Guest Lead Post: Picking up the PACE for jobs

Picking up the PACE for jobs
Anne B. Butterfield, September 4, 2011 (Daily Camera)

Labor Day is upon us and we all hope for Congress to resume actual work in Washington when it reconvenes on Tuesday. And their chief work is to help Americans get back to work. So give up your grandstanding and get on it, Congress.

Though President Obama is going to tout a highways and jobs bill, we who want a cleaner world anxiously await Congress' plans for clean energy funding, such as the loan guarantee program that has supported 70,000 new clean energy jobs in the past 2 years while costing the government under $3 billion. Meanwhile China is pounding its clean energy sector with cash and loans, with the intent to dominate the 21st century economically.

Which puts Congress in a bind. On the one hand many members are devout about slashing spending, especially on Obama's favorite energy projects while religiously protecting subsidies for dirty fuels, and on the other hand, unemployment, energy insecurity, the climate, and China's power to price-compete American products, all produce a deafening drumbeat compelling us to invest or die.

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Fortunately, coming up to Labor Day, there's news of a likely rescue to a clean energy and jobs financing tool (and has a strong parentage from Boulder). The PACE lending program is back in play, through a rare bipartisan bill (the PACE Protection Act, HR 2599) introduced refreshingly by two Republicans to prevent federal regulators from interfering with the lending program passed into law in 30 states.

PACE is an elegant mechanism for deploying private monies for efficiency upgrades and renewable energy installation at the local level. It allows municipalities to float bonds and issue loans for upgrades, allowing homeowners to pay back the low-interest loans through their property tax bills, with the balance staying with the property through a sale.

If passed, the bill could prompt hundreds of thousands of construction jobs -- all paid by property owners on projects which simultaneously reduce energy bills.

In July of last year, federal lending authorities, perhaps stung by their inept complicity in the mortgage crisis, aimed to trim sails by finding fault with the popular PACE program on the complaint that the liens are paid first in the event of a default. Even as the program reportedly reduces mortgage default rates.

PACE bill is now being weighed by the House Financial Services committee, with Colorado's own Ed Perlmutter, plus colorful members such as Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, Peter King, Emanuel Cleaver, Maxine Waters, and Barney Frank. The committee can be reviewed at govtrack.us. The members deserve lots of phone calls to be reminded that their job is to create jobs.

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Happily there's even more support coming to PACE, from the courts. Just days ago a federal judge ruled that the Federal Housing Finance Agency probably broke rules when deciding against PACE financing, and posed an injunction ordering the agency to invite public comments on the decision. This bureaucratic blunder will get resolved and the construction sector can heave a small sigh of relief.

On a different note, another gift of labor needs to be recognized in the recent personal sacrifice made by environmentalists who were arrested at the White House for protesting the State Department's aim to approve the completion of a pipeline for tar sands oil from Alberta Canada to refineries in the Gulf. Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post wrote with poignant naivete in support of this as a boon to American oil markets, as if the supply is assured to go to the States. Steve Kretzmann of OilChange however dug around in corporate disclosures to find that the oil will go to the international markets (as befitting the port destination). So there is no excuse not to heed climate expert James Hansen when he says that if the Alberta resource is used as intended, the emissions would be "game over" for the planet. So, a restful Labor Day is due to Coloradans Gina Hardin, Tom Weis and Leslie Weise who ventured to Washington and were arrested among many hundreds, keeping this story in the news throughout the climate-enhanced wreckage of Hurricane Irene.

Hurricane Irene taught us that uber-storms are the new normal, and that means battening down the hatches for the indefinite future, which is just what PACE financing is all about. In his address to the joint session of Congress, the president needs to commend the PACE program as a benefit for this blue green planet that is swept with hurricanes, drought and energy insecurity, with more on the way.