Eugene Clean Energy Fund moves closer to qualifying for ballot; volunteers at Juneteenth, summer events

Presenter: Signatures are still needed to qualify the Eugene Clean Energy Fund for the ballot this November. You can learn everything you need to know at upcoming events or from the website. From Breach Collective,  Oregon Energy Transition Organizer Aya Cockram:

Aya Cockram (Breach Collective): We’re actually getting quite close to the signatures we need to qualify the minimum. But of course we’re trying to well overshoot that minimum requirement for valid signatures so we can be sure to qualify for November. And then, yeah, getting excited to actually start campaigning and getting the community more involved in this.

We really welcome and would love anyone who wants to volunteer to join us. Right now the biggest need is to signature-gather. We have an awesome volunteer coordinator who can train folks up and get them everything that they need. 

Oftentimes signature gathering happens at any one of our fun events. You know: Pride; Juneteenth; Saturday Whiteaker Markets. We have so many amazing things going on over the summer, so really excited to invite community members to come, collect signatures, and spread the word at those events.

Our website is EugeneCleanEnergyFund.org, and we have a tab for volunteers, where you can sign up and get some of your questions answered. And we do have some other volunteering opportunities as well. So folks with a range of different skills, we welcome you to reach out and come join us.

Presenter: Aya said the volunteers should be easy to find at the Juneteenth events Friday. 

Aya Cockram: We will be wandering around, but folks should keep an eye out. We have a really fun, bold logo and we’ll be wandering around with clipboards. So yeah, come find us, sign the petition. Chat. We’d love to tell you more about the initiative

We have been wanting to do something like a Eugene Clean Energy Fund for quite a while now. The inspiration comes from a highly successful initiative that was passed in Portland in 2018 called the Portland Clean Energy and Community Benefits Fund. And this fund has been raising hundreds of millions of dollars per year for clean energy and community justice projects since it passed.

And so we’ve been really eager to try and get something similar in Eugene. We routinely have heard that a lot of the projects and policies we would like to see move forward in Eugene to help address the climate crisis, affordability issues, and environmental injustice are not possible because the funding isn’t there.

And so the idea behind this fund is really to make sure that we have a steady, sustainable source of funding dedicated to this incredibly important issue of meeting our climate goals and simultaneously increasing resilience and creating good clean jobs in Eugene. 

Portland has invested to date about $1.7 billion. 

And the beauty of this fund is that it really takes from the folks who give the least to our community and who have the most and really helps build that resilience in the community.

So the businesses that would be affected are those that earn over $1 billion nationally, $500,000 locally, they have to meet both of those thresholds in order to be subject to a 2% fee on their gross profits.

So that doesn’t capture any of our local businesses. It’s just your big corporations. Think Amazon, think Chase Bank and Home Depot.

And then it creates a clean energy fund, which would then be invested back into the community in four rough categories.

So we have about 60% going to renewable energy and clean energy projects. 25% going to jobs, trainings, apprenticeships, and contractor support. Then we have 10% going into green infrastructure. So rain gardens, urban canopy, just green space in the city, things like that.

And then finally we have a small 5% going to a catchall category called future innovation, which kind of gives us some flexibility to capture those programs that may not neatly fall into one of the other categories, but which remain true to the spirit of the initiative.

Presenter: From the Sierra Club, Dylan Plummer:

Dylan Plummer (Sierra Club): Yeah, and I’ll just chime in here too and say, you know, this initiative is about making corporations pay their fair share.

You have people like Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, who’s jet-setting around the world and riding around in his private yacht. And every sale that’s happening in the city of Eugene, some portion of that’s just going directly into lining the pockets of these billionaires—while our city continues to face budget deficits, having to do layoffs, cut critical programs.

And what this initiative is about is making sure that those corporations that are profiting off of our community members are giving back and funding the initiatives that we so desperately need in the city, whether it’s resilience or emissions reductions. 

And really the limits to what this fund can provide are the limits of our community’s imagination. We really believe that Eugene has long been an innovator on reducing emissions and taking action on environmental issues. And so, we think that the opportunities with funding like this are just huge.

