In this issue: 

• Minneapolis Climate Budget
• St. Paul Reaches New Agreement with Xcel Energy
• Meet Our New Civic Bridgers Fellow
• Minneapolis Data Center Public Hearing Oct 13th + Energy Democracy Context
• PUC lets Xcel Profit Increase Stand
• National Energy & Utility News

Minneapolis City Budget Public Hearings Oct 7th & Oct 19th:

Help Restore Climate Equity Funding!

Community Power, along with coalition partners and residents from around the city, (and the city itself) worked hard last year to win an additional annual $4-5 million for weatherization & environmental justice.

Two months ago, we shared out an action alert that the mayor's recommended budget would propose diverting this new $4 million to fill gaps in the general budget. 

There's a groundswell of opposition to this proposed funding cut. 

On September 30th, dozens of residents gathered at City Hall to take a stand for restoring these funds to the Climate Legacy Initiative (photo below from local news coverage).

Photo: Becca Gilbuena

The city council which is tasked with drafting and voting on Amendments to the Mayor’s recommended budget which could address this.

This month we have 2 City Budget Public Hearings that provide an opportunity to ask the City Council to create an amendment to restore this funding.  

You can watch the video of the Oct 7th public hearing, which Community Power staff spoke in along with a variety of perspectives regarding the city budget. 

Each speaker (like you!) can speak for up to 2-minutes at the public hearing or by submitting a written comment electronically. On some occasions, we are given as little as one minute to speak when a huge number of community members sign up to do so. 

Need help with talking points? Read on below

Important note: While the final public hearing on the city budget won't be until December 15th, October is the most impactful time to speak so that they have time to respond and make amendments to the budget. While last minute changes do sometimes occur, larger Council amendments to the budget are due November 18th. 

Dive into the numbers, we now have the receipts: 

On Sept 24th, we saw the Climate Legacy Initiative Budget Presentation. That finally gave us some granular numbers on how much the mayor's recommended budget plan proposes to be cut from specific programs. You can hear city staff presenting it starting at the 1 hour 24-minute mark in this video, followed by commentary from city councilmembers attending. 

Minneapolis has found that these programs facing proposed cuts have had tremendous cost and energy savings for families who got the upgrades. We share our takeaways from this presentation in our updated action alert.  But the one most worth sharing here is the big picture which is captured in this image from last Wednesday's demonstration: 

Delaying investment in mitigating climate change is not delaying the same risk. Delaying action is COMPOUNDING risk.  Rising instability means we also have fewer and fewer spare dollars to mitigate rather than simply repair damage. As economists and scientists have said: the value of avoiding the impacts of climate change through mitigation is so great (and we are so behind) that there is quite literally no limit to how much policymakers can spend on well-calibrated climate action. It's all saving us. Not just our lives. But our $$$ - even if that's all we're talking about.

Those are the reasons why the City of Minneapolis even has set ambitious science-based climate goals in the first place, as shown in this chart below. Making steep cuts in climate equity spending next year right is dissonant with the goals that the city has on paper which require the most aggressive carbon reduction efforts between 2025 and 2030: 

Here are 4 additional main points to keep in mind for crafting public commentary: 

1: Cutting or diverting these funds that were promised to go towards weatherization for energy-burdened households breaks trust with residents as well as the small business community.

2: The stated purpose of franchise fee increases has always been based on the return of funds to customers through weatherization and clean energy opportunities that would reduce utility bills. In the mayor’s proposed budget, the City keeps these franchise fee funds, but this portion would no longer be used to help residents and businesses reduce their energy bills.

3: This is one of the few city-funded activities that offsets property tax increases (by lowering energy bills). If the intention of the mayor's budget is to balance a shortfall and relieve pressure on residents from a rising levy by making cuts...this is arguably one of the worst things to pick. Leaving buildings uninsulated compounds costs. 

4. These programs, notably Green Cost Share, are not only well-known but are successful, well-tested, high-quality and wildly popular. It is oversubscribed every year. That is why the City Council passed the $4-5 million increase in the first place last year. 

Interested in seeing more of our takeaways on the proposed budget, and the full story of its spending plans on climate? 

Read on in our Updated Action Alert which now includes our takeaways from the Climate Legacy Initiative budget presentation. 

St. Paul reaches new Franchise Agreement with Xcel Energy

As we were in the thick of the Minneapolis Energy Options campaign back in 2013, working to use the coming expiration of Minneapolis' franchise agreements with energy utilities as leverage for climate action, one question inevitably arose: “What about St. Paul?”

It turned out that St. Paul had signed a 20-year franchise agreement with Xcel Energy back in 2006 (which provides both gas and electricity in St. Paul). What once seemed so impossibly far into the future back in 2013 has now arrived…

See our new blogpost:

What About St. Paul? New Franchise Agreement Arrives - Community Power

In the post, we share ways how the new utility franchise agreements (which the city council unanimously approved on September 23rd) are an improvement from what the city had before. In addition, Xcel struck a deal so that some households that qualify for energy assistance may also receive a 50% rebate from their previous month's franchise fee.

Milo Greenberg joins as our new Civic Bridgers Fellow  Meet Milo Greenberg, a 2024 graduate of Willamette University with a degree in Politics, Policy, Law and Ethics. This is Milo's second year of AmeriCorps service, following his year coordinating energy resilience programs in Northeast Oregon through the Resource Assistance for Rural Environments AmeriCorps program. At Community Power, Milo is looking forward to supporting the Good Energy Connections program and helping empower communities to have a voice in the energy system.