems with the larger Pajaro Sunny Mesa Community Services District to the north.

To see the Trump administration pull funding for the second part of the project was especially disappointing, Jimenez said, “because water shouldn’t be a political issue.”

More than 80 percent of the domestic wells in the region exceed safety limits for at least one contaminant.

Trindade’s well has 10 times the level of 1,2,3-TCP state health officials consider safe and nearly seven times the legal limit of nitrates, byproducts of nitrogen fertilizers that can cause “blue baby syndrome,” a potentially fatal blood disorder that inhibits an infant’s oxygen supply. Some wells in the area have up to 33 times the legal limit of 1,2,3-TCP, which easily evaporates from tap water, leading to particularly high exposures during hot showers.

“Water shouldn’t be a political issue.”
— Maraid Jimenez, Community Water Center

Jiminez said it’s puzzling that the administration would cancel the project’s grant while promoting its support of rural infrastructure.

The EPA announced $30 million in grants last month to strengthen drinking water systems and improve water quality for small and rural communities, which it called “the backbone of our country.”

Inside Climate News asked the EPA how canceling a grant designed to deliver safe drinking water to rural communities that have lacked potable water for decades is meeting its goal of strengthening rural water systems and making sure every American has access to safe water.

“Maybe the Biden-Harris administration shouldn’t have forced their radical agenda of wasteful DEI programs and ‘environmental justice’ preferencing on the EPA’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the grant’s remit to fund environmental and climate justice under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

“The Trump EPA will continue to work with states, tribes and communities to support projects that advance the agency’s core mission and Administrator Zeldin’s Powering the Great American Comeback Initiative, which includes providing clean air, land and water for EVERY American,” the spokesperson said, repeating verbatim a response provided to another outlet on a different issue.

The Community Water Center grant was among hundreds targeted in the Trump administration’s push to terminate $2.4 billion environmental and climate justice grants authorized by Congress under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. At least three lawsuits have challenged the freeze on federal grants, and all are tied up in the appeals process. After initially ordering the release of all frozen IRA funds in April, a federal judge later allowed the EPA to cancel the grants, including all Community Change grants.

The Community Water Center officially contested its grant termination but has not signed on to any of the lawsuits.

Trindade, who grew up on a dairy farm in a small town in the Central Valley, thinks the EPA must feel bad about taking back the money that would have finally delivered clean water to the house he built with his own hands. But he figures the agency doesn’t consider getting water to people like him a priority and is going to let “little things” like Bluff Road wait a while.

A Persistent Problem
Driving through the Pajaro Valley on an overcast June day, strawberry fields stretch for miles in every direction, interrupted periodically by small, densely packed neighborhoods and trailer parks. Several dozen modest houses sit between fields along a stretch of country road a few miles south of Bluff Road. Just feet from their front doors, a tarp covers the field where growers would soon apply the fumigants chloropicrin and 1,3-dichloropropene, also known as 1,3-D or Telone, to sterilize the soil before planting.

Until the 1990s, fumigants like Telone contained 1,2,3-TCP, a highly persistent chemical that can be hard to remediate. It pollutes so many wells in Monterey County, the state’s richest strawberry producer, because strawberry growers have relied heavily on 1,3-D and other fumigants for decades. They applied more than 91,000 pounds of 1,3-D and chloropicrin within a mile of that one row of houses alone between 2018 and 2022, the most recent state records show. Even as applications of 1,3-D fell statewide during that time, they rose by more than 80 percent in Monterey Country, an Inside Climate News analysis showed last year.

Applications of the fumigants have poisoned residents’ water as well as the air they breathe.

California has known for decades that both 1,2,3-TCP and 1,3-D, now banned in 40 countries, cause cancer. Residents and their allies have fought for years to restrict use of 1,3-D, which can also trigger asthma attacks even in trace amounts.

When Saul Reyes, a community solutions advocate for the Community Water Center, talks with families about their drinking water, many tell him they worry about going outside when they see people covered in protective gear spraying fields.

They should probably stay inside, he tells them.

Reyes started working for the Community Water Center in August, but first learned about the nonprofit four years ago, when a staff organizer knocked on his parents’ door to tell them their tap water was contaminated.

Reyes lives with his parents in Royal Oaks, outside the safe drinking water project boundary, surrounded by strawberry fields. The landlord warned his parents about the water when they moved in nearly 30 years ago, and gave them a discount on the rent. They later learned their well has nearly three times the legal limit of nitrates. Reyes, 27, has been drinking bottled water as long as he can remember.

