National Clean Investment Fund Grant Support Letter

The City Council of Cambridge, Massachusetts is pleased to support the application from Clean Communities Investment Partnership, Inc. (CCIP) for Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) funding through the National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF). CCIP is a collaboration of strong partners— Enterprise Community Partners, Rewiring America, Local Initiatives Support Corporation, United Way Worldwide and Habitat for Humanity.

The coalition is designed to couple tailored financial products with software solutions and complementary partnerships that will build demand for single- and multi-family home electrification in low-income communities and beyond. The Cambridge City Council embraces equitable access to residential electrification as critical to our own work.

We believe that CCIP presents a detailed and compelling vision to effectively remove barriers, build markets and help U.S. households (whether they rent or own) at every income level—but particularly in low-income and disadvantaged communities—afford the transition from fossil fuels to clean, efficient, and electric appliances, vehicles, solar and battery storage.

The Cambridge City Council’s is to is on record as supporting electrification as a means of reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and decarbonizing our city as evidenced by many local actions including

leadership work of our Climate Crisis Working Group, recent emissions reductions requirements added to our Building Energy Use and Disclosure Ordinance, the passing of a Green Jobs Ordinance, the updates to our Green Building Zoning Ordinance, and the recent launches of programs like Electrify Cambridge and the BlocPower decarbonization pilot, and as outlined in our Net Zero Action Plan.

The work to accelerate the electrification of all American households—and the CCIP’s approach to achieve that mission—is in line with our own mission. We know that decarbonization is an essential piece of our climate fight and we need to couple that effort with creative solutions to develop the funding and technical support necessary to incentivize this work on a large scale.

We are particularly impressed with the scope of this proposed work, which both reflects an understanding of many of the systemic barriers to this clean energy transition and smartly addresses them one by one—from connecting Americans directly to incentives and contractors and organizing households ready for this transition to spur the market, to providing various financing tools aimed at maximizing affordability.

The City of Cambridge has entered into discussions with CCIP and has established ongoing conversations about how the populations we serve will benefit from this combined effort. If awarded, we are prepared to collaborate with CCIP to organize our community around this generational opportunity to electrify households and to participate in CCIP’s proposed participatory governance structure alongside other community leaders.

We view our work at the municipal level as a compact of trust between us and the people we serve. Our anticipated engagement with CCIP to implement its proposed GGRF-supported programming, tools and financing solutions is rooted in our shared expectations for accountability to both those we serve and the taxpayers whose investments must yield progress for people and the planet.

If you have questions about our support for this application for funding from CCIP, please contact the Cambridge City Council at [email protected].

Respectfully submitted,

Cambridge City Council

Councillor Patricia Nolan

Councillor Quinton Zondervan

Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui

Councillor Burhan Azeem

Councillor Dennis J. Carlone Councillor Marc C. McGovern Councillor E. Denise Simmons Councillor Paul F. Toner

Vice Mayor Alanna Mallon