John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, flew to eastern Colorado in 1962 to celebrate a pipeline project, already 30 years in the planning, that he promised would bring clean water to farm towns whose groundwater was contaminated with salt and radiation.
It was never completed. Many people in the area still cannot drink from the tap safely. And now the 47th president, Donald J. Trump, has left many wondering if they ever will.
Congress unanimously passed a bill last year, sponsored by Representative Lauren Boebert, a conservative Republican closely aligned with Mr. Trump, to help communities in her rural Colorado district pay to finish the pipeline.
Then the president, fresh from adding his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, added his own disruptive stamp to another piece of the Kennedy legacy: He killed the pipeline bill.
His veto in late December — the first of his second term — has left many residents and leaders in a staunchly pro-Trump swath of Colorado bewildered, and reeling, with the sense that they are victims of much bigger political forces they cannot control.
Democrats have accused Mr. Trump of punishing the state because its Democratic governor has not released from prison a Trump ally convicted of tampering with voting machines. The water-project veto was only one of several blows that the administration has delivered to Colorado.
Water agencies in the state insist that they will press forward with the project anyway. But without the preferential loan terms and lower interest rates that would have been provided by the legislation, it is not clear how they will.
“I can’t believe he would do that to us,” said Shirley Adams, the Republican mayor of the tiny farming town of Manzanola, whose groundwater is tainted by naturally occurring uranium. She said she voted for Mr. Trump and still supported him, but felt stung by the veto.
Manzanola, about 40 miles east of Pueblo, has to test its water every few months and mail out letters to its residents warning them about tap water that can make Geiger counters chirp. Some homeowners have put in filtration systems. Others buy bottled water. Some just go ahead and drink from the tap, brushing aside worries about increased risks of cancer.
Ms. Adams said the pipeline project, known as Arkansas Valley Conduit, was their best hope for obtaining a steady supply of clean water, piped 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 across Colorado’s southeastern plains — about 50,000 people in all.
“It’s not political,” Ms. Adams said. “It’s our only answer.”
Manzanola tries to reassure its residents that the municipal water it has now is fine 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 face.”
She stocks up on bottled water once a week from a Walmart store 25 miles away, and has spent most of her life hearing and wondering about the pipeline.
It is easy to feel forgotten in a place like Manzanola, she said. The small town was once a hub for apple orchards, but good jobs are now scarce, and the town struggles to hold onto its fewer than 500 residents. Ms. Rivera said Mr. Trump’s veto felt like one more hit.
“People don’t think about small towns,” she said. “We worked so long for this.”
The Trump administration once heralded the pipeline project, back 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.
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“Enough is enough,” he said in his veto message.
The federal government is already shouldering 65 percent of the pipeline’s cost. The bill that Mr. Trump vetoed would have given agencies in Colorado more time to repay federal loans for their share of the project, as well as pay lower interest rates on the loans. The bill also made it possible for the federal government to forgive some of those loans.
The water agency that is building the project says it has already put 12 miles of pipeline into the ground, and will keep pressing ahead despite the veto.
Democrats in Colorado accused Mr. Trump of sabotaging the project as political payback for their state’s refusal to release Tina Peters, a county clerk from western Colorado who was convicted of tampering with voting machines in a failed effort to prove Mr. Trump’s falsehoods that Democrats had stolen the 2020 presidential election.
Mr. Trump has tried to cut federal transportation and child care funding to Colorado; moved to dismantle a leading climate and science research center in Boulder; and relocated the headquarters of the U.S. Space Command to Alabama from Colorado Springs.
Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, has so far resisted pressure to release Ms. Peters from her nine-year prison sentence, though he recently called the sentence “harsh” in an interview with CBS Colorado, raising speculation that he might commute it. Ms. Peters’ lawyers are challenging the sentence in court.
In southeastern Colorado, residents and local officials in melon-farming towns and cattle ranches said they have no part and want no part in the battle over Tina Peters. They said they just wanted safe drinking water.
“I’m very disappointed,” Benita Gonzales, 55, said as she finished a shift serving lunch at a senior center in the town of Swink, about 14 miles east of Manzanola. “There are certain things you do not politicize. Water is the most basic thing.”
Ms. Gonzales, a Democrat, said she had crossed party lines in 2024 to vote for Representative Jeff Hurd, a Republican who represents parts of the state along the pipeline route.
Mr. Hurd supported a failed effort to override Mr. Trump’s veto of the pipeline bill, saying on the floor of the House that “rural America voted for this president and for an agenda that they would not be forgotten.”
Ms. Gonzales was unpersuaded. 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 area who disagreed with the veto said they were past second-guessing their support for Mr. Trump.
Toni Hughes, a cattle rancher who was getting highlights one recent morning at a salon in Manzanola, said she held her tongue last year when other ranchers criticized Mr. Trump over his move 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 killed the bill, she said, but “I guarantee you he’s done it for a reason.”
At the far eastern end of the pipeline’s planned route, some conservatives even embraced Mr. Trump’s veto.
Dave Esgar, a fifth-generation resident of the tiny 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 that it was time to give up on the project.
“It’s a total waste,” he said. “Most of us will be dead by the time it ever gets here.”
The piped water in Wiley exceeds federal limits for radium, so people in town install filtration systems at home or fill bottles at a tap outside the local water provider.
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 up several gallon containers. They said their tap water was so hard that it stained their clothes and tasted like pennies.
They said they were disappointed, but not surprised, that their little town had become grist in a political fight beyond their control. “We’re used to it,” Mr. Francis said.
Jack Healy is based in Colorado and covers the west and southwest.
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