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hi everyone welcome to our webinar today the topic for today's webinar is closing the energy and transportation affordability gap for connecticut's low and moderate income households this webinar is being presented by the clean energy states alliance also known as sisa and before we pass it over to our excellent group of speakers today i'd like to go over a few quick webinar logistics all of our attendees for this webinar are in listen only mode you have a couple of options to join the audio portion of the webinar you can connect using your computer mic and speakers or you can call in using a telephone if you'd like to minimize the webinar console so that you can view the presentation full screen you can click on the orange arrow that you see circled here and you can also click on that to expand the webinar console and one of the things that you might like to do on your webinar console is to submit your questions and your comments you can type those into the questions panel and hit send we encourage you to type your questions and comments and throughout the webinar we'll be saving some time following the presentations for a q a with the audience and we want to get to as many questions as we can so please please do submit those a final note this webinar is being recorded we will have the webinar recording and slides posted on our website probably within 24-48 hours and we'll send those to you via email and we'll also post them on sisa's website at csaid.org backslash webinars that is also a good url to know because it is where we post info about our upcoming and archived webinars so with that i'd like to now post it turn it over to our host for today's webinar abby ramanan abby is a project director here at the clean energy states alliance and she is going to get us started over to you abby thanks sam um welcome everyone thanks so much for joining us today for this webinar um so a bit of background the clean energy states alliance is a organization primarily made up of um state energy offices you can see their logos um all listed here um and this particular webinar is part of our state energy strategies program which is funded through a grant from the um doe uh office of solar technologies um so under the scs project cesa is working with five states um including connecticut minnesota new mexico oregon and rhode island and the district of columbia to develop and implement low and moderate income solar strategies um this project is winding down in 2020 and we hope to be able to share a lot more webinars reports and lessons learned from this project um through the next year so i'd like to introduce our speakers for today um we have emily basham who is the manager of partnership development at the connecticut green bank um she works across sectors in the organization to develop mean partnership program opportunities to grow clean energy deployment she primarily manages the community campaigns for the solar for all program to increase lmi solar energy efficiency adoption and the solar municipal assistance program which is supporting connecticut's towns and cities um gannon long is the director of policy and public affairs for operation fuel which is a statewide organization offering energy and water utility assistance to lmi families in connecticut and prior to that she was the assistant coordinator at transport hartford which is a program at the center for latino progress that advocates for multimodal transportation safety and access in the region justine sears is a consultant with vic who joined the eic in 2012 she leads research and implementation projects related to clean transportation energy programs her work focuses on equity affordability and bring clean energy technologies to element populations and then jennifer wallace broder is a manager at vic's consulting division and she oversees their transportation electrification work she sets a strategic direction for vic's clean transportation programs and helps lead the team's efforts to reduce the environmental and economic impacts of energy use in the transportation sector and now i will hand it over to emily to introduce um a bit of information about the connecticut green bank and vic and operation fuel thanks abby can you hear me all right yep hi everyone i'm emily basham i'm a manager of partnership development on the connecticut green bank welcome to the webinar we're so glad to have all of you this afternoon and we're very excited to share this study mapping household energy and transportation affordability in connecticut which was produced for the connecticut green bank by veic with guidance from operation fuel and justine from veic will present the findings of the study here shortly and gannon long from operation fuel will describe you know how these findings are impacting low and moderate income families here in the state but before we dive in i just wanted to provide a little bit of context the connecticut green bank is a quasi public state agency and we provide financing for clean energy projects and more recently you know we've been having an increasing focus on delivering these clean energy benefits to the state's vulnerable communities and operation fuels mission is really to ensure that equitable energy access to energy occurs for all by providing year-round energy and utility assistance so this topic today is is really close to both of our missions in 2017 operation fuel released the home energy affordability gap study which really helped us here in connecticut understand how energy costs really burden lmi families and so the connecticut green bank wanted to build on this critical research and expand the study to look at also not just energy but transportation the eic also did a supplemental analysis of um the connecticut green bank's low and moderate income incentive program including our solar for all programs so we'll touch on that and you know really wanted to understand how that could be a solution um for energy burden and that analysis was funded by one of our doe grants and in coordination with cisa so the goal of the study is really to understand how these costs are are burdening our residents by how much and take a cursory look at what programs in our state exist to address these costs um with you know growing income inequality in connecticut or the third highest in the nation and high energy costs energy affordability is really a pressing issue we're hopeful that this report is informative to our fellow connecticut stakeholders and shaping or reshaping programs and you know this is also a familiar narrative to outside of our state so we