A.G. Gancarski
Going into Wednesday’s meeting in Jacksonville, state Sen. Audrey Gibson and NextGen Energy agreed that they were meeting, but not what they were meeting about.
Gibson’s letter in December, promoting the event, concerned “engaging Faith Leaders to help with planning power for communities, with an eye towards 50 percent clean carbon-free energy by 2030.”
“Engaging faith and community leaders early is key to ensuring no one is left behind as this plan moves forward across the nation. Your input is needed to develop a total plan for our community” including “jobs created that raise income levels of families of color.”
Throughout her letter, Gibson’s remarks were tailored to energy-related concerns of African-Americans, including the impact of energy costs and the increased chance of African-Americans to live within 30 miles of a coal plant, which has negative health impacts.
The release from NextGen, which went out Tuesday, described the continental breakfast as “interfaith leaders … stepping up to demand that elected officials take bold steps to combat climate change now.”
The language in NextGen’s release, which had a California phone number attached to it, was a world apart from that of Senator Gibson, discussing climate change instead of communities of color. And she told POLITICO that she was “really ticked” by NextGen’s framing of the meeting.
With that prologue, a midweek meeting on “climate change” got a certain type of meta-publicity that may not have been anticipated.
When reporters arrived at Gibson’s office downtown, a staff member said that the event was Gibson’s show. And indeed, it was. Faith leaders and politicians, including Jacksonville City Councilman Garrett Dennis and state Rep. Mia Jones, were at the event at the Senator’s behest.
The event managed to encompass NextGen’s agenda of powering America with more than 50 percent clean energy with Senator Gibson’s desire to have a “policy meeting” about extending that to “communities of color” so they “don’t get left behind.”
Representative Jones noted that “clean energy is often not spoken of in our community.” She cited a project that she was involved in the Sherwood Forest area bringing solar water heaters into older homes.
To make other initiatives such as that viable, Jones said, “we have to be able to speak to our communities and bring that information.”
Dennis spoke of the need to bring “information for clean energy” to districts like his, adding that the “national push is something that is lost on the local level.”
This is especially true in African-American communities, where the children are most vulnerable, and so many homes aren’t up to code. NextGen believes that a push in the direction of clean, sustainable energy can help to increase personal income in these areas, and can create jobs within the community, via retrofitting homes to include solar panels.
Of course, that approach would require buy-in from ownership, which the Rev. Lee Harris said was not a given.
“One of the challenges with communities of color,” said Harris, is that often they are not “homeowners,” but “transients, tenants, consumers of everything.”
He described the dynamics between landlords and tenants as a “predatory situation,” in which up to two-thirds of income goes to “just survive.”
The paradox: “The ones who need it the most have the least access,” Lee said of those who could benefit from the cost savings brought forth by energy efficiency.
Councilman Dennis spoke to economic reality also, regarding desired installations of energy efficiencies, such as better water heaters and windows.
“As a contractor,” Dennis said, “I’m not going to put it in for free.”
Senator Gibson asserted that government can “jump-start” these processes, incentivizing septic tank removal, and defraying connection costs to city sewers.
Indeed, some help in identifying issues exists already, such as JEA’s energy audits. However, proposed efficiencies, such as solar panels, aren’t much use in houses on the Eastside and in Newtown, many of them a century old, where the roofs won’t take solar panels.
The action steps desired by NextGen include signing on to a letter to the editor in support, or writing op-eds to get stories planted in media. Gibson, meanwhile, suggested that church bulletins and email blasts include similar advocacy for clean energy solutions.
In the end, the event went well enough. Gibson addressed the “confusion” documented in the POLITICO piece from Tuesday in conversation with FloridaPolitics.com, saying that her focus was to “make sure that anything with her name attached” had to do with a “policy meeting” focused particularly on “communities of color … so that people could receive information” they can use.
However, tangible policy outcomes, at least on the municipal level in Jacksonville, may be slow in coming, Councilman Dennis said.
Saying that legislators “can’t just have a knee-jerk reaction,” and that they “have to look at the entire effect” of these proposals, Dennis said that he’s “all for trying to figure out how to make homes more energy efficient, but government can’t do it all.”
