Utilizing The Benefits of the 2022 Federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA, The Climate Bill)
Our Interim Board Members:
Tim Mahoney (Austin), Kelly Treybig (Fayetteville), Jan Lance (Austin), John Cordova (Garland), and Mark Boyden (Windsor Park)
Mission Statement
Promoting The 2024 ‘Gifts’ from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and Utilizing Texas Regions to Build Empowered Communities
Public Interactive, Locally Sourced Data Sets, Equals Common-Sense Green Economic Grounding for Our Futures
- Our Working Goal: We are all connected to each other and our environment because we have a political and community structure that we can see what goes from our neighborhood to our region to our environment and out beyond and back again to our families and you.
- Instead of this: We have people on the defensive with every attempt at communication. We are lucky if an individual’s real sense of history goes back to their parents; we usually expect that when people are speaking about our culture, people rise to defend themselves, and their sense of community and family…
We Have Been Gerrymandered…
and the best way to get out of that map is to build new relationships, to build positive communications and build relationships in our compact communities. And for that we have the 12 Regions in Texas, originally set up by the Comptroller’s office, and currently being utilized by the folks at Texas 2036.
Building positive communications between now and the end of this year as the first step of getting a State Redistricting Commission to stop future gerrymandering, building a new consensus market where consumer awareness meets growing businesses for the affordable building of the new green economy. The 2022 federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will bring us those tools in 2024. We at Empowering Texas Communities will be utilizing experts around the State of Texas to bring you the latest discounts as they become available.
Texas 2036 has its own philosophy, board and mission, but it is essential that we, as compact regions, predict a compact energy efficient future. Working together, we can even make energy distribution more efficient. The Texas Comptroller’s Office has done it, and the State of Texas has a new Data Portal. There are other regional groups already in Texas that can assist you in getting out the word about the IRA: Sierra Club, labor unions, county organizations, and every consumer and competent producer that we can find together, all have regional groups, but this effort for 2024 is about building local relationships for creating new markets, consumers and producers, by saving money as allowed by the IRA. Many groups will be providing information about how the IRA benefits will be rolled out (The Texas Comptroller’s Office, federal officials, other websites) will be coordinating information about how the IRA’s benefits will be rolled out, but Empowering Texas Communities will be focused on making that information relevant to you and your Region.
So contact us if you would like to work with others to build a structure for your own region, and get updates on your own regional portion of the Empowering Texas Communities website.
The planets are moving towards a new alignment: while we have watched the anti-community forces dominate our communities, to buy elections, and to destroy our communities, joining together we can create a new future.
Interrelated communities who can anchor data change, keeping this new energy market from being just another example of industry using the population to be their marketing endgame, as in plastics recycling.
The Comptroller’s Office’s 12 Regions are based on Texas geographic city/county organizations that have grown organically and endured for two hundred years. Finding ways to accelerate the State and Federal regulations by allowing them to “see” how the Texas 12 Regional markets are developing, with such community building including City, Counties and all the neighborhoods within, will maximize green economy opportunities. With that common language, the year 2025 can be the new goal, with annual milestones what we can’t imagine now. We should be the agents of change that we need to be
What Are the Top Issues Empowered Communities Have in Common
Fairness for the average citizen?
Do you ever get the feeling that Texas government is so complicated that it just doesn’t make sense? This is not by accident. Unless we build the capacity for public policy analysis in our communities. Even if we elect good people, we must ensure that our communities understand that public policy is an ongoing process, beyond elections. That is why we are using the notion of building self-reliant communities, a concern that average Texans get the “square deal squared”. Texans will have the opportunity to find a factual framework that not only makes sense but has the potential to build structural changes into the present and our common futures. There is a big reason that we can expect a different result every election: we will collectively activate our collaboration weapons to build a common language, a new family of Texans. We do not need to have an ongoing message of “they did it to us”, reactive to its core; we need to build a new power paradigm of common cause.
Spend Texas resources on issues important to Texans?
The first step of empowering communities will be the same basis for finding those issues and resources important to Texans. They are not hard to figure out; these are the same issues that the right-wing Republicans have dulled our senses with for decades, and most ruthlessly, during the last 4 years, during our first Pandemic in 100 years. It will weigh heavily on them in the future history books that they cut access to Medicaid expansion that would have cost Texas nothing because that expansion would have been paid for by that federal government that they so despise. As 2024 approaches, we will have the opportunity to take advantage of Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) benefits, both as citizens and as local governments to save money and make for long term options for our children. We need to shake ourselves off, roll up our sleeves, and get to work on universal education, better jobs, and more empowerment for every community, every city, every neighborhood in Texas! Join us! Let us embrace the present and the future!
Robust, Secure, and Weatherized Power Grid?
The power grid seems to roll out of some sort of mythical board room: but the only people at the table are a select cabal of right-wing Republican legislators, the Governor’s campaign contributors, and the secret grid of the members of the Public Utility Commission, Railroad (i.e. Gas Regulation) Commission, and ERCOT (with its incredible growing library of planning documents). It is important to keep in mind that a bunch of Texas energy owners oversee a “fossil fuel dinosaur system”? Should we instead start rolling out our future energy system now with economies of scale in mind? If the new energy backbone of solar energy panels is constructed on our rooftops, paid for by public bonds to be authorized by the 2023 Texas Legislature, the new energy grid will also reflect our common power. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provides many opportunities to save money and our future.
Education that is affordable for Texas children and adults?
There is no doubt that Texans need good, even great, public schools, from pre-K to post-graduate work, and the funding for this system should be transparent, public, and affordable. We do not need to test the children; we need to test the system. Public education is the most American of world institutions. When Texas was starting, back before the Republic, we began with our public schools. Compact election districts would anchor the notion, for the present and future, that public education is the most important first step, and the most important continuing step, to our future world. This future world will be one that they, and we, will love and thrive in, as we are making our new and future families. Our families are depending on us.”
