The Corpus Christi City Council voted 5-4 to reject a $60,000 gift intended to cover the cost of applying for a federal grant to help build a city-owned water treatment plant.

The Tuesday night vote confirms the strength of the anti-desalination bloc in the City Council, a month before members are expected to vote on whether to revive plans to build the $978.8 million Inner Harbor desalination plant.

Business and community leaders pledged the money in hopes of moving forward on a desalination plant capable of providing a drought-resistant water supply by removing salt from seawater collected from Corpus Christi Bay.

Tuesday’s vote came three weeks after a bitterly divided City Council declined to apply for the grant from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which has a program offering up to $120 million to help build desalination plants across the country. Five council members opposed spending money and time applying for a grant for the proposed Inner Harbor desalination plant — a project that has not yet been approved and would take three years to build.

The same five council members voted Tuesday to turn down the $60,000 gift to put toward application costs.

Council Member Carolyn Vaughn said she didn’t know the identity of all the donors and was skeptical of their intentions.

“To me, this is dark money when you don’t know who the people are,” she said. “If the city’s going to take money from somebody, they should have names. … Not sure what the motive is. It’s very frustrating because we have not approved Inner Harbor, so yet again this is being shoved down our throat.”

Council Member Kaylynn Paxson, who voted against applying for the grant last month, said her position had not changed: “We still don’t have a project to apply this to that’s been approved.”

The city has been in the grips of a relentless drought and came close to enacting emergency water-use restrictions earlier this year. The region got relief last week when runoff from a series of Hill Country storms flowed downstream into two of the city’s main reservoirs, delaying projections of a water supply emergency until September 2028.

A group of community members and business owners got together through Voices for Coastal Bend Energy, an organization of business owners and industry leaders, to raise money to cover grant application costs. Nick Winkelmann, chief operating officer of the city’s water department, estimated it would cost the city up to $60,000 to apply for the grant, considering staff time and the consulting firm.

The proposed $1.2 billion desalination plant — capable of treating around 30 million gallons of seawater a day beginning in 2029 — was halted by the City Council in September over concerns about the cost and environmental impact from salty discharge into Corpus Christi Bay. The city’s water department has whittled the project’s cost down to $980 million, and the City Council is set to reconsider the plant on Sept. 1.

But the federal grant has an Aug. 26 deadline, and Dolley Trolley, executive director of the Voices for Coastal Bend Energy, a nonprofit sponsored by the Energy Equipment and Infrastructure Alliance, said the donors were eager to support the effort. She said they saw it as a way of “removing one of the obstacles” that concerned council members.

Trolley said some in the city’s business community viewed the federal grant as “an opportunity that our community can’t pass up. … It seems like it would be foolish not to apply for this grant.”

But council members are concerned that money invested in the application process would be wasted if they decide not revive the Inner Harbor project. Additionally, City Council Member Gil Hernandez said “it’s a simple no” for him to apply for the grant because the City Council hasn’t yet approved the project.

“It doesn’t make sense to apply for a grant for a project we’re not doing right now,” he told The Texas Tribune. He said there are many parts of the proposed project that he doesn’t agree with, and the grant’s application requires a fleshed out plan.

“I’m not going to put us in a position to make a mistake and apply for a grant, and then lock us into a certain procurement fund,” he said. “It’s trying to force our hand.”

Council Member Mark Scott, who voted in favor of accepting the donation and was one of the members who pitched the idea of applying for the grant, said this was “an opportunity for substantial funding.”

Some council members expressed concern about involving the federal government in the city’s proposed project, but Scott said he did not see it that way. “It’s really obvious to me, a layman, that they’re sincerely interested in helping this project,” he said.

Scott said the decision before the City Council was not whether to greenlight the Inner Harbor project, but whether to accept money to apply for a grant in case the plant does get approved.

For one of the gift’s donors, the grant’s looming deadline and pressure for the city to find new sources of water is worth the risk.

David Loeb, a former City Council member and founder of Landlord Resources, a real estate company, was one of the donors through Voices for Coastal Bend Energy. He was ready to donate $20,000 to fund application costs — if the City Council had accepted it.

“The majority’s decision is indicative of their incapability to work constructively with the federal government, state government, our neighbors, our partners, and even our own community,” Loeb told the Tribune. “It was sad but not surprising.”

Loeb saw the offered donation as a long-term investment in providing the city with a reliable water source.

“It’s a lot of money but compared to how much money it returns, it’s a small amount of money,” he said. “And it’s for the most critical issue of this community — water.”