So whether it’s zero-emission affordable housing, or energy-efficiency retrofits to help reduce costs and reduce emissions for homeowners or renters, again, the sky is really the limit on this project and we’ve seen it just be so successful in Portland.

Aya Cockram: The fund will be housed in the city of Eugene, but there will be an advisory committee that will make recommendations on which projects should be awarded funding.

That advisory committee will be made up of an appointee from the city of Eugene, an appointee from EWEB, and then a member of the Human Rights Commission, a member of the Sustainability Commission, and five community members who represent the different impacted communities in Eugene or who have significant expertise in one of the areas that the program focuses on.

So it will be managed by parties in the city who are deeply invested in the success of this, and members of the community itself.

Dylan Plummer: The city of Eugene, we have a Climate Action Plan, and that’s based on the goals established in our Climate Recovery Ordinance, which require the city to reach 50% reductions in fossil fuel use across the community by 2030. And right now we’re really far away from meeting those goals.

And that’s been our underlying objective since we started Fossil Free Eugene and some of our organization’s efforts on the Eugene Clean Energy Fund is: How can we set the city back on track to meet these really ambitious goals? 

So everything will be informed by those Climate Recovery Ordinance goals, and then some of the strategies that have been identified in the Climate Action Plan. There’s been a tremendous amount of good work done by our city staff and our City Council on identifying pathways. And then what we find so often though is: Where are we going to find funding to make these investments in climate and sustainability?

And so what we’re really trying to do is find that funding so that we can just turbocharge all of the existing amazing programs and ideas that have come from the Sustainability Commission, the City Council, city staff, through the climate action planning process and beyond. 

Aya Cockram: This fund is projected to generate about a floor of $15 million a year. Just noting that in Portland, their projections ended up being much lower than they thought. So we could be seeing quite a bit more than that, all the way up to $30 million. 

A chunk of funding will go directly towards, as Dylan said, existing programs to complement the subsidies at EWEB and the subsidies that are available at the state level. So there will be a good chunk of this funding that’s going straight to members of the community so that they can upgrade their homes.

And we know that existing buildings are a huge source of emissions. And so being able to make folks more comfortable in their home, help them save on their utility bills, and reduce our greenhouse gases and the existing building stock is really huge.

We could be seeing such a huge amount of funding, the kind of funding that we have never had for this type of work, and we’ll say it again and again: The sky’s the limit with what we can imagine and there’s just so much that we could do with that much money in our community to make it more resilient, to meet our climate goals, and to create new jobs for folks that contribute to a green economy.

So that will be really significant in helping us meet our goals as well as achieving a lot of other things that are important to our community members.

Dylan Plummer: You know, Aya and I are both members of unions. Aya is a member of Communication Workers of America, and I’m a member of an independent union, Progressive Workers Union, that represents Sierra Club staff. And it’s really also a special thing about this campaign to get to be working super closely with our partners in organized labor.

We have a lot of amazing endorsements, the Eugene Education Association, along with the Lane, Coos, Curry, and Douglas County Building Trades Labor Council.

And you know, we think that building these kind of bridges between environmental and climate work and organized labor and really trying to paint a vision for a future where we’re building clean renewable energy infrastructure while creating good-paying union jobs is so critical for our city so that we can make a city that’s not only more sustainable, but a city where people can afford to live here and people can get prevailing wage to do work that they really believe in. 

So just, you know, I think that there’s so much happening with this effort intersecting economic justice, racial justice, environmental justice, and it’s just an opportunity for us to build a really strong progressive coalition to make Eugene the city that we know it can be.

Aya Cockram: Yeah, absolutely. And I would encourage folks to go to our website and check out our endorsements. The number of businesses, elected officials, and organizations that have endorsed the initiative is really a testament to how broadly it will support our community.

And, you know, if you are a small business owner, if you are working for an organization or a group that would love to endorse, please get in contact with us. We’d love to have you on board.

Presenter: That is Aya Cockram and Dylan Plummer, who welcome all volunteers to help with the campaign for the Eugene Clean Energy Fund. You can learn more by visiting them at summer events, such as today’s Juneteenth events Friday June 19 at the Farmer’s Market and at Riverfront Park, or at their website, EugeneCleanEnergyFund.org.