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Comment 116 for Public Workshops on Investment of Cap-and-Trade Auction Proceeds to Benefit Disadvantaged Communities (sb-535-guidance-ws) - 1st Workshop.
First Name: Charles
Last Name: Davidson
Email Address: charlesdavidson@me.com
Affiliation:
Subject: Cap-and-Trade funds for Solar Electricity to benefit residents of a refinery town
Comment:
The use of Cap-and-Trade funds for economically-disadvantage and highly pollution-impacted communities should be able to assist isolated refinery towns that have a dramatic bimodal income distribution pattern. I speak specifically of Rodeo California or collectively, the Rodeo and Crockett unincorporated county jurisdictions, that are both adjacent to and inclusive of the Phillips 66 Refinery, having two zip codes (94547, 94572) and approximately 8,700 and 3,100 residents, respectively. It is remarkable that Rodeo scores above the 20% cut-off point, when considering both the distribution of poverty and pollution. I..Phillips 66 is the most polluting refinery in the state, 1,097,117 pounds of toxic releases in 2012 versus Chevron in Richmond's 611,255 pounds, although it is less than half the size. Much of the reason for the Rodeo refinery's high pollution levels is that Phillips 66 has a history of and capacity for utilizing lower-quality, higher-sulfur crude feedstocks than most other refiners in California Rodeo also has a major interstate highway running through it that separates the lower income flat lands on one side of the highway and the moderate income communities on the other side, where it is hilly and has a higher percentage of homeowners. It is beyond understanding that Rodeo does not qualify for use of Cap-and-Trade funds under the CalEnviroScreen models, 1-5. To amend the problem that leaves out thousands of low income Rodeo residents in the vicinity of Phillips 66, Option #6 should be used to include asthma, age, gender and poverty on the refinery side of the highway. in other words, option #1-5 lack resolution and have increased granularity for those factors and other reasons. My read of the statistics are that The median income for a household in the CDP was $60,522, and the median income for a family was $63,151. Males had a median income of $46,077 versus $32,452 for females, indicating that female-only led households would be disproportionally impacted by poverty, even before the Bay Area cost-of-living is factored into the equation. Both towns recently learned that their single supermarket, an old Safeway store, that will be closing, so the at a new store will be opened by corporate headquarters in the next town over, Hercules. that has a much higher average household income of about $93,000. So therefore, both Rodeo and Crockett are food deserts as well as grossly underserved by public transportation and subjected to Interstate 80 traffic and diesel particulate pollution. At the very least, the qualifying score should be raised for certain communities that the CalEnviroScreen algorithms 31-5 bias against, statistically. As others have noted the problem with qualification methods #1-5, I quote: "Many Bay Area Communities with some of the highest poverty rates and greatest health burdens (asthma rates and low birth weight) are not identified. For example, current approaches for scoring CalEnviroScreen indicators fail to identify: • Bay View/Hunter’s Point in San Francisco, • Portions of West Oakland adjacent to the Port of Oakland, • Portions of Richmond and Rodeo, and • Portions of East Palo Alto and San Jose. In fact, CalEnviroScreen Method 1 using a 20% threshold identifies fewer than 3% of Bay Area census tracts as disadvantaged." Why is it important that Rodeo be included on the map, as could Crockett that is certainly down wind of all refinery releases? Cap-and-Trade funds can be used to offset the cost of electricity for low-income households that are about $200 dollars per month or $50 thousand dollars over 20 years. Thus, unbelievably, a low income family pays five times out of pocket for electricity than an upper middle class family pays to own outright a photo-voltaic solar collectors and pays nothing else on a monthly basis. II. I intend to propose, under the DeLeon CA Senate Bill 535, for Cap-and-Trade Investments to Benefit Disadvantaged Communities, that a solar farm be built in Rodeo/Crockett, perhaps on the 64-acre asphalted superfund site of Selby Slew, The electricity generated from this site will primarily go to the most economically-disadvantaged households, to markedly reduce their electrical bill and to reduce greenhouse gasses produced from the burning of natural gas at investor owned utilities. The project would be primarily local hire. Another portion of the funds could possibly be invested to improve public transportation, both within Rodeo and Crocket and for better connecting those two communities to BART, bus hubs and shopping areas. The entity that would operate the solar farm would be a non-profit Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) using non-fossil fuel-based and sustainable clean energy. The project would start with solar that would generate enough energy for about 1,000-2,000 people. The area is high in solar sunlight availability, and could also be sited, in the future, for vertical axis wind generation that could be more closely spaced than larger horizontal wind towers. The CCA would distribute the electricity to the qualified households, in the communities of Rodeo and possibly Crockett, in the form of Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) as spelled out by AB32, the 2006 California Clean Air Act. Charles Davidson
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Date and Time Comment Was Submitted: 2014-09-15 16:59:39
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