welcome national listeners to this um you know to think about what is similar in in our findings here in connecticut um as as your state as well um so with that i'll turn it over to justine to really dig into the study hi everyone this is justine all right so let's see i can advance this so as emily mentioned um so this slide is not if you wiggle your mouse over that there you go just click on your slides do it you got it okay and you've got to click on the first slide to advance it and after that it will there you go you got it there okay um yeah okay that's fine so um yep so this is justine um i work at veic we're a non-profit based in vermont we have offices in ohio and dc these are my colleagues jennifer is on the line today leslie was not able to join us but we worked on this study together the bulk of the work that veic does is implementation work we implement efficiency and renewable programs um but we also have a consulting division and that's where jen and i do our work and that work is can be analysis policy recommendations and the hope a lot of times is that it can lead to it can kind of feed into and further our implementation work so here in connecticut we were looking at burden and affordability gap so those are the two metrics that i'll be talking about today are burden i think that's probably familiar to most people that's spending expressed as a percentage of income so you can have an energy burden a housing burden a child care burden and we also looked at affordability gap and that was a metric that was new to me and it really came out of the previous work that operation fuel had done and that's the difference between an affordable level of spending and actual spending levels so it's not the total amount spent it's just that gap between what's considered affordable and the amount that's actually being spent and it's a really tangible metric i think because it's expressed in dollar values and it can kind of help policymakers i think kind of wrap their arms around a problem instead of it just seeming this kind of amorphous oh my gosh energy levels are unaffordable oh actually they're you know we can once we have a sense of the gap that we're dealing with i think we can start to come up with really targeted solutions so as emily mentioned this study came out of a study that was done in 2017 focusing on low-income households in connecticut looking at building energy so heating and electricity and um that study estimated about a 450 million dollar affordability gap for energy and so we were interested in revisiting that and updating for 2020 but we also we included transportation costs in that for a few reasons it's the second highest household household expense for most households there are few programs that exist currently to assist the same way that we offer fuel assistance and it's also the number one contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in connecticut the transportation sector is and from in my opinion i really think of energy affordability as not so much i mean part of it is helping people meet their their needs each month so that you know basic needs are met but it's also i also think of it as building wealth so and allowing families to save so the scope of this study we had three spending categories and we were looking at them we were interested in geographic patterns across the state so we looked at building energy transportation comprehensively so energy but also other spending on transportation housing which was not a thrust of the study but we included as an expense and we used the two metrics i mentioned earlier burden and affordability gap so our sorry that map is a little fuzzy but our unit of study our geographic unit with census tract and that's a unit that is used by the u.s census as they track populations and other demographics so each census tract has a few thousand people in it and there's about 830 census tracts across connecticut so it's um i think a pretty fine granular unit of analysis um and these are this is just to give you a sense of the data sources that we used for building energy so for heating and electricity we got estimates of spending through the lead tool there's a tool developed by doe and it provides estimates of spending for different income levels at a variety of geographies so we took their estimates of spending on heating and electricity for each census tract in the state for transportation we use the housing and transportation affordability index which is a very similar tool for housing and transportation it's maintained by the center for neighborhood technology which is a non-profit base in chicago and through that tool in a very similar fashion so for each census tract in the state we could get estimates of spending on transportation and housing and then household income came from the american community survey which is an annual survey conducted by the u.s census and that kind of income provides the denominator to all of our equations with that's what we're grounding our estimates of burden and affordability gap in so these are the affordability thresholds that we used and i'm not trying to so we're going to be in the weeds a little bit here and then hopefully that will make the results um clear and compelling if we can just make it through all of these different thresholds and metrics so our affordability thresholds were based in the literature as as much as they could be so for each spending category we have a threshold so for building energy that includes household heating and electricity and the affordability threshold that we used was six percent so you shouldn't be spending more than six percent to heat and cool your home on a monthly basis and that six percent threshold actually came out of the study that operation fuel did in 2017 um and has since been adopted pretty widely within the industry i know um ac tripoli uses it and i sort of uses it um or the the firm i guess that did the study for operation fuel really kind of created that six percent threshold um our transportation threshold um so within the spending category of transportation we it's really a comprehensive um cost category we looked not just at transportation energy or vehicle fuel but transit costs and all the costs associated with owning a vehicle so purchase or lease insurance and maintenance and granted those are highly highly variable um but we just we took the estimates that were available through the h t index and also based on that index we used an affordability threshold of 15 of household income for housing we used 30 that's a widely used metric and it's worth noting that's total shelter cost so that is all