I woke up this morning in Washington DC to snow flurries and then, at a conference of the National Association of State Community Service Providers (NASCSP), to a blizzard of acronyms. I will be dreaming of strings of letters for the rest of the year.
NASCSP is an organization of state-level leaders of weatherization programs and community action agencies. The Department of Energy (DOE) provides funds to the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP). Its mission is to make the homes of low-income people more energy efficient, safe, healthy, and affordable. It has a pretty good track record in that for every dollar they spend weatherizing a house, someone saves two dollars, and the planet avoids a few tons of greenhouse gas emissions. And the weatherization community is a pretty diverse group. In the green building world, I have never seen so many women and people of color involved in every facet of the work.
Some of the funds for weatherization work also come through the Low-Income Heating Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP); some through Energy Conservation Block Grants (ECBG); some through Community Service Block Grants (CSBG); the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD); the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (ReGGIe) in the Northeast; and other acronyms... I mean organizations. Thank goodness, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) keeps track of all those funds and how they are spent, and these folks are sticklers for details. They know what all the acronyms mean. Under the Obama administration they are gearing up to be even more demanding of transparency and performance.
It's a very exciting time to be in Washington and at the NASCSP conference. The House "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" allocates more than $6 billion for weatherizing homes in the United States. The Senate is still debating its version of the bill, but right now they are allocating $2.9 billion for weatherization. President Obama has made a firm commitment to weatherizing 1 million homes a year for the next ten years, and even mentioned "weatherization" several times on television. He calls it a "three for." The program helps people afford to stay in their homes by lowering their energy bills, it creates good jobs with a future, and it moves the nation closer to energy independence. To put things into context, the budget for weatherization in 2008 was about $250 million.
In his 2009 budget sent to congress last February, President Bush allotted $0 to weatherization. That's what people in weatherization work are used to for the past several years - figuring out how to do more for less. Now they are getting ready for a flood of money, and that is not an easy challenge. For the weatherization community, the state agencies, the nonprofit service providers, and the contractors who are fueled by the desire to have everyone live in a safe and affordable home, it means doing the same excellent work they have been doing for decades - just much much more of it. These people are big on quality and will not sacrifice it for numbers. They know they will be judged on measurable results - energy saved per dollars spent.