When Reyes started going to community meetings, he met some of his neighbors, who had lived in the area for 50 years. All their wells were contaminated. The only water they drank at home came from bottles.

Searching for Solutions
California codified the human right to water as official policy in 2012. At the time, more than 1.6 million residents living mostly in communities of color in agricultural regions relied on contaminated groundwater that left them with higher rates of asthma, heart disease, cancer and neurological and reproductive maladies, including birth defects.

California has awarded more than $1 billion in grants to deliver safe, reliable drinking water to hundreds of thousands of people. Yet about 750,000 Californians, primarily residents of small, rural, underserved communities of color like those in the Pajaro Valley, continue to lack safe drinking water.

Judy Vazquez-Varela, general manager of the Pajaro Sunny Mesa Community Services District, has handled more than her share of water contaminants since she started working on the Springfield project about a decade ago.

But her district has faced multiple challenges beyond contaminated groundwater. Winter storms supercharged by climate change caused catastrophic flooding in 2023 that forced the water system to shut down for about two weeks. Then in January, a massive lithium battery storage plant in Moss Landing erupted in flames, sending huge plumes of smoke across the region that prompted evacuations and shelter-in-place orders.

Vazquez-Varela sent water samples to a lab after the fire, and the tests showed no evidence of contamination from the accident. But flooding remains a perennial concern, and the EPA grant would have helped the district invest in the type of climate-resilient infrastructure needed to cope with the next devastating storm.

It also would have helped the district provide safe drinking water to thousands outside the district’s current service boundaries.

The Pajaro system has enough high-quality water to meet the needs of people with contaminated wells like Trindade, Vazquez-Varela said. But delivering it to the smaller Springfield and Sunny Mesa water systems would require building a pump station, an additional treatment facility and a network of pipelines to connect Pajaro.

That’s why Vazquez-Varela and the Community Water Center applied for an EPA Community Change grant. When the grant was approved in December, organizers saw it as a huge win for long-underserved “last mile” communities that have historically lacked essential services and infrastructure.

When the Community Water Center learned the grant was terminated in May, it was “definitely a big disappointment,” said Roxanne Reimer, a community solutions manager with the center. “But we truly believe that this means that the state of California has a really big opportunity to step up.”

California now has the world’s fourth-largest economy, but it also has a $16 billion drinking water problem. That’s the estimated cost of building the infrastructure needed to deliver safe drinking water to hundreds of communities with failing water systems and contaminated private wells.

California finalized its state budget on Monday. But advocates say the state could still help offset the loss of federal dollars with alternative funding sources, including the $10 billion climate-resilience bond voters passed last year.

“There’s certainly areas that we can pull money from, but you can’t replace federal dollars,” said Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church.

The federal government typically provides support for big infrastructure projects, he said. With so many disadvantaged communities like Pajaro across the state, Church said, “the competition is fierce for a few dollars.”

California is already providing $130 million a year to get projects shovel-ready through its Safe Drinking Water Fund, and has faced significant budget pressures exacerbated by federal cuts, said Jennifer Clary, a longtime water and climate justice advocate with the nonprofit Clean Water Action. She said it appears the federal government is targeting California, along with poor people of color, because it makes no sense to cut a program that would ensure people have safe drinking water.

“Funding water infrastructure tends to be a bipartisan issue,” Clary said. “You’d think that would be the kind of thing they would want to fund in all states.”

By canceling a grant that would have provided critical support for clean drinking water in disadvantaged areas, the EPA and Trump administration have “once again demonstrated a troubling disregard for the communities most impacted by the climate crisis,” said state Senator John Laird, whose Central Coast district includes the Pajaro Valley.

Even as the state navigates budget constraints, he said, “I remain committed to working with my colleagues to push for the resources necessary to assure that every community in California has access to safe and reliable drinking water.”

Vazquez-Varela and her Community Water Center partners also remain determined to solving the region’s drinking water crisis.

“We are doing everything that we can possibly do to be able to reach as many people as we can with a reliable source of water,” said Vazquez-Varela.

She has the plans, the engineers and technical advisors ready. The only thing standing in her way is funding.

Back on Bluff Road, Vernon Trindade still showers with water from his well and fills his dog Bagel’s water bowl from the tap. He’s trying to regain the strength to carry his giant water bottles into the house.

He’d like to leave the place to his nephew but doesn’t want to saddle him with water that’s not safe. He just hopes he lives long enough to see the day when “good water” reaches his house.

Inside Climate News reporter Marianne Lavelle contributed to this story.

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