of the costs associated with your housing including heating your home so it includes that six percent of building energy um insurance taxes any all of your costs are included in that 30 percent um and then these i think yeah so the this 15 and that 30 percent add up to a 45 affordability threshold of energy transportation and housing so within those three buckets of spending that includes your total shelter costs and your total transportation costs you shouldn't be spending more than 45 of your income um in order to fall within an affordable threshold um or affordable level of spending so and i think there's a little bit so that the h t index where we pulled these thresholds there's a little bit of play here i think the idea being that when you're if your housing costs tend to be high maybe if you live in a a dense urban area your housing cost might be high but your transportation costs should be lower so you can still kind of fall within an affordable threshold there's a little bit of play between that 30 and 15 so in our affordability analysis we used that 45 total so that's our those are methods i'll move into results um for building energy we estimated on average folks are spending about three thousand dollars per year that equated to about a four percent building energy burden so within the realm of affordable we saw a lot more variability in spending on electricity than heating i think that's because electricity actually is a pretty common source of heat in connecticut and much greater variability among low income households so this is a look at building energy burden by income so this is income banned relative to the statewide median um i don't think it's a huge surprise but as income goes up burden goes down um so and this dotted line is that six percent affordable threshold so we see right around sixty to eighty percent of statewide median income spending becomes affordable uh we did find that among low-income households the energy burden was six to seven times higher than the statewide average so this is a map of those same results so this is on these maps each each little piece here is a census tract and this is a map of building energy burden by census tract so these blue areas are census tracts where the the energy burden is well below that affordability threshold so less than three percent less than half of what's considered affordable the blue areas are kind of or the the yellow areas are kind of right in the middle three to six percent and it's these red areas that on average households in those tracks are experiencing a high energy burden so six to ten percent or over ten percent and we see clusters of those in the states urban areas so this is hartford this is new haven this is bridgeport and this over here is affordability gap so very similar map it just doesn't call out those blue areas um but you still you see the same clusters and it puts a dollar amount on those burdens so these in these orange clusters people are facing affordability gaps these are annual gaps of five hundr d dollars and then it goes up to five a thousand and over a thousand these bright red tracks so those are tracks where most households are facing unaffordable energy bills in excess of a thousand dollars and i think we have a close-up here so this is hartford county and i think if you if you look on on this slide most of the county is blue or yellow but when you look at downtown hartford you have a cluster and it's the most densely populated area of the state of we estimate to be about 33 000 households that are highly burdened so those are households where the burden is up to 10 over 10 annually we also looked at building energy affordability by with statewide by income band and this allowed us to estimate an aggregate statewide affordability gap for building energy and very similar results to the previous study we estimated about 444 million dollars over what affordable spending levels would be and that was present in income bands below 60 of the statewide median income and it works out to be about a thousand dollars per household so in excess of an affordable level of spending so for transportation these are the spending categories that we considered vehicle ownership so vehicle ownership alone made up about 15 of a household's spending on an annual basis so they so they've already hit the affordable affordability threshold just in owning a vehicle fuel was similar to building energy is about four percent of spending or of of income transit was less than one percent and so we that adds up to about a 20 transportation burden on average which is in excess of the 15 affordability threshold so the map is not pretty um very different from the building energy map so this is burden on the left and we see large swaths of the state are deemed unaffordable so these are census tracts where most households are facing unaffordable levels of transportation spending um this area in the southeastern part of the state is can so burden was consistently below 10 we've got a big cluster of blue there but i think what's so different about the transportation map from building energy is just how widespread unaffordability is so it's in rural areas we see those same clusters in urban areas so that's hartford and new haven so in these areas transportation burden is in excess of 20 even 25 percent and i think what's important to note is that the data that we use doesn't so much it's not so much a reflection of how much people are spending more than so much as it's about what they would need to spend to achieve an acceptable level of mobility so folks in hartford may not be spending 25 percent of their income on transportation but they also might not be able to get where they need to go so that acceptable level of mobility includes being able to get to work being able to get to the grocery store get to the doctor and then here on the affordability gap so similar map it just puts a dollar value on those burdens so spending levels in excess of twenty five hundred dollars of what would be considered affordable and then up to five excess of five thousand dollars and you see these clusters of orange and red in there in the urban areas but also rural areas suburban areas really pervasive across the state we looked at transportation spending um or by so this is statewide by um i guess this is by census tract by ami band so this is um increasing incomes so increasing ami area median income band and then this is the estimated affordability gap um and i think what was most striking about this to me was how um just how pervasive the affordability gap was so in households so in census tracts that are earning