From El Paso Matters:
The city of El Paso is preparing to implement a wide-ranging climate action plan in about a year. But after the city lost out on major federal grants that could have provided hundreds of millions of dollars for the effort, there’s a question looming: Who will pay for it?
The city, through its 2-year-old climate office, is heading the charge with 11 other local governments, utility companies and business groups under the Chihuahuan Desert Climate Collaborative. The collaborative this year had sought over $500 million from two grants from the Environmental Protection Agency, but instead the city won two smaller grants totaling $45 million.
“Bringing together those 12 jurisdictional governing bodies all together to pursue a common goal is a win in and of itself,” Nicole Ferrini, who heads the city’s climate office, told El Paso Matters. “That collaboration, that formality, positions us better for future grants.”
The dozen local governments, such as the cities of Horizon and San Elizario as well as El Paso and Hudspeth counties, each signed interlocal agreements to formally work with the city on the climate plan. And Ferrini points to other available grants for funding opportunities because at this point, she said, it’s unlikely that voters would support a bond – and issue debt – to address the effects of climate change in the Borderland.
However, it’s not clear how involved El Paso’s business sector is in the development of the city’s climate plan; interviews with numerous stakeholders suggest collaboration has been limited. Instead, some utilities and businesses are focused on their own initiatives. And public finance experts say that cities such as El Paso should not rely solely on grant funding, but instead look to take advantage of other state and federal incentives and financing options.
El Paso is looking to join Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Houston – as well as other Southwestern cities that are implementing climate action plans. The plans differ by city, but generally lay out broad strategies to reduce air pollution, address excessive heat and rising average temperatures and conserve water.
El Paso voters in November 2022 approved a $5.2 million bond to develop the climate action plan, and the city in January hired an environmental consulting company for $1.2 million to craft the preliminary draft. For now, Ferrini’s office is slated in the city’s budget to spend the remaining $4 million of bond proceeds through 2027.
Where’s the money going to come from?
This spring, the EPA received 300 applications for pollution reduction grants but awarded only 25. Austin was the sole Texas city that won a grant.
However, cities have used a variety of methods to raise money for climate-related plans and programs, such as taxing retail sales at big box stores or putting to voters bond proposals specifically to fund climate initiatives, which the city of Austin is planning to do.
And cities around the United States have been figuring out how to fund climate initiatives for years before federal spending bills – namely the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act – made hundreds of billions of dollars available to cities and states to address climate change and environmental degradation.
El Paso lost the two major grants it sought that were worth up to $530 million, but the city won two smaller federal climate grants. One is providing the city with $15 million to install 74 electric vehicle chargers around El Paso. Another grant worth $30 million is helping Sun Metro replace 32 old buses with new buses that run on compressed natural gas.
Ferrini said she’s heard from the community that there is little appetite to put another bond on the ballot for climate-related initiatives. The city will continue applying for different grants going forward, she said.
And there are other options for cities to pay for climate policies.
“It’s very reasonable for cities like El Paso to say ‘Hey, pursuing grants is part of our strategy,’” said Matthew Popkin, a researcher focused on clean energy and public finance with the Rocky Mountain Institute think tank. “I would encourage cities across the country to realize that pursuing grants should only be part of your strategy.”
Popkin said federal programs, and not just grants, have made clean energy programs more doable. He pointed to a project in San Antonio, where the city developed 13-megawatts worth of solar panels – enough to power around 3,200 homes – that it built as shades over parking lots at city-owned properties.
The project cost $31 million, and San Antonio made it happen without receiving any grant funding, Popkin said. The Inflation Reduction Act changed rules to allow cities to own solar projects, receive the benefit of tax credits and cut the up-front cost. San Antonio is expecting to save around $10 million on electricity bills over 25 years as a result of the project.
“This is something that could probably be exported as a model to El Paso to save money on their electricity bills and to power their facilities with clean energy,” Popkin said. “We do not need infusions of federal capital to make this happen.”
Another state-run program, for example, can finance energy efficiency upgrades at commercial buildings with loans that are paid off with the resulting electricity bill savings, said Molly Freed, a senior associate with RMI.
