Kansas City Strikes Out on Big Bid for Sustainability Funds Nearly $200M in Federal Funds Were Sought for 40 Area Projects
Published July 24th, 2024 at 6:00 AM
After months of crafting the Kansas City region’s best ideas to improve sustainability and combat climate change, local officials have just learned that they struck out on a vast pool of potential federal funding.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Monday said “no dice” to 40 proposals cobbled together into a massive regional grant request this spring.
The Kansas City bid for funding totaled more than $197.8 million.
Local government and agencies won’t get a penny.
Tom Jacobs, the chief resiliency officer at the Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) who helped coordinate the Kansas City application, said the loss hurt. But he graciously conceded: “I am thrilled for those who were funded. I am sure they deserved it.”
MARC is a regional council of governments that represents 119 cities and nine counties in Kansas and Missouri.
“We worked so hard on that,” Jacobs said, adding that he has never pursued such a massive grant during his long career in the local government and environmental policy trenches.
“We didn’t leave one stone unturned,” he said. “We were detailed, focused. We tried our very hardest and came up short.”
Sustainability Winners
The EPA this week selected 25 applicants to share in an unprecedented $4.3 billion pot of grants to tackle the climate crisis and juice the nation’s clean energy transition. The money will fund state, local and Tribal projects in 30 states.
The EPA received grant requests from 300 entities that totaled $33 billion – an overwhelming response suggesting a sea change in the priorities of local governments serving grassroots America. Such strong interest shows more communities are looking to rethink the way we power and live our lives to address existential threats to our climate.
The projects will be funded through the Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program, which was created under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. That effort is part of a multi-pronged effort to stoke a languishing post-COVID economy and spur environmental action.
Check the Map
Regional EPA administrator Meg McCollister, in an exclusive interview with Flatland, said that she was thrilled that Nebraska, part of her region, will receive $307 million to fund the grant requests of the state Department of Environment and Energy.
Of the 25 grants announced by the EPA, only seven exceed $200 million. Nebraska landed one of them.
“To be at $307 million – that is a tremendous amount of investment. We are excited that it’s coming to the heartland,” McCollister said. The state’s proposal was “innovative and ambitious,” she said.
“How amazing it is that this large a grant is coming here to the Cornhusker state,” she said.
McCollister declined to discuss or speculate about why both Kansas and Missouri will receive no grants.
Iowa, also in her region, also received no grants.
Both Kansas and Iowa are noted national leaders in the development of wind energy, a leading source of electricity supplanting generation by coal-fired power plants that are long dominant in the Midwest.
Among the 13 states that were awarded grants are Michigan and Pennsylvania, both considered vital swing states in this fall’s presidential election. Also on the list of successful states are Oregon, Montana, Utah, Colorado and Illinois.
Kansas City’s grant proposal included projects designed to reduce area greenhouse gas emissions by 5.5 million metric tons over 25 years. The proposals ranged from home weatherization and energy efficiency programs to solar arrays, electric vehicle charging stations, electric bicycles, commercial composting sites, and planting trees, wildflowers and grasses.
Like the Kansas City area’s request, Nebraska’s grant proposal is a clothesline hung with a wide variety of proposals. As McCollister outlined them, Nebraska will be funding implementation of community driven solar projects, the reduction of air pollution, the advancement of environmental justice on behalf of low-income citizens and an acceleration of the move to cleaner sources of energy.
But at its core, the Nebraska statewide proposal championed by Gov. Jim Pillen was most innovative in zeroing in on making agriculture more sustainable, McCollister said.
Agriculture occupies 80% of the land in McCollister’s EPA Region 7.
“We know we cannot tackle climate without involving farmers and the ag industry,” she said.
“Nebraska’s application – and the reason it was selected – funds measures to increase the adoption of climate smart and precision agriculture and reduction of agricultural waste from livestock,” she said.
Farmers will be encouraged to replace diesel fuel powered water pumps with electricity. Water and wastewater treatment facilities will be expanded, updated and solar powered.
Hope for Future
The regional EPA office referred all questions about the Kansas City grant proposal’s demise to officials in its Washington national headquarters.
In an exclusive interview with the Grid Talk podcast this spring, Zealan Hoover, the EPA administrator Michael S. Regan’s senior advisor, said: “It is unlikely that everyone will be selected so one of the criteria we care about is both diversity of projects and geographic representation…”
Hoover said that part of the grant program, early on, awarded $250 million to 45 states, hundreds of cities and tribes to develop climate plans.
“Just at the state level for 23 of those states, this is the first meaningful emissions reduction planning effort they’ve done since at least 2018, so planning is valuable,” Hoover said.
“The purpose of these planning grants was not to just to tee people up for this funding but to set up cities and states for successes as they are planning their broader decarbonization efforts,” Hoover said.
Jacobs of MARC said that the Kansas City area will be using its emission reduction plans going forward in multiple ways. First up, though, Jacobs said he will be probing EPA and other sources to learn exactly how this region’s grant application stacked up with others and why it missed landing the vitally needed money.
Asked if in retrospect Kansas City area programs should have been rolled up into broader statewide campaigns as occurred in Nebraska, Jacobs responded:
“The state of Missouri submitted a proposal in the $200 million to $500 million range… I don’t know to what degree the governor was involved. Kansas did not consider a statewide application. MARC coordinated with both states during the process.”
In response to Flatland’s request for more information about where Kansas City and surrounding communities can next turn for addressing its energy and environmental goals, EPA national headquarters issued the following statement:
“EPA believes the 25 applications we have selected will achieve ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reductions, bring substantial benefits to low income and disadvantaged communities, and provide a variety of proposed projects that are diverse by geography, economic sectors, and size of government jurisdiction.”
The EPA also tried to help the Kansas City region move on from its disappointment.
“EPA looks forward to continuing to work with the Mid-America Regional Council and the many other applicants… In September, we will hold a Planning Grant Workshop to work with recipients of planning grants on their Comprehensive Climate Action Plans. As part of that workshop, we are planning to host a funding fair – another way we can help planning grant recipients identify other funding opportunities across the government as they work to implement their many excellent ideas.”
Jacobs said all the work to date will not be wasted.
“We built partnerships,” he said. “We built momentum. We still have that. We will continue to work to reduce pollution and build more resilience.”
Google, Meta (formerly Facebook) and other private sector leaders are stepping up their investments in sustainability and prodding other parts of the energy grid, like hidebound utilities, to get more focused on the energy transition.
“A lot of private money is going into this stuff,” Jacobs said.
The open question, though, is whether the federal government will ever again offer billions of dollars of grants to local communities to help address climate change.
Flatland contributor Martin Rosenberg is a Kansas City journalist and host of the Grid Talk podcast on the future of energy.