sixty percent where the the median income is sixty percent less than the area median income we estimate an affordability gap about five thousand dollars annually and that gap persists into census tracts earning 100 of area median income and it's not until you're well above that to 120 of ami that that affordability gap goes away um so that i think is a striking result that even beyond households that we traditionally think of as low or moderate income affordability is an issue when it comes to transportation so this is our this is a combined map of energy transportation and housing but using those the thresholds that i mentioned earlier in the presentation and again so we see that even households above traditional low income thresholds are struggling with the combined affordability of building energy transportation and housing so in this on this map we see this a similar pattern to transportation a little less acute i think but clusters of bright red census tracts in hartford in new haven and then rural areas that are also facing unaffordable levels of spending this is the breakdown of spending this is statewide just on average and it looks similar to what you would expect what i would expect um so shelter costs make up the most um this is shell this dark blue is housing and the light blue is building energy and then this dark red is transportation with the light red being fuel or gasoline and then a transit is such a small sliver at 100 you can't you can't quite see it but clearly one way to improve affordability for households in connecticut would be to reduce their transportation costs if we could get that well below 20 i think we could make a lot of progress so that's 35 000 in total and then this is another figure that's combining costs on transportation building energy and housing so those the costs are the blue bars and this is spending and then on the x-axis we have income band and then the green bar is remaining income and there's a there's a lot going on in this figure but it's worth taking the time to understand it it's telling a number of compelling stories i think so we see income so first i guess we could start with spending on transportation energy and housing it increases a little bit over as income increases but we see remaining income increases dramatically as incomes go up and total burden so this is total burden so that would be measured relative to the 45 affordability threshold starts at 68 for households running at sixty percent less than sixty percent ami and it really doesn't hit affordable levels until about eighty to one hundred percent ami um and this is just a we have one slide on the supplemental analysis we did looking at the green bank solar program they have a low and moderate income solar program which we reviewed and estimated annual savings and so here we have savings on the y-axis the blue bars are savings that are attributed to solar and then the orange bars are savings attributed to efficiency upgrades so retrofits or deep efficiency measures and the solar for all program we estimated based on the program data provided by the green bank that average annual savings were about thirteen hundred dollars for those households which is enough to close the affordability gap even for low and even for the lowest income households so we estimated that gap to be about a thousand dollars per household and these annual savings are above that which i thought was good news so in conclusion we saw energy burden highest among low-income households that wasn't a surprise but six to seven times higher i thought was that was a surprise to me um we saw high-energy building energy burdens clustered in urban areas but the combined combining efficiency and solar programs can essentially close that building effort building energy affordability gap for many low and moderate income households we saw high transportation costs across the state and reducing those costs is crucial to preserving affordability certainly the biggest driver of those high transportation costs was reliance on a personal vehicle there was i don't think there was a single census tract in the state that was deemed there was no place where you could live and have an adequate level of mobility without owning a personal vehicle and that that was what was driving the high transportation cost that we saw i'm going to hand it over to emily now i think she's going to take policy and program recommendations thanks justine so the there are a few policy recommendations in this study we've got a range of programs that exist here in connecticut to help um households really chip away at their energy burden either you know direct fuel assistance weatherization solar incentives and encourage folks to look at the study to see all of those programs tabled out in their associated savings but at current funding levels existing programs really can't bridge the gap for all households that need assistance so a good place to start is you know how do we expand these programs or how do we better layer these programs to help close that gap as justine mentioned solar for all program um closes the gap for many households you know how can we serve more households or how can we expand solar and energy efficiency services to renters um you know connecticut we're just about to kick off our shared clean energy facilities program um which is our community solar program to help expand um clean energy benefits to renters um it's a 25 megawatt a year program so it will help a lot of our households but um we've got a lot more remaining that we need to help um and we saw really clear areas to target it's all clusters in urban areas that are really hot spots of burden so we really need more programming and assistance in these areas the next largest justine there we go thanks for transportation it's a really different picture the gap is really broad so it's present in rural areas and urban areas it's spanning income ban so really a sweep of solutions is needed there the report offers a few considerations generous income eligible ev programs there's some other states that are noted for us to keep an eye on california and new york income eligible electric bikes could really be part of the solution there's you know no one transportation solution that will work for every household um as just you mentioned the the affordability issues for transportation are really really variable but e-bikes will you know always be cheaper to own and maintain than a vehicle so that's maybe one option and they're financially more sustainable in a lot of ways expanding transit is obvious um we need to kind of think beyond the 40-foot buses to micro