Bizarre terminations of staff coupled with freezing of signed contracts for ongoing restoration work at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie by the Trump Administration brought chaos and confusion in mid-February.
Now funding has been unfrozen for the $1.5 million America the Beautiful Challenge grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation for a project to restore and expand 1,321 acres of grassland at Midewin led by Openlands and partner The Wetlands Initiative.
The NFWF, a private/public nonprofit established by Congress in 1984, describes ATBC grants as “support projects that conserve, restore and connect habitats for wildlife while improving community resilience and access to nature.”
“Funds were unfrozen a couple weeks ago,” said Emily Reusswig, vice president of conservation and policy at Openlands. “We received one reimbursement and are waiting to see the other.”
Midewin, near Wilmington, is the greatest protected public space in the Chicago area. Established in 1996 from the old Joliet Arsenal, Midewin has grown to 20,283 acres with multiple uses. The public can hike, bike, bird, see prairie flowers and grasses, view bison, tour bunkers, ride horseback and hunt turkey and deer. The greatest experience may be to feel the vastness of prairie.
By comparison, Indiana Dunes National Park and Indiana Dunes State Park top 17,000 acres. The Palos Preserves have 15,000 acres. Kankakee Sands in Indiana has 8,400 acres. Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge with Tamarack Farms connecting with Glacial Park Conservation Area, North Branch CA and three U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service parcels make a continuous 5,600-acre macrosite, Hackmatack could move up with approved boundaries of 11,200 acres around the Illinois-Wisconsin line.
“Our team is back at Midewin,” said Paul Botts, president and executive director of TWI. “The new wrinkle is that through an anonymous funder of Midewin we received an emergency donation to carry on.”
That matters because invasives and non-natives would have quickly taken back earlier work. Their “generous donors” covered the extra costs to do catch-up work.
“The rest of the donation is in the bank and restricted to Midewin,” Botts said. “So our team is out there keeping it from degrading. In the fall, they plan to plant a native cover crop. Midewin has a robust [prescribed burn] program.”
A good native cover crop (decisions on the crop will come later) should make good fuel for a prescribed burn. Botts described working in this situation as going from “adaptive management to adaptive improv,” but with funding in place, he said, “We will keep our people there and keep it moving.”
Homer Tree Service, contracted by Openlands to do the heavy tree work, will not be back “until dormant season.” They could have done a week or so before the April 15 deadline when tree work needed to stop for nesting season. It’s one reason the capricious funding freeze was so wasteful. Two months of work, a good chunk of the season, was lost for no good reason by the Trump administration’s random actions.
With Homer’s big machinery — Timberpro hot saw tree felling machine, Tigercat tree skidder, Morbark whole tree chipper, two Tigercat forestry mulchers, CMI stump grinder–it would have taken on another $15,000 to restart for a week of work.
“I’ve done a lot of planning around what to do if this happens again,” Reusswig said. “But there is only so much planning you can do. “Openlands has not traditionally relied on large government grants. . . . I don’t think our way of business will change. Our focus [will be] on strong governing on the state and local levels. We are really focused on strong regulations on the local level.”
Now the bad news, which started out looking like good news. The illegal terminations in mid-February included the entire education department– Abbey Hays, Emily Harvey, Siobhan Solkowski-Peacy, Josephine Hull–who had programming or events for nearly 15,000 people in 2024.
“We all were supposed to return to work and had our return to office dates (Siobhan actually went back a couple weeks ago), but new communication came out from the USDA and Forest Service offering the Deferred Resignation again (DRP2.0 is what they’re calling it) and then saying RIFs are coming,” texted Harvey, who supervised the four-person education department. “So pretty much . . . take the DRP or you’re probably going to get RIFed.”
That came from Washington. RIF is reduction in force.
“Which is the legal route of getting rid of people this time,” Harvey texted. “All four of us have taken the DRP. MANY have taken DRP this time around.”
Requests for information on return of the terminated employees at Midewin was forwarded to United States Department of Agriculture.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Harvey concluded.