Arizona’s congressional delegation needs to help unfreeze federal grants meant to pay for clean energy and climate initiatives in Tucson, City Councilwoman Karin Uhlich said Wednesday in a news conference that included local business and nonprofit leaders.
The local call on releasing federal funding comes a day after The Washington Post reported that Environmental Protection Agency lawyers wrote in a court filing that the agency plans to cancel nearly 800 grants issued under former President Joe Biden.
One of them is a $20 million Community Change Grant to Tucson-based Primavera Foundation.
Losing the grant, which would have created new green spaces along major traffic corridors, installing stormwater harvesting basins, increasing shade at bus stops, installing solar and energy storage, as well as home energy audits and upgrades, would cost jobs, training and sustainability investments. She said it would especially harm “our most vulnerable people” and impact public health for those facing higher energy costs, Uhlich said.
“These grants and investments have a huge impact and benefit to our community, not only in-terms of energy and climate sustainability, but also on our economy and our public’s health,” Uhlich said at the news conference. “We really urge our congressional delegation, on both sides of the aisle. I believe that Republicans and Democrats understand common sense investments, that have such multiple impacts and benefits, are worth carrying forward.”
Uhlich
Among the flurry of executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in his first week in office were “pauses” ordered on spending from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Tucson, Pima County and local organizations saw large amounts of funding roll in through the two federal laws.
Leaders at Wednesday’s news conference said the federal pause on funding caused “deep harm.”
For Kimber Lanning, founder and CEO of statewide nonprofit Local First Arizona, the goals of long-term climate planning that her nonprofit has had a hand in are “completely unreachable” now due to the funding freezes. Quality jobs local governments and businesses could have attracted to the region “are now in question,” Lanning said.
Kimber Lanning, left, founder and chief executive officer of Local First Arizona, joins Councilmember Karin Uhlich Wednesday in calling on Arizona’s congressional to help unfreeze federal climate funding.
“I think it’s critically important that we recognize that we were just building this wonderful momentum in collaboration with our community colleges and investing in the trades, the tax credits that were available to incentivize diverse investments to build a truly inclusive economy in southern Arizona have now been lost,” Lanning said. “There are many people out there who are believers in a free economy ... (but) we need to build an inclusive economy to transition successfully into the environment that the future will hold, the environment that the future requires all of us to participate in.”
The recent federal action also froze clean energy financing for local small businesses through Groundswell Capital, who’s president, Dre Thompson, said is Arizona’s “first green bank.”
Those actions have resulted in the freezing of about $4 million owed to Groundswell Capital, Thompson said, “and another $10 million are really at risk.”
“These dollars were expected to be leveraged tenfold for every dollar that was invested ... but today our momentum is stalled. And while we wait, the cost of inaction is mounting and impacting our community,” she said. “I urge our leaders to see past politics and return to a common-sense vision that made the IRA possible in the first place: a dedication to jobs, to opportunity and to resilience for every American.”