transit options there's really a lot of healthy ideas here in connecticut that we can piece together to help chip away at the transportation cost which is which is kind of a one of the larger findings in this report is helping to kind of shed light on on those numbers and and help encourage the state to move in these directions so those are that's the overview of the the program and policy recommendations and i'm going to turn it over to gannon to kind of talk about the bigger picture all right thank you so much uh can everybody hear me just take that take your silence's information thank you um first thank you so much to abby samantha and sisa for organizing this event for us and thank you all to the guests for joining and being here today and i also want to thank emily and the green bank and beic justine your presentation was great um just really appreciate your partnership on this work so hey everybody my name is gannon long i'm the policy and public affairs director for operation fuel in hartford we're a statewide organization providing energy assistance to low and moderate income residents of connecticut and prior to this position i was with transport hartford at the center for latino progress i'm also getting my mba at uconn so why is operation fuel primarily an energy affordability organization focusing on the transportation burden the short answer is that transportation costs both explicit and implicit impact our clients and folks like them around the state so transportation costs can be very highly variable there are also a larger percentage of household budget and so that has a big impact on the cost of living for our clients and other low and moderate income or lmi families in our state transportation is also a systemic barrier that keeps a lot of connecticut residents from accessing necessary services and while there are various energy assistance programs including federal lie heap funds operation fuel there's very similar little similar support uh for for transportation despite the larger costs wealth inequality you all may know in connecticut is higher than just about in any other state and in our four largest cities more than 25 percent of households don't own a car at all so transportation burden and opportunity cost is compounded by the persistent financial stress that low-income residents of our state experience so when i say lmi or low and moderate income i want to acknowledge the diversity of communities that we're discussing and we should be thinking broadly about people who might be living in rural suburban or urban environments maybe white black brown multi-racial differently abled earners of fixed income like social security or earners of variable incomes like a minimum wage job with inconsistent hours our clients are often older couples they're single parents and this year we've gotten a lot of requests for the from first-time applicants who have never needed or saw our help before um so we we understand that to indicate that what justine has presented in the study around mapping these burdens is likely much more exaggerated now under under covet than it was before for the most vulnerable residents so operation fuel is concerned about transportation costs in terms of dollars and cents in terms of public health environmental outcomes that are related to pollution in uh and low-income communities and communities of color and also in terms of opportunity cost medical appointments access to aid job opportunities educational just going to school social and cultural experiences so forth all depend on access to reliable transportation and in our state the wealth disparities among residents of the same and neighboring towns some of the greatest in the country mean that marginalized people lose out because they can't get farther than a few miles away so during the pandemic electricity use and rates in connecticut have increased and they're about to go up again in january i'm sure everybody's thrilled to learn record numbers of residents have applied for unemployment in our state over a million unemployment claims in a state of three and a half million people public transportation options have been cut back throughout the pandemic as well so the study again doesn't cover 2020 data but it describes a state that is suffering even worse now under the under covet and one of the main takeaways from this report that that we took is the combined spending burden is unaffordable throughout the state and we noted the high affordability gaps clustered in new haven bridgeport and waterbury in some areas this gap exceeds 12 000 a year or 68 of a household income and of course many households don't actually spend that they just fall behind on bills rent uh electricity you know utility bills etc and this increases folks housing security it cuts off their opportunities to save or acquire wealth we also know that the transportation burden is high throughout the state and really throughout income levels and one of the big challenges that's driving that so to speak is that without a private vehicle a resident of connecticut your mobility is quite limited so requiring that folks own a car so that they can get to school work and doctor's appointments reduces net income it erodes economic mobility and our state needs transportation systems that don't shift the cost burden to the lowest income residents and that provide clean and reliable options for everyone we saw from justine's presentation that the main drivers in in a transportation burden in rural areas are centered around the cost of private vehicle ownership and the maintenance costs that go up with vehicle miles traveled and in urban areas they're mostly derived around lower incomes that come from decades of policy designed to segregate and disenfranchise poor people city dwellers are also likely to experience unaffordable energy and housing costs with decades of under investment in older energy and efficient housing stock we understand that all of these burdens are exa gerated by high unemployment and the kovid pandemic so veic's research points out why it's so important to reduce eliminate perhaps our reliance on private vehicles i said eliminate our reliance on private vehicles not not necessarily to eliminate private vehicles but this shift is necessary for environmental health economic and of course equity reasons without intentional intervention inequality inevitably reproduces our state responded to covid on a dime it is time for us to confront inequality racism and climate change with that same existential urgency thank you to our partners at veic the green bank and sisa we're grateful for the chance to