Thursday, July 11th at 11 AM ET via Zoom
Guest Speakers:
- Kristine Chan-Lizardo, with RMI, has been working to assess Community Benefit Plans nationwide, and will share their preliminary findings, which include a catalog of community benefit examples. These benefit examples are pulled from the CBPs of federal funding awardees and from benefits implemented in the past by utilities, cooperatives, and developers. In the catalog, RMI cross-referenced each benefit example by the DOE and USDA funding criteria they satisfy and the stakeholder priorities that they addressed. References and resources are included as well. In cataloging these real-life community benefits, RMI offers a way to understand what is both possible and meaningful to achieve with the CBPs required to receive BIL/IRA project funding.
- Meagan Niebler, with Fairshake Environmental Legal Services, will share preliminary work towards creating a menu of community benefit options for communities looking to advocate for strong provisions. For community benefits to provide meaningful value and protections for Appalachian communities and workers, they must have strong management and leadership by diverse local stakeholders.
About Community Benefits:
This call was a part of our monthly Appalachian Community Benefit Network Call series, a space for the growing conversation around community benefits in the Appalachian region. These calls are the second Thursday of each month at 11 am ET and include a presentation followed by time for networking, discussing questions and sharing resources around community benefits.
As part of the unprecedented climate and energy infrastructure investments launched by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), some funding awardees are now required to implement Community Benefits Plans (CBPs) as a condition for receiving their grants and loans. In addition, Community Benefit Agreements, Project Labor Agreements, Good Neighbor Agreements remain important tools for communities hoping to ensure that new projects bring value to their communities, land, and workers.
This new policy comes with many challenges and opportunities, not least in that we are still learning what these plans could and should include for our communities.