Trump vetoes bill to fund Arkansas Valley Conduit in Colorado

[douglas9]

DENVER — President Donald Trump is using his first veto of his current term to kill funding for a major drinking water project in Colorado.

The Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit (AVC) Act passed unanimously in the House and Senate.

Monday's veto comes after Trump promised retaliation against Colorado for keeping his ally Tina Peters in prison. Peters was convicted on state charges for a scheme to tamper with voting systems in a search for election rigging in the 2020 presidential race.

Trump is killing the bill to finish the Arkansas Valley conduit, a decades-long project to bring safe drinking water to 39 communities on the Eastern Plains between Pueblo and Lamar. The groundwater there is high in salt, and wells sometimes unleash radioactivity into the water supply.

The Arkansas Valley Conduit is the final component of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, which was first approved in 1962. In recent years, the cost estimate nearly doubled.

The pipeline is in Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert's district. Boebert recently stood up to the Trump administration to force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Colorado's Democratic senators have chipped away at the funding gap on the project for more than a decade. Boebert sponsored the House bill to finish the project.


https://www.9news.com/article/news/politics/trump-vetoes-bill-arkansas-valley-conduit-colorado/73-92847cda-6b22-4402-a8e2-c3882888c7a3

[Chipper Chat]

1. Fucker.

Does he own stock in Nestlé Pure Death?

[JBTaurus83]

2. If it passed unanimously

Then it should be quite easy to overturn his veto.

[mountain grammy]

6. Should be..

wonder if any republicans will grow a spine..

[Lovie777]

3. And shithole ratings are down...............

while majority of American disapprove him, the administration, cabinet, republican party.

[gab13by13]

4. Krasnov is at the point where he doesn't need unwashed Magat votes,

The message from this should be that Krasnov never gave a shit about unwashed Magats, he only used them to get elected.

I hope that Boebert tells the story of the leopard to her constituents.

We are going to need unwashed Magats to join us to throw out the billionaires.

Let Colorado Magats know what Krasnov thinks of them.

[mountain grammy]

5. The part of the state that elected Boebert, who never even lived there

and where so many worship, yes I said worship, president pervert, I wonder if they'll even notice.. Their representative is a racist idiot just like their racist idiot president.

[CanonRay]

7. Those are almost all his voters out there.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

8. MaddowBlog-Trump gives away the game on his motivations for the first vetoes of his second term

The president has threatened to impose “harsh measures” on Colorado unless the state frees a felon he likes. We now know what that means in practice.

Trump wants a blue state to free a convicted felon he likes. Since the state disagrees, the White House keeps punishing the state and its residents.

Let’s not lose sight of how utterly bonkers this is. www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2026-01-02T17:20:25.857Z

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-gives-away-the-game-on-his-motivations-for-the-first-vetoes-of-his-second-term

The pipeline project in Colorado, like the measure for the Miccosukee Tribe, cleared Capitol Hill with overwhelming bipartisan support. And if White House officials had any concerns about the effort, they kept those opinions to themselves.

With this in mind, when Trump vetoed the bill, observers were left with a limited number of possible explanations: (1) Maybe the president was punishing Colorado as part of the Tina Peters case; (2) perhaps he was punishing Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado over her support for Epstein files transparency; or (3) both.

Trump helped shed light on his reasoning soon afterward. Politico reported:

President Donald Trump told POLITICO on Wednesday that he vetoed a bipartisan bill to fund a Colorado water project because he views it as a waste of taxpayer money, saying residents are leaving the state under Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.

‘They’re wasting a lot of money and people are leaving the state. They’re leaving the state in droves. Bad governor,’ Trump said in an exclusive phone interview with POLITICO.

Around the same time, the president published an item to his social media platform in which he called Colorado’s Democratic governor a “scumbag,” before concluding, in reference to Polis and other state officials: “I wish them only the worst. May they rot in Hell.”

In other words, Colorado hasn’t freed a prisoner convicted of a felony whom Trump likes, and so the White House appears to be taking steps to punish the state.

Indeed, the veto of the pipeline bill, known as the Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act, was the latest in a series of anti-Colorado moves from the Republican administration. As The New York Times summarized, “Miffed at Colorado’s votes against him in three successive elections and furious at its refusal to free Tina Peters, a convicted election denier and ardent Trump supporter, Mr. Trump has opened an assault against the Democratic-run state. His administration has cut off transportation money, relocated the military’s Space Command, vowed to dismantle a leading climate and weather research center and rejected disaster relief for rural counties hammered by floods and wildfires.”....

In August, Trump threatened to impose “harsh measures” on the Rocky Mountain State unless it agreed to release Peters from prison several years before her sentence runs its course. We’re now getting a better sense of what that means in practice.