A spring thaw in federal funding

Late March brought the spring thaw to Colorado and most of the federal funds for climate change-related work

by Allen Best

Federal funds for climate-change-related projects in Colorado have started arriving in almost perfect concert with the spring thaw.

Among the applications for the hundreds of millions of dollars will be:

energy efficiency work in southwestern Colorado communities,
curbing methane emissions from old coal mines west of Carbondale, and,
preparation of a climate action plan for the Yampa Valley.

Among the smaller grants, $187,605 went to Salida and Chaffee County. The money will fund a staff position shared by the two jurisdictions to create a greenhouse gas inventory, a climate action plan, and then the means to implement what the city and county decide to do.

That grant and seven others for rural Colorado jurisdictions from the U.S. Department of Energy totaling $1.865 million were announced in August 2024. The federal program had received key funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021.

The awards were temporarily frozen by President Donald Trump.

The money is largely to be used for staffing for climate action planning but also for workforce training in communities where extraction and combustion of fossil fuels has been fading.

“Capacity is an essential component of local climate action, and these new awards will play an important role in enabling this work in Colorado’s rural and mountain communities,” Christine Berg, senior policy advisor for local governments in the Colorado Energy Office, said in the August 2024 announcement.

A far larger grant of $200 million to the Denver Regional Council of Governments, or DRCOG, had been announced in July 2024.

See more at “A great transition 50 years from now”

That money, a product of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, was to have been used for retrofits of buildings in the nine-county metropolitan area. DRCOG did not respond to repeated requests as to whether the money has been unthawed or is expected to be.

The Colorado Energy Office had been awarded $129 million. A spokesperson confirmed the money has arrived. It will be used:

To deploy advanced methane monitoring technology to produce data that will inform regulatory policy concerning methane emissions from landfills and coal mines, including those in the Redstone-Paonia area.
For energy efficiency and electrification upgrades in large commercial buildings that are otherwise hard to decarbonize.
To help local governments to implement projects that help reduce emissions from buildings, transportation, electric power, waste and other economic sectors. The money is to be administered through a new program, the Local Government Climate Action Accelerator.

Part of the $129 million received by the Colorado Energy Office will be used to work on large commercial buildings that are hard to decarbonize. Photos/Allen Best

What melted the ice?

The Trump administration’s budget office on Jan. 20 had ordered a pause on previously promised funds if they helped advance the “green new deal,” as the Congressional laws adopted when Joe Biden was president have been called. A federal court issued a temporary restraining order in late January, but the Trump administration seemed to ignore it.

Colorado in early February joined 21 other states and the District of Columbia in asking the court to require the federal agencies to release the money.

Will Toor, the executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, at the time declared that the federal government had signed contracts granting more than $500 million to Colorado through the 2021 and 2022 federal laws. “By not meeting these contractual obligations, the federal government is inflicting real harm on our state,” he said in a statement posted on the CEO website.

The Trump administration seemed to ignore the legal requirement, and a federal court judge on March 6 ordered the administration to comply.

Judge John J. McConnell Jr., of the Federal District Court for the District of Rhode Island, said the case amounted to executive overreach. The directive from the White House budget office, he said in a New York Times story, “fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government.” Without his action, he said, “the funding that the states are due and owed creates an indefinite limbo.” A federal appeals court on March 26 upheld that decision.

On March 28, Colorado Energy Office spokesman Ari Rosenblum reported that the $129 million in funding announced last summer for the state agency has been unfrozen.

“We are moving forward with work on all projects funded through this grant,” he wrote in an e-mail in response to a query from Big Pivots. “We expect to launch the Local Government Climate Action Accelerator this summer.”

Projects in rural Colorado

The $1.8 million grant — this is in addition to the program for local assistance that the Colorado Energy Office created with its $129 million — funded projects for Salida and Chaffee County and these additional rural communities:

$240,000 for Lake County to support a new position to lead development of the county’s first climate action plan and implement the county’s climate initiatives in and around Leadville. These and other similar positions are for three years.
$240,000 to the Colorado River Valley Economic Development Partnership, which has representatives of municipalities from New Castle and Silt on the east and Parachute and Battlement Mesa, as well as parts of unincorporated Garfield County. The project has a strong emphasis on workforce development and new job training in a county that formerly had a strong component of fossil fuel extraction.
$264,100 to the Routt County Climate Action Plan Collaborative. The money is to scale up electrification in Hayden, Oak Creek, Steamboat Springs and Yampa as well as other parts of Rout County. As with the Colorado River communities, there will be a workforce development and job training component as two coal-burning units at Hayden will close in the next several years. The coal for the plant comes from Twentymile Mine.
$240,000 to Pueblo and Pueblo County for a staff position for implementing city and county sustainability projects.
$240,000 to the City of Durango for a staff position to be housed within the Four Corners Office for Resource Efficiency to work with La Plata Electric Association and the city government to implement energy efficiency and so forth.
$191,100 to EcoAction Partners, a consortium of San Miguel and Ouray counties along with the towns of Telluride, Mountain Village, Ophir, and Norward. This money is to provide staffing to assist the 10 jurisdiction members with climate action plan projects and programming implementation.
$262,194 to Larimer County to help with staffing to develop a climate action plan for Estes Park and ensure alignment with Larimer County climate Smart Future Ready plan.

A $240,000 grant was awarded to the City of Durango to work with the a local non-profit group, the Four Corners Office for Resource Efficiency, and La Plata Electric Association on energy efficiency.

Salida tree grant

Salida will also receive another $250,000 to cover the costs of planting trees in a somewhat newer but lower-income neighborhood during the next five years.

The older part of Salida that can be seen along F Street, the town’s older commercial corridor, has many tall shade trees. The town’s southeast corner, though, is an area converted from light industrial and commercial into manufactured and other housing. It has a paucity of trees.

Sara Law, Salida’s sustainability coordinator and public information officer, explained that Salida expects to get hotter during summer months in coming decades because of accumulating greenhouse gases. The goal was to get medium- to low-tree covers to help provide cooling on those hot days of summer.

Awardees of that grant program, including Salida, are now able to work on their tree projects and submit for reimbursement.

Teddy Parker-Renga, associate director of communications and communities for the Colorado State Forest Service, reported on March 31 that awardees of that particular grant program, including Salida, had become eligible that day to submit reimbursements for their work. The money comes from the U.S. Forest Service and grants are administered by the Colorado State Forest Service.

At an elevation of 7,400 feet, Salida has a climate warm enough to accommodate rattlesnakes. They can be encountered on hiking trails of nearby Methodist Mountain, the northernmost peak in the Sangre de Cristo Range. Salida’s all-time high temperature record of 102 degrees was set in July 2019.