present to you today especially thank you to all of you for being here and listening we're really looking forward to hearing your questions and continuing this conversation thank you okay great thank you so much ganon emily and justine um we'll now be um opening up the question portion of the webinar so please if you haven't submitted your questions yet feel free to put them in the chat box um and we'll try to get to as many as we can um so to start off with um you know again and you mentioned how covet has impacted um exacerbated these problems for households but it's also obviously has hit states hard as well so a lot of states are dealing with being resource constrained um you know something that for states to consider when considering assistance programs you know is is what is the most impactful um so for example with considering the average cost of say the solar for all program versus giving direct assistance for paying energy bills you know how how should students be prioritizing those two approaches and i i would uh i'll i'll leave emily to get into the details on those um i think they're both they're different approaches right so one is a little bit more of a longer term and one is a little bit shorter term i think one of the challenges that you have in a state that has tremendous wealth inequality is that a lot of the time the folks who are just making those types of decisions have really not no direct experience with what it's like to be you know have lost your job in march have been five thousand dollars behind on rent you know your utilities are at risk of getting shut off unless you you know follow a series of steps of that can be very scary you know calling your utility company asking for help applying through a pretty extensive application process uh either through the state or through other agencies like operation fuel um so i guess i kind of i'm viewing what you're asking as what's you know meeting someone's immediate basic needs and i think that comes from my perspective that really comes before anything um unfortunately i don't think that that is that we are taking enough of those steps in connecticut to do that and i think if you um you can look to the news to read about that today in the connecticut mirror there's you know we're talking about the eviction crisis that is now underway because people are thousands of dollars behind on rent um you know there's a there's there's a lot of examples of how that kind of works out so um i guess depending on the situation you know so if you're we've also seen an incredible amount of generosity that that our supporters and other folks around around the world i'm sure have contributed to just making sure that their neighbors are okay in whatever way maybe it's mutual aid maybe it's contributing to a food bank maybe it's volunteering maybe it's uh contributing to operation fuel so so that's also really encouraging to see um but i for me i think basic needs really is important and and as you're as the better that you're able to address that uh that that helps you address the longer term challenges as well um but i think i think kind of understanding the stark reality that people are dealing with is really important in this climate especially considering how comfortable some of us are it makes it harder to believe that other folks are actually incredibly uncomfortable right now thanksgiving i'll also just add onside if i could um i i agree i think there's a chart in the presentation that shows that all of these um affordability gaps can really compound to show um a really stark picture for some people but we can see a gap for all income bands so you know when we have compounded um affordability gaps that is leaving people with opportunity you know cost um they're not able to have the same quality of life as others so um you know as ganon mentioned that can mean not paying bills and going into debt going into um you know utility bill or rears so there there is you know crisis points that need to be addressed with more urgency um but all of us across the state need to be um helping to address the challenges that we have acros you know across the state across income bands and those are those are going to need kind of a patchwork of programs people who are um you know ready to go solar um you know may not be the people who are walking into operation fuel looking for um you know energy assistance that may not be a conversation they're ready to have so we know we've got to have a lot of different tools in our tool belt um to start addressing all of the gaps that we see now that that um that makes a lot of sense and i think this is something that has been touched on with this question and as well as through the presentation but you know what is the role of debt in all of these burdens and how you know how should states be considering targeting um household debt from you know going into years with utility payments or with car payments or you know um heating and cooling um you know how can those be targeted in conjunction with assistance programs yeah i mean that has been a big point of focus for the connecticut public utilities regulatory authority over this past year and that's in part because we have had strict shutoff protections for residents for a long time unfortunately sometimes legislation like that comes about because somebody almost loses their life and you realize that all they needed was electricity and and legislation was passed to protect people after that happened um but we have those protections and yet there were tens of thousands of people in connecticut and it actually doubled within four years of who were getting shut off for their utility bills uh being over being overdue so it has been a problem that has accumulated for a long time and i think when you're you know since covid we've had uh we've had so there's a variety of payment plans people can get into you know operation fuel can help with some of them the state data helps with some of them some of them you know sometimes they can be an entry point to discussion okay are you is your household efficient you know do you have do you need an energy audit do you have weatherization are those uh you know how are you using water filters that you know conserve water etc um so there's those are things that you know we have not connected so far and and i give pura our regulators a lot of credit for really laying out what's actually happening and now it's a time for all the stakeholders to come together including the utility companies and figuring out how to make that work for people because what happens is people's bills get really behind and then because