Green Justice Coalition Demands Support for Disadvantaged Communities at Energy Efficiency Advisory Council Meeting
BOSTON/Government Center - A large conference room at the 100 Cambridge St. headquarters of the Mass. Department of Energy Resources was packed by over 125 people on Tuesday - most of whom were members of several of the labor and community organizations that make up the Green Justice Coalition, a new grassroots formation aiming to ensure that the rising "green economy" in the Bay State will create quality jobs in disadvantaged communities.
GJC organizers said that they had brought dozens of activists out on only 8 days notice to comment before the latest meeting of the Energy Efficiency Advisory Council - the deliberative body brought into being with the passage of the Green Communities Act by the state legislature last year, and tasked with "designing and approving the Commonwealth’s utility- and municipal aggregator-operated energy efficiency programs" according to Council documents.
In the service of reflecting various key constituencies, the 11 voting EEAC councilors represent a number of state agencies, the utility industry, the business community plus a couple of representatives of labor and community interests. The 11 non-voting members all represent Mass. utility companies - with the exception of the Cape Light Compact.
The EEAC's legislative mandate states that “electric and natural gas resource needs shall first be met through all available energy efficiency and demand reduction resources that are cost effective or less expensive than supply.”
According to Frank Gorke, Director of the Division for Energy Efficiency at the DOER, that mandate is a big policy breakthrough, "Until the Green Communities Act, the efficiency programs, good though they were, were constrained by a fixed budget. Spending levels were capped by the legislature and regulators. And the regulatory mandate was to spend the efficiency budget delivering as much efficiency as possible for each dollar spent. Those factors obviously informed the development of the programs, and focused them on achieving savings in particular ways: for example, low cost, high savings interventions like changing light bulbs. This was good, but did not allow for much innovation or creativity.
"The Green Communities Act completely changes that dynamic. Instead of spending a fixed budget to deliver a specific amount of energy savings, the efficiency program administrators (which includes one non-utility entity, the Cape Light Compact on Cape Cod) are required to achieve all cost-effective energy efficiency. What that will look like is more air sealing, more insulation, more efficient appliances and heating systems, and more efficient light bulbs in every home; more efficient lighting and refrigerators in the convenience store down on the corner; and more efficient industrial equipment in paper mills and every other industrial building. The Act also requires statewide programs, where before each company often had its own programs for its own service territory."
But while the GJC advocates voiced general support for EEAC goals they were strongly critical of its implementation proposals - which must be filed with the Department of Public Utilities by October - in the public comment portion of the meeting, which was chaired by Gorke.
"The implementation of the Green Communities Act has presented the state with the unique and critical mandate to live up to the challenge of the spirit of and the letter of the law that can literally help us to change our environment and our future," said Kalila Barnett of Roxbury-based Alternatives for Communities and Environment. "Unfortunately, the Green Justice Coalition feels like the current utilities service plans fall short of where they need to be in order for a real impact to be felt by low-income communities and communities of color across the state, and do not bring us where we all need to be."
"The current plans just won't work. The old way of doing business of marketing energy efficiency retrofits as options for a small few leaves too many people out. Our communities are contributing to the energy efficiency pool and we refuse to be left out. Utility companies do, we feel, have a mandate to remove the barriers that prevent low-income consumers from being able to access these resources by addressing up-front costs, and by taking into consideration the tension of serving tenants and landlords in this process."
Caroline Murray of Alliance to Develop Power of Springfield provided more details, "As presented, these proposals are unfair. They exclude opportunities for low-income people and people of color to access the jobs created and benefits of energy efficiencies. They also exclude opportunities for neighborhoods to benefit as a whole - and will exclude entire communities. We have four basic principles that we believe are unfair in these plans, and Kalila will share with you the results of a survey we conducted of folks in our neighborhoods. First, we believe they're unfair because communities that bore the brunt of the fossil fuel economy and the environmental racism that accompanied that brunt. Those communities must not be left out of the solutions. There's a reason why many subsidized housing complexes have children who live in them who have higher rates of asthma than in other neighborhoods. There's a reason why many bus depots are located in low-income communities, and then also result in unhealthy neighborhoods. There's a reason why folks in Springfield can't pay their bill from the Western Mass electric company. - and pre-paying it will certainly not solve that problem. So we believe that these communities must not be left out of the solutions.
"Second, our neighborhoods are not getting access to the information, the services or the jobs that will be created. Advertising in a bill with piecemeal individual calling-out to access the services is not going to address the problems. We need to have a broader scale community-wide plan that will get deep into our neighborhoods. Second (Murray meant "third" - ed.), folks in our communities cannot afford the up-front costs of deep retrofits. This is especially a problem for tenants. So how are we going to address that? Do the utility service plans have a plan for financing up-front?
"And finally piecemeal retrofitting - house-by-house or individual-by-individual - means that the jobs that accompany those will not take their workers out of poverty. When you go from house to house with your subcontractor that doesn't have a larger scale contract that means that you're going to put in a smaller bid. And then obviously with a smaller bid are smaller wages. So we need to address whole communities, and we need to have large-scale contracting that takes place in those communities that pay family-sustainable living wages with a career path."
Over the course of two hours, over 20 people made public comments to the council - most of them GJC activists that further developed the ideas presented by Barnett and Murray. Several major organizations were represented including the Greater Boston Labor Council, Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts, New England Regional Council of Carpenters, Mass. AFL-CIO, Chinese Progressive Association, Mass. ACORN, Clean Water Action, Mass. Energy, Unitarian-Universalist Mass. Action Network, and the GJC convener Mass. Community Labor United. Many wore GJC stickers reading "A Green Wave is Coming."
Gorke called the event to a close as soon as the last comment was finished. EEAC members did not make any direct remarks to the crowd before adjourning.
Asked for comment on the issues raised by the GJC advocates - and what he thought of the relatively large number of community activists in attendance - Gorke responded, "The GCA is very clear in establishing the EEAC as the table for developing the utility-administered efficiency programs. It is made up of stakeholders from a broad range of interests, including energy users, environmental groups, labor, industry, ratepayer advocates, and more. The EEAC has been meeting twice a month all spring and summer, and monthly before that. Every meeting is open and public, and we've had a public comment session at every meeting since the Council got set up this winter. There have been sizable crowds at every meeting. All Council documents are posted online, including now two drafts of the three year efficiency plans. In addition, in response to requests for additional opportunity to comment, we scheduled the extended public comment session. After the EEAC considers the plans, they will go to the DPU for additional review.
"Overall we're encouraged by the progress we've seen, but not at all satisfied. People at the comment session raised a lot of important issues that we expect the Program Administrators to address, and the Council will hopefully be a partner in addressing them. In the past there have been dedicated programs for income-eligible households; in fact the legislation has always required that low-income households get as much out of the efficiency funds as they pay in on their bills, and that will continue to be the case. But obviously now we need to shift gears, to make sure that everyone in every corner and the middle of the state can access the programs, and to make sure that we communicate about efficiency in all the languages of the Commonwealth. And on jobs, we fully expect that the expansion of the clean energy sector - efficiency as well as clean energy generation technologies - will be one of the key ingredients to our economic recovery, and this effort will create good jobs for Massachusetts residents. And as you know, efficiency jobs are jobs that you can't send anywhere else - you've got to do a lot of work in the old buildings around here to make them more efficient."
The GJC, for their part, plans to continue efforts to ensure that the needs of low-income communities, immigrant communities and communities of color are met through the GCA process.
Read the latest Green Justice Coalition reports on the Green Communities Act process at the Community Labor United website.
Visit the website of the Mass. Energy Efficiency Advisory Council here.
