City officials in New Haven thought they’d been left in the lurch after President Donald Trump called for a federal funding freeze last week. For several days, the city wasn’t able to access a federal Treasury account containing the money needed to continue work on a geothermal project underneath Union Station.
The initial planning phases of the $16.5 million project — which will eventually require drilling boreholes hundreds of feet underground — had just gotten underway when officials discovered Monday that they no longer had access to the account, which held nearly 60% of the dedicated funds for the project.
The lockout continued until Friday afternoon, when city leaders said their access was restored without any immediate explanation from federal officials.
“It’s a colossal waste of time,” Mayor Justin Elicker said in an interview a day before the funding was restored.
“Our staff has spent so much time trying to navigate this situation that was created by a piece of paper,” Elicker said. “Our staff should be busy doing the work to provide services to our residents, rather than flailing to respond to some ridiculous executive order that doesn’t, in the end, have any clarity of purpose.”
The Union Station geothermal project is part of New Haven’s ambitious plans to electrify all municipal buildings and buses by the end of 2030.
The system will essentially act as a giant loop of pipes and boreholes drilled deep into the bedrock, where temperatures remain relatively constant. In the winter, it will pump warmer air up to the surface providing heat, while in the summer it will work in reverse, sending hot air underground to be cooled — thus eliminating the station’s reliance on inefficient gas heaters and an electric air conditioning system.
The system would also connect across the street to a proposed “Union Square” development, where the New Haven Housing Authority hopes to build up to 1,000 units of mixed-income apartments on vacant land that previously contained public housing. Besides pulling air from underground, the system will also be able to exchange hot and cold air between the two spaces, depending on the need.
Steve Winter, New Haven’s executive director of climate and sustainability, said it will be highly efficient. “If the train station needs to reject heat, if it’s too hot, it can send heat to the Housing Authority building, if the Housing Authority building needs heat, for example,” he said.
Altogether, it is estimated that the project will eliminate 63,000 metric tons of carbon emissions by 2050.
Last July, the EPA committed nearly $9.5 million toward the project. Winter said that the rest of the funding for the project will come from a bridge loan from the Connecticut Green Bank and federal tax credits.
A regional spokesperson for the federal Environmental Protection Agency did not reply to a request for comment earlier this week.
According to Politico, funding for a variety of EPA programs around the country remained on hold this week despite a memo directing agency staff to release Congressionally-approved funds after a two judges temporarily blocked Trump’s attempt at instituting a sweeping funding freeze across the federal government.
Winter said he first became aware of New Haven’s blocked access when he went to check the city’s Treasury account to see whether a separate, $20 million environmental justice grant recently awarded by the EPA had been deposited. Instead, Winter said, he found that he was locked out of the account, which also holds funds from a $1 million federal grant intended to help residents purchase electric heat pumps and induction stoves. (Winter is also a state lawmaker representing New Haven).
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and 22 other state attorneys general filed a motion Friday afternoon to enforce the second of those temporary restraining orders, which was issued late last week, prohibiting the federal funding freeze. The filing alleged the Trump administration had failed to comply with the order.
In a declaration accompanying that filing, DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes said that more than $530 million awarded to Connecticut by the EPA and under the under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for various projects remained inaccessible this week. Dykes also said in her declaration that “the chaotic and unpredictable communications from the federal government regarding DEEP’s legally contracted for and fully obligated funding has caused additional harms,” including time lost, a lack of transparency and a “chilling effect on the market.”
Should the federal government back out of its commitment to fund the geothermal project, New Haven Mayor Elicker said the rest of the city’s plans to redevelop the area will move forward, albeit under a “dramatically” altered vision that is also likely to result in higher energy costs for the people who end up moving into the development.
“As you can imagine, because these are pipes going under the ground in this area … we need to figure out pretty quickly, is this going to happen or not, because it impacts a lot of the other potential future construction, where things go, and the complexity of moving utilities,” Elicker said.
Winter said the city had already drawn down about $1,000 in funding to conduct historic survey work around the station, which was opened in 1920. The next step, he said, was to put out a request for bidders to design the schematics of the geothermal system, which the city had hopes to have completed by the fall.
Construction itself is expected to last roughly two years, Winter said, with a final completion date in summer 2028.
The EPA program through which the city received the geothermal grant was created as part of the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden. Among the law’s goals were to help states and local governments reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax,” and his budget director issued a memo on his first day in office ordering government agencies to pause federal funding deemed to be supporting the “Green New Deal.”
Winter said on Friday that he was relieved to have the city’s access to federal funding restored, but added that the “whole experience was definitely concerning,” as to the future of the project.
“It’s just a very difficult position to be in, because we don’t want to be left holding the bag,” Elicker said.
John Moritz is a reporter for the Connecticut Mirror. Copyright 2025 @ CT Mirror (ctmirror.org).