of that the the companies come to the regulators and say okay we have to increase prices because you know we're losing money on these folks and it's a perpetuating cycle because the more that the rates go up of course the more people can't pay their bills and get behind and during the more you know we've had a moratorium protecting people from shutoffs uh but at the same time your bill is we haven't connected that to how are we really making sure that anyone who has this moratorium is effectively being reached with you know assistance energy efficiency information whatever else that we can do to to bring down their their cost burden so i'm talking specifically around the energy uh burden situation because that's where i'm focused right now with operation fuel um there's obviously you know housing and transportation also really really important um and i think for transportation a lot of the time it's not that necessarily you're behind i suppose people could be behind on their cars but then they just get repossessed right but the real transportation cost is the opportunity cost it's it's not that you're it's spending too much to get somewhere that you're not going and what does that mean for your life because you can't get to that job you can't get to that school yeah there's something that gannon said earlier that i think is worth um just reiterating that we see with our regulator and also our utilities in our um scaf or community solar program here really prioritizing those benefits for those who need it most and they're interpreting that um as uh our lower income folks or folks that are repeatedly participating in energy assistance programs and they're really using those types you know we're seeing that baked into policy we're seeing that baked in a program design that we need to start addressing folks that have arrears or are constantly needing assistance to help bring those benefits back around of clean energy and that's really important to help chip away at the debt that they're accumulating because we have expensive electricity costs but the but the another side of the coin is that in connecticut we have such old housing stock that we're not addressing the home that also has really terrible weatherization um so we've got to continue to deepen the programs that weatherize homes so that those bills aren't high to begin with so we've really got to think about how can we stitch these programs together how can we layer them together to do the deeper energy efficiency work um in the home network for our you know small multi-family for our renters a lot of you know programs fit neatly for homeowners they have the ability to make a decision about what technologies can be introduced in their home and there's programs that help them pay for that but um we're still leaving some segments behind so there's a lot of work to do no definitely um and so kind of related to all of that um for the study did you all look at sort of drivers of wealth and income inequality for example racist housing policy through redlining or other sorts of intersectional issues and how did that impact the affordability gaps in these communities i can answer that no we did not look at race we just looked at income and location um and i think that i we were talking about this um i think last week so the the scope of work for this study was finalized in like december 2019 january 2020 and then 2020 happened and like imploded so the study doesn't talk about co-fed it doesn't mention structural racism and those are just glaring glaring um omissions i think that are worth revisiting and um yeah so that um not that structural racism wasn't an issue before 2020 but it's certainly a part of every conversation now and and it should be and i i have i've thought about it a bit i don't the data source that we used i don't think has um i don't think it includes race as a variable so i think we would have to get at it in a different way but it's definitely on our radar to revisit that that's great um and so getting into um the transportation burden specifically you know i i think you got to this a little bit transportation affordability is definitely a harder variable to measure um for example for folks that are living in areas with limited public transit but who can't afford to buy a personal vehicle they might be spending money on rideshare apps like uber or lyft um and that's obviously much more difficult to get access to that sort of data um so you know one how can states kind of better understand and sort of typify those needs and then how can programs be structured to really get at folks like that i know you mentioned things like um you know rebates for ev vehicles but obviously for low-income households who may not be in a position to purchase a vehicle in the first place even with you know state assistance that probably isn't going to cut it and you know even with eb bikes i'm sure in connecticut it's not great whether to be riding a bike all year round um definitely isn't in maine where i am so you know what are other ways that states can kind of can structure programs to to meet those needs as well yeah i mean the the the answer that comes to the top of my mind is not a flashy answer that anybody ever wants but it's access to transit it's getting it's offering people options that does not involve getting in a car that they own i think yeah rideshare was not that's generally proprietary data it's very hard to come by um but it so it was not it was not included in this analysis there's a little bit of it out there i think it's you know it's worth adding as a discussion um but and it's true and i think what's tricky about transportation is there is not one solution that's going to work right and once you get into the nuance um it gets a you start to lose people a little bit but clearly different areas need different solutions there's not one that's going to work for every household everywhere and that's okay as long as there are lots of options and they're available to everyone then you have a more equitable system so maybe in rural areas it's a low-income electric vehicle program maybe in in urban areas the focus is on transit making sure you have weekend service late night service um and yes absolutely we have snow on the ground here in vermont my e-bike would not be very helpful today but the truth is it's helpful like eight months out of the year which is a lot of months and i think is worth thinking about it's way cheaper than than owning a car i don't i don't know that we want every household in connecticut to have their own personal vehicle i don't think that's a goal anyone is working towards so we