Amtrak postponed a series of October meetings designed to help West Baltimore organizations in applying for grant funds as part of the construction of the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, worrying community members about the money’s future.

As part of the multibillion-dollar project to replace the aged B&P Tunnel underneath West Baltimore, Amtrak committed $50 million to dole out to eligible nonprofit or government organizations for workforce development, building community spaces, historic preservation and more.

The Civil War-era Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel between Penn Station and just north of the West Baltimore MARC station acted as a chokepoint on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor because it’s curving alignment forced trains to slow to a crawl. The project will replace it with a pair of parallel, two-mile tubes that arc farther north under Reservoir Hill, Penn North and Sandtown-Winchester and allow passenger trains to travel faster.

Over the summer, with construction well underway, Amtrak officials said the community investment process would begin soon, planning a series of three workshops throughout October to provide guidance to community groups looking to apply for a slice of the $50 million pie.

An email sent Thursday afternoon said the process was “temporarily postponed,” and that additional notice would go out “in the coming months.” A previously published fact sheet said the application process would proceed through the end of the year and grant awardees would be notified next March, but any timeline is now up in the air.

Amtrak officials did not respond to questions from The Banner about the reason for postponement.

“It’s very disheartening,” said Glenn Smith, a lay minister and activist in West Baltimore who signed up to attend one of the workshops originally planned for Tuesday. Smith is part of multiple area organizations interested in applying for funds.

Community members showed up Tuesday morning at for the first of the previously-scheduled workshops having not received word that it was canceled, Smith said.

Organizations operating within a quarter mile of the future tunnel‘s alignment are eligible to apply to the program, which Amtrak has framed as a sign of its commitment to community stewardship as construction upends life in some West Baltimore neighborhoods for years. To community members, the fund has represented a chance for a major infrastructure project to bring direct benefits to an area where projects have historically divided communities, not knitted them together.

Amid the daily construction, “the community has not seen a single positive change,” Smith said.

“The community trust is gone … all they see is disruption," he said.

The postponement comes as President Donald Trump’s administration is cutting and rescinding money for infrastructure projects around the country — including $18 billion for a New York rail tunnel and $88 million for clean energy projects in Maryland, both announced last week — leaving many assuming that any expensive, ongoing project in a majority-Democratic state either could get its budget cut or face the chopping block.

Jonathan Sacks, head of the HUB West Baltimore community development corporation in Midtown-Edmondson, wrote in an email that the delay is “not surprising” despite organizations like his waiting nearly three years for the program to kick off.

“And now, with the current Administration and their views on public transportation and community investments, we’re not optimistic it’s ever going to happen,” Sacks wrote. “The possibilities were, and are, huge, even if just a fraction of the $50 million finds its way into community investments here. We sure hope this doesn’t signal the end of the road for those possibilities.”

In September, tunnel updates stopped coming from the Frederick Douglass Tunnel Program, and instead started landing in emails as the B&P Tunnel Replacement Program.

Some in the community thought the shift meant that the name of the tunnel was changing or wondered if the project team was trying to keep the tunnel out of the crosshairs of federal officials bent on attacking anything remotely connected to DEI or the history of slavery in the United States. Douglass was a famed 19th-century Maryland abolitionist and civil rights leader.

Amtrak representative W. Kyle Anderson wrote in a message that reverting to the original program title highlights the project’s full scope, which also includes roughly $100 million to rebuild the West Baltimore MARC station and the replacement of several area bridges.

The name of the future tunnel is not changing, he said.