Collaboration
Virtually every major city’s climate action plan gets signed off on by local environmental groups, utilities and the business communities. Ferrini regularly says that bringing together community organizers, utilities and industrial companies is a major part of her work.
Ferrini often points to the climate action plan that Dallas adopted in 2021 as a model for El Paso. That plan includes signatories such as the Dallas Sierra Club, the Dallas Regional Chamber, as well as natural gas utility Atmos Energy.
“You’ve got to bring in the private sector,” Ferrini said.
Yet, the involvement of El Paso’s business sector in the city’s climate plan is unclear.
The El Paso Chamber did not respond to questions about its role helping to develop the CAP. And Liz O’Hara, chair of the chamber’s board and a regional manager for natural gas utility Texas Gas Service, didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Texas Gas Service also didn’t respond to questions.
Marathon Petroleum didn’t make any of its employees in El Paso available for an interview. The publicly-traded company worth $55 billion operates a refinery off of Trowbridge Drive that produces from crude oil about 133,000 barrels of petroleum products daily, including much of the gasoline that drivers in El Paso use.
“Marathon Petroleum is committed to environmental stewardship and has long worked with community members and other stakeholders to create positive environmental outcomes,” the company said in a statement, adding that it has slashed emissions from its refinery here by 37% since 2011.
“We look forward to continuing this work and lending our expertise to the ongoing efforts to develop an effective regional climate action plan that meets El Pasoans’ needs long into the future,” Marathon’s statement read.
El Paso Electric was mentioned a single time in the city’s 73-page preliminary climate plan, even though the utility’s Newman 6 natural gas power plant in the far Northeast is the biggest single source of heat-trapping greenhouse gas pollution in El Paso County, according to EPA data. The Newman plant also generated about 25% of the region’s electricity last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
EPE offered one idea in the city’s initial climate plan: Either give customers an incentive to buy home battery storage systems, or place utility-owned batteries at customers’ homes that EPE would tap when demand for electricity is high.
El Paso Electric has its own goals to produce 80% carbon-free power by 2035. Last year, 42% of the electricity that powered homes and businesses in the region came from pollution-free sources, mostly the Palo Verde nuclear power plant outside of Phoenix as well as a handful of local solar farms.
City-owned El Paso Water, meanwhile, is working with the city on a few climate-related initiatives aimed at taking carbon out of the air and powering more of the utility’s operations with carbon-free energy, said Drew Aliyas, the utility’s climate and research program manager.
“We gave some input,” on the city’s climate action plan, Aliyas said. “We weren’t really that involved.”
El Paso Water recently won a grant from the Bureau of Reclamation worth $4.87 million that will cover half of the cost of a solar installation at the utility’s Fred Hervey Water Reclamation Plant in the far Northeast, just east of Painted Dunes Golf Course. The solar panels will supply 85% of the plant’s electricity, likely within a handful of years, Aliyas said.
El Paso Water is also pursuing a project at the Rio Bosque Wetlands Park in the Lower Valley, which the utility owns. Aliyas said El Paso Water will conduct a bio survey at a part of the park, remove invasive species and eventually plant native flora that will suck carbon from the air. Plus, he said, the utility wants to create a green space with plants that act as a buffer between the adjacent Bustamante Wastewater Treatment Plant and the abutting neighborhood.
“We’re probably one of the largest landowners in the county, and I want to make good use of our unused spaces,” Aliyas said.
State grants from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality could eventually help provide some money for El Paso Water to gradually convert its fleet to either electric vehicles or lower-emitting vehicles that run on natural gas instead of diesel.
“If funds become available, I think (fleet electrification) will be a priority for the utility,” Aliyas said.
In a statement, El Paso County Precinct 2 Commissioner David Stout said local governments aren’t taking “long-term resiliency” seriously enough – something that must be centered in a regional climate plan, he said.
“The biggest example is sprawl. We continue to subsidize new development in the far east,” Stout said.
In addition to curbing sprawl, he said, El Paso’s climate plan should ensure the adoption of more household rooftop solar panel systems, advocate for an end to polluting commercial truck traffic at the Bridge of the Americas and preserve the natural local environment.
“The County cannot do it alone, and nor can any single entity, but we cannot just throw up our hands and accept the destruction of that environment and fouling of the air as the price we pay for economic activity,” he said.