need to get at it another way yeah i would just kind of echo the question that i'd be very interested to see more information about how you know the ride sharing network is supporting different communities and there's an argument to be made about the you know the greenhouse gas emissions from from having that be kind of a band-aid solution to people's transportation needs than actually having comprehensive transit um i'd be very interested to see that i think we need a really radical rethinking of transportation um we have invested really regressively uh the money of everyone including low-income communities in structures like highways that have been really designed to serve higher income communities and not just like in a zero subway like in a really like low-income communities have been polluted uh disrupted uh houses raised in order to support those those structures that just reproduce inequality with everything they do um they're bad for greenhouse gases they're bad for the environment and they're bad for neighborhoods and so i think we need a completely different way of thinking about it and we need to be thinking about how are we spending resources that that poor people pay into to subsidize services for richer people and that highways you know uh whether you put a an electric vehicle on them a hybrid vehicle on them whatever else it's the highway itself is actually the structure that's producing the inequities and um and and hartford is a great example of that there are many other cities across the country that also are uh kind of stemming back to your redlining question from before abby um so that's i mean it's not an easy answer like justine i didn't have a quick one for that but um but that's really important and i guess another thing that i see really close up hand i think this is definitely the case with transportation in connecticut where you look at we have one state department of transportation we have 12 different transit agencies across the state literally hartford new haven and middletown each have their own different transit agency that runs a different system i mean our state compared to most would be the size of a county uh so that's like a really and if it's a sort of glaring inefficiency in a lot of ways um and an energy is similar a similar situation meets peopl when they seek assistance or when they seek energy you know advice there's one website for efficiency stuff there's a different website for weatherization there's one place you go to to get you know assistance there's another one that you go to to get uh you know to get weatherization or to get other services um has you know sometimes the the home has too many health hazards in it that it can't you can't even receive those services even though as a ratepayer you're paying into the fund that supports them so there's a lot of ways that i think just broadly states can look at how do we develop a no wrong door where if somebody applies for health care or for food benefits they're automatically enrolled in energy benefits too or they automatically get also a transportation voucher or a free bus pass or whatever that might be um how do we eliminate all of that because a lot of it is just administrative bureaucracy and that limits our efficiency and at a limit it limits how much we actually have to spend because we're not spending our resources wisely so i think those things are really important and and the more that you're able to bring folks to the table that experience the problems that you're trying to address the better you'll be able to address them because if it's just a bunch of people sitting around talking hypothetically you're not really going to get to the bottom of the of the of the challenge that people are living in their daily lives that's a great point annan then um i know we're at the top of the hour so i don't want to hold anyone too much longer um i did have one final question for you all and i can see a few minutes after um that i think is is relevant for this entire discussion which is you know you know in connecticut you have um the gc3 recommendations on climate change um i think this is an issue a lot of states are thinking about particularly as they're also resource constrained by covid um so how do things like the results of this report really inform and compel action um under under gc3 or for states looking at reducing their ghg emissions overall yeah i'll i'll just give a quick answer that the benefit the real you know when you boil it down this report gives you the dollar amounts and the areas where you know average gap is and these are numbers that we need to start using when we start giving recommendations we can integrate this information into how big do we need to expand programs where do they need to go this is a report that helps us understand you know how we can more efficiently deliver you know our resources so um i think that's that's where this really is helpful and i think it also brings together uh a lot of different groups of people that can be working on these issues together whether it's you know clean energy uh energy affordability efficiency you know greenhouse gas emission reductions all these types of things so um showing what the daily lived experience of people is gives you the opportunity to bring different groups together and explain how you know how this is impacting your life and in a really concrete way um kind of breaking through the abstraction of uh negotiation and politics sometimes i hope uh so i think that's that's really is it's just showing people exactly what is happening exactly where it's happening and seeing how you can address it together yeah definitely okay well thank you so much everyone um you know we still have we have ton of questions in the the chat that i don't think we'll be able to get to unless you wanted to be here for the rest of the day um but this has been great gannon justine emily thank you so much for sharing your findings and for being here with us this afternoon um and i will turn it over to sam to just go over any close-out logistics hey thank you abby and thank you again to all of our panelists you guys were great this was very informative um for people head out for the day i just want to let you know that we well this was the last webinar of 2020 we've got a lot of webinars that we're working on for 2021 you can see a couple of those on your screen now a few that we've got scheduled in january so if you visit our website csa.org backslash webinars you can read more about those webinars and sign up so thank you all for being here today we look forward to seeing you at our webinars in 2021 bye everyone