President Donald Trump issued an executive order late Friday supporting an important Great Lakes project in Illinois to contain invasive carp, but the president still found a way to call out Gov. JB Pritzker, who responded by saying he was glad the White House “heard our calls about the importance of delivering federal funds.”
Trump’s order and Pritzker’s response mark a rare point of policy agreement between the governor and a president whose administration Pritzker has compared to Nazi Germany. Pritzker has harshly criticized Trump on an array of broad issues and has also noted that the Trump administration has held back some $2 billion in federal funds meant for Illinois.
“The State of Illinois continuously monitors access to these funds and Governor Pritzker will keep using every lever available to unlock these resources the state is owed, including how he did with the Brandon Road Infrastructure Project,” the governor’s office said in a news release.
Anticipating a federal funding shortfall, Illinois recently postponed construction of a project near Joliet aimed at stopping the movement of invasive carp up the state’s waterways. A scheduled groundbreaking ceremony in February was canceled.
In the executive order Friday, Trump referenced the stoppage at Brandon Road Lock and Dam and asked his administration “to ensure the State of Illinois does not stand in the way of its construction.”
The construction is intended to stymie the spread of invasive carp, which could pose a significant threat to the Great Lakes region’s native species, ecosystems and billion-dollar fishing and boating industries.
Trump blamed Pritzker by name for not allowing the project to start, while the federal government, he said, has already begun work on it.
“Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker decided to delay the State’s acquisition of property, which is necessary for construction to begin,” the order said of the project.
In his response, Pritzker said the Trump administration “decided to finally meet their obligations to the State of Illinois and the Great Lakes region.”
“I have made clear that — in the interest of saving the Illinois taxpayer potentially hundreds of millions in liabilities — we would only move forward if given the proper assurances that the federal government would hold up their end of the bargain,” Pritzker said. Those assurances had been met in the Friday executive order, the governor’s press release said.
By February, about $340 million had been allocated for the first phase of the project. But state officials were worried about going further without assurances from the Trump administration that the state would receive the necessary funding for the next two phases.
The first phase includes site preparation and installation of some multilayered technologies at the lock and dam. These technologies include a bubble barrier that removes small fish trapped under barges or carried in their wake and an acoustic deterrent that creates painful sound waves.
The subsequent phases are expected to include an electric barrier and more acoustic deterrents. At the end, a flushing lock would send any remaining larval fish and eggs back downstream.
At the time the project was delayed, the Trump administration was withholding $117 million in federal grants from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, halting 70 unrelated projects across the state, according to Pritzker’s administration. Because of that uncertainty, Pritzker and IDNR Director Natalie Phelps Finnie expressed concerns about starting construction at Brandon Road.
So-called Asian carp, which are invasive across the United States, include silver, bighead, grass and black carp. The fish were introduced in Arkansas in the 1960s to get rid of seaweed without using chemicals. After flooding events in the 1980s and 1990s, the carp escaped into the Mississippi River basin, spreading to 31 states. Some were also released after breeding experiments failed. Silver and bighead carp are particular threats to native species as they have no natural predators in American waterways and likely never will, meaning their populations can grow uncontrollably.
The National Wildlife Federation on Friday praised the White House’s reinforcement of full funding at Brandon Road, calling the project “the most effective solution to protect the Great Lakes from invasive carp.”
“We are encouraged by the federal government’s signal of renewed commitment to complete the Brandon Road Project and broader efforts to keep invasive carp out of the Great Lakes,” NWF Great Lakes policy director Marc Smith said in an emailed statement.