Engaging more with businesses and community groups is “part of the work ahead,” Ferrini said.
“You’ve got to be able to bring parties that do not agree with each other and seem miles apart to the same table in the same room. And you’ve got to identify common goals,” Ferrini said. “I do not pretend that that’s an easy thing to do. And that’s also why climate planning takes 18 months.”
Local impacts of climate change
The need for a climate action plan was underscored last year when the city experienced the hottest year on record and the lowest amount of rainfall in 20 years, according to the National Weather Service.
This year’s summer – from June through August – was the second-hottest on record going back to 1887, only slightly behind last year. And last month was the second-warmest August ever in El Paso, when temperatures were five degrees hotter than the 30-year average.
The amount of water flowing through the Rio Grande into El Paso has also increasingly fluctuated year-to-year because of drought in the Rio Grande watershed north of El Paso.
That’s in part “because increasing temperatures that are associated with climate change have caused a 15% increase in evaporative demand of the atmosphere in the last 40 years,” said Sam Fernald, a professor at New Mexico State University and director of the New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute. “And it’s expected to continue, because temperatures are just going up.”
El Paso Water has responded by spending to develop other water sources so that it soon won’t have to rely at all on the drought-prone river for water.
About 60% of the annual air pollution in El Paso comes from vehicles that run on gasoline or diesel, as well as from the energy that buildings use, mostly for air conditioning, according to the city’s preliminary climate plan, which is based on data from 2019. The electricity used in buildings here is supplied in part by local natural gas power plants owned by El Paso Electric.
A major goal of the climate plan is getting El Pasoans to spend less time in their vehicles, even as urban development sprawls further into the desert and requires most people to drive more. Ferrini has said previously that the number of miles that vehicles travel is a “driving force” of air emissions in El Paso.
“In the context of (electric vehicles), you’re going to see us lean in more about how to make (ownership) a reality for more El Pasoans,” Ferrini said. “We know that the first steps are to make sure that the charging infrastructure is there.”
A climate action plan for El Paso “can really push for more innovation,” said Joshua Simmons, director of the Eco El Paso environmental group.
Simmons pointed to South Pasadena, California, a city of about 25,000 within Los Angeles County, where the municipal police department this summer purchased 20 electric Tesla cars and ditched its old gasoline-powered fleet of police vehicles.
“Those are the things I would like to see – really bold moves forward,” he said.
Environmental organizers in El Paso are wary that the climate action plan could become a vehicle for ideas that are minimally related to the environment or climate change. And there’s a risk that the city crafts a plan without the means to implement it.
Simmons took aim at the deck park, which is a proposal to build a cap over the sunken portion of Interstate 10 Downtown and put a park on top that would span five city blocks.
The deck park was included in the city’s preliminary climate plan; the city would build a public transit center at the park “to provide enhanced transit connectivity and new natural space.” The park would include green space, and it would be built while the state’s transportation agency adds a new lane to that segment of I-10.
“Until someone is willing to move the money and actually come in and do a big project that’s not a deck park, that has renewables in the blood of it,” Simmons said, “I think it’s going to be ‘Let’s plan, let’s plan, let’s plan. Let’s plan for the plan.’”
For the Amanecer People’s Project, an organization pushing for climate justice, a climate action plan must take into equal consideration the concerns of local residents as it does business lobbyists, said Matt Rodriguez, an organizer with Amanecer.
“The contractors association and Marathon and a mom concerned about the heat all walk into City Council. They don’t have the same clout, right? Their needs are not assessed the same,” Rodriguez said.
“What we want to see more of is real, structured plans on ‘This is exactly how we need to engage these five neighborhoods’, overlaying that with heat maps, or pollution,” he said.
Ferrini acknowledged that she faces a tall task of crafting a climate action plan in a binational metropolitan region with six border crossings and heavy commercial traffic. But the final plan, she said, will have tangible results of cutting energy costs, slashing pollution related to vehicles and buildings and addressing excessive heat.
“As we’re going through this next (12 to 13 months) before we’re ready, all of these investments we’re making, all of these grants that we are pursuing are helping us lay the groundwork for those to be real actions,” Ferrini said, “and not be some plan that sits on the shelf.”
This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
