City of Greensboro to hold informational meetings on weatherization grant

The city of Greensboro will hold two public meetings to gather public input on how to bring the BetterBuildings energy efficiency program to homes and businesses across the city. The first is scheduled for Monday, June 27 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Eastern Division police substation, located at 1106 Maple St. The second is scheduled for Tuesday, June 28 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Trotter Recreation Center in Hester Park, located at 3906 Betula St.

Council and staff wrangled over implementation of the grant for months, leading to concerns that the $5 million grant from the federal government would get left on the table instead of being spent to retrofit people's homes and help them save money on their energy bills. Earlier this month, council gave final approval of the grant program.

For information about the program from the city, click here. To read a YES! Weekly story about the politics surrounding the program, click here.

Back to the drawing board?

Community organizers who helped the city apply for an application for a federal energy efficiency grant are asking that the funds be redirected to their original purpose — a targeted economically distressed area of east Greensboro.

A draft agreement attached to an item on the agenda for tomorrow’s Greensboro City Council meeting requesting approval for “redesign” of the program has this to say about the eligible area for the grant: “All loans closed through this program must be for qualifying properties located within the city limits of the city of Greensboro.”

Assistant City Manager Denise Turner told me today that the city received approval from the US Department of Energy through verbal conversation and e-mails last November to change the geographic scope of the $5 million grant.

From an e-mail received today from Danielle Byrnett, program manager for the BetterBuildings program at the US Department of Energy:

Greensboro is currently approved to offer the program in east Greensboro, per the application the city submitted originally, and will need to submit a formal request to DOE to expand the geography of the program beyond that area if it wishes to do so. City staff just learned last week that they need to submit a formal request, which DOE has consequently not received.

Turner says, if necessary, she will pull the item from the agenda to ensure that the city has necessary approvals before proceeding.

Residents: Give energy efficiency grant back to east Greensboro

Residents from across the city who attended a mass meeting this afternoon at St. James Presbyterian Church vowed to go to Greensboro City Council on Tuesday to urge them to get a federal energy-efficiency grant back on track and to return to the original intent of designating the funds for an economically distressed swath of east Greensboro.

“We want to simply ask them: Go back and use these funds in accordance with the original intent of the grant, said the Rev. Gregory Headen, pastor of Genesis Baptist Church. “We want them to honor the geographical location which is east Greensboro. We also want them to include the community-based aspect of this grant.”

Council approved the grant last November after a series of delays, but only with the understanding that property owners across the city would be eligible to use the funds.

“They held this grant up hostage unless the people who wrote the grant would allow half of it to be spent in west Greensboro,” said the Rev. Randall Keeney, pastor of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. “They held it up hostage and stole $2.5 million from east Greensboro.”

The council’s handling of the $5 million grant, which was awarded to the city more than a year ago, has become racially volatile considering that the council is also moving toward reopening the White Street Landfill, which is located in an area of the city that is predominantly African American.

The council is scheduled to hear a report from a city consultant on three private companies that are being considered for a contract to operate the landfill and a staff recommendation for a redesign of the energy efficiency grant program during as part of a lengthy agenda on Tuesday that also includes presentation of the budget. Supporters of the energy efficiency grant vowed to also speak out in opposition to the reopening of the landfill. The two groups also share significant overlap with a group of citizens that recently shamed the council into withdrawing a controversial redistricting plan seen as favorable to a conservative council member whose district is located on the west side of town.

Speakers at the meeting today asked audience members to call council members and urge their friends to do the same.

Joyce Johnson with the Beloved Community Center said the idea for pursuing the grant originated in January 2009 around the time of President Obama’s inauguration when the new administration began discussing a stimulus bill.

“Right before Christmas, when everybody else was shopping, we were together in our basement and at the Beloved center a lot of times writing with the city staff this grant that was then seen to be a stellar one,” Johnson said. “In fact, we’d heard that they even wanted us to come to DC because ours was so good; it could really be an example of what communities could do.”

Bob Powell, an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering at NC A&T University, was also part of those early discussions. Johnson said 19 different groups, including minority contractors, were involved with the grant application.

Beth McKee-Huger, executive director of the Greensboro Housing Coalition and part of the coalition that helped write the grant application, recently sent city staff a proposal to contract the east Greensboro portion of the grant to an organization that would manage implementation of the program, including outreach, financial advice to property owners, workforce training and quality assurance.

The program “redesign” (scroll down to page 69 of the current agenda with attachments) recommended for approval by staff describes the eligible area of the grant as the entire city and makes no mention of a targeted area in east Greensboro or the use of community organizations to deliver the program.

Staff’s recommendation does include detailed proposals for leveraging private capital for construction costs. To address stated concerns of council members, the plan would concentrate leveraging with larger, institutional properties so that low-income property owners could receive a larger share of direct funds and reduce the amount of debt required to finance upgrades.

(Wednesday’s cover story in YES! Weekly will be published online in advance on Monday so that it can be publicly available before the council meeting.)

To highlight the history of the grant, organizers performed a two-part skit that showed an elderly grandmother, a pastor and a struggling entrepreneur discussing high energy bills and the inability to hire because the down economy. Wesley Morris, dressed in a black suit and holding a basketball, represented the federal government, issuing a grant that, for a change, could help ordinary, lower-income people rather than large corporations and the wealthy.

The ball was passed to the pastor, to the grandmother, to the entrepreneur and then into the audience, prompting a chant of, “The ball is in our court.”

Notwithstanding the creativity and high spirits permeating the atmosphere, an undercurrent of apprehension was also evident.

“There are some rumors, threats that certain people will not be allowed in city council that they will be arrested on the spot,” said the Rev. Alphonso McGlen, pastor of Bethel AME Church. “The mayor has come out and publicly said that he will not tolerate any hand clapping, any hand waving, and I will be facetious to say, even wiping your nose. And he will construe that as a sign that you have come to disrupt city council meeting. And he will – this is a rumor – order that you be removed, physically if necessary, from city council chambers.

"We will not be intimidated by those tactics," McGlen added. "There’s no legal ground for preventing us from being in attendance and participating in a civil manner at the city council meeting.”

Yesterday, during a forum hosted by the Greensboro Neighborhood Congress at the downtown library, Mayor Bill Knight said, “Any displays of disruption, whether it is clapping, laughing, hissing or waving of hands will not be tolerated. If that occurs, I’ll stop the meeting and I’ll ask that you leave the room.”

The mayor also dismissed any notion that racism is at play in the council’s decision to reopen the landfill.

“The question of racism, I totally disagree,” he said. “It is a question of where things are.”