Posted on behalf of Roberta Kwok

Environmental projects in cash-strapped California are at a standstill after state financial officials froze hundreds of millions of dollars in funding last month, newspapers are reporting. The freeze, which forbids releasing money to any state project operating on borrowed funds, is intended to relieve California’s massive budget crisis.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, more than 4,000 environmental and water projects are feeling the pinch, including an extensive wetlands restoration effort (above, in red and green) in the San Francisco Bay. The project came to an almost complete stop in December, and the executive project manager has been working without pay for two months.

In the Los Angeles area, $420 million for projects such as water cleanup and fish population restoration have been halted (Los Angeles Times). Most of the funds are from voter-approved bond measures. “The will of the people has been completely ignored,” Mark Gold, president of the nonprofit Heal the Bay, told the Times.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has also proposed bypassing standard environmental studies for 10 highway construction projects, which his aides say would create 22,000 jobs over the next three years (Los Angeles Times). Such a move would mean waiving the California Environmental Quality Act, a law that has been previously suspended for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and the 1994 Northridge earthquake (San Jose Mercury News).

“The truth is that California is in a state of emergency,” Schwarzenegger said in his State of the State address last week (AP). He said the budget deficit, which officials estimate could reach $40 billion in the next year-and-a-half, is “a rock upon our chest and we cannot breathe until we get it off.”

Image: the Cargill salt ponds, from the NASA Earth Observatory site