Racine Mayor Cory Mason, photographed in the outdoor, rooftop lounge at the Hotel Verdant in Downtown Racine. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
For Racine Mayor Corey Mason, a small park studded with boulders on the shore of Lake Michigan just south of the city’s downtown is an object lesson on the impact of climate change.
In January 2020, a 100-year storm demolished at least one-third of Sam Myers Park. “If you’d been here at the time, you would have seen a lot of these boulders on the street,” Mason said at a morning press conference on the park grounds last week.
“Climate change, if we don’t address it, is expensive,” Mason said. “We are seeing more frequent and more powerful storms, and the cost of upsizing our wastewater pipes or making a more resilient and powerful lakefront becomes an important investment that we have to make.”
While the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) paid for the restoration, the park served as a backdrop last week for Mason to describe how the city has benefitted from other federal programs: three signature laws passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden over the last four years.
Between the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, Racine has gotten a formidable amount of federal support.
“Those three together are sort of the holy trinity of federal legislation,” Mason said in an interview. “They’ve just been so transformational for us. I don’t know how we’d have gotten through Covid without them.”
ARPA, the pandemic relief program that was enacted in the first three months of Biden’s term, funded incentives the city used to encourage residents to get the first vaccine for COVID-19, which was just becoming available then. The city’s ARPA allotment also helped it fund programs for youth employment and adult high school, Mason said.
Some $38 million in ARPA money — $20 million from the state and $18 million from the city’s direct allotment — are helping to finance a new community and health center in Racine’s Lincoln-King neighborhood just west of Downtown.
A $9.8 million infusion from the bipartisan infrastructure law will cover more than 70% of design and construction costs to repave a stretch of one of Racine’s main north-south arteries and put new concrete on three other streets. Some of that money is also covering 80% of the cost of bridge repairs and additional street repairs.
In the coming year, Mason said, the law will fund Racine’s first “smart street” project — reconfiguring streets to be more walkable, adding bike lanes and curb bump-out features that require drivers to slow down “instead of four big lanes where people drive in as fast as they can in each direction.”
And the mayor singles out federal support for strong sustainability measures in the city. The sources of those measures are climate and clean energy provisions in the infrastructure law along with the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes extensive renewable energy and energy conservation provisions.
Racine has been electrifying the city’s bus fleet. The first nine electric buses were purchased from Racine’s share of a national legal settlement with Volkswagen over allegations the automaker cheated on federal emissions tests. The city is buying four more buses, funded through the infrastructure law, at which point the bus fleet will be 40% electric.
A new solar station is planned to recharge the mass transit vehicles. Construction is expected to start in the first half of 2025, with $1.2 million of its cost paid for from ARPA.
Federal government: From uninterested to policy ally
Climate change was a priority of Mason’s from when was first elected seven years ago. He committed the city to following the Paris Climate Accords.
Former President Donald Trump was in the White House at the time and withdrew from the accords in 2017. With federal policymakers uninterested in addressing climate change, Mason said, he looked elsewhere for support.
An electric city bus was the centerpiece for a city of Racine press conference Sept. 26 to discuss the city’s sustainability investments made possible by federal funds. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
He joined the bipartisan Climate Mayors organization, municipal chief executives concerned about what many viewed as the central environmental concern of the time. He found the group invaluable for sharing ideas and learning what could work.
“You hear people, ‘Oh, you can’t do police cars that are electric,’” Mason said. “And then you go to a conference, and here’s 12 that are using electric vehicles as police cars.”
He welcomed the sharp federal turnaround on climate policy when Biden entered the White House in 2021.
“I can’t … emphasize enough just what a transformation it has been to have real partners at the federal government,” Mason told reporters at last week’s press event. He called the infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act “generational pieces of legislation.”
The city started its work on renewable energy and energy conservation several years before either of those bills were on the national agenda. Nearly 20 years ago the city installed solar cells near a municipal annex building. In 2020 it leased a 2.6 acre patch of a South Side industrial park to Wisconsin Electric Power Co. to build a solar array.
Racine has been retrofitting municipal buildings, 70 years old on average, with energy-saving measures such as better insulation, which climate experts say shouldn’t be overlooked in the quest to reduce carbon emissions.
The infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act have helped turbocharge those efforts. Besides big projects like the park rehabilitation and the new electric buses, the city has also benefited from much smaller ones.
Homeowners and businesses have been eligible for tax credits to help cover the cost of what they spend on energy conservation. Nonprofit groups and municipalities can’t claim tax credits (they don’t pay taxes), but through the Inflation Reduction Act’s direct pay program, they can get the same sort of reimbursement.
“Having a check sent back to you for 30% to 60% of the costs is just transformational,” Mason said.
Green investment nets developer tax credits
The city hasn’t been the only beneficiary of the act.
Five years ago, Milwaukee developer Mike O’Connor paid a visit to Racine and happened upon what had once been a major downtown department store. Unoccupied since the 1980s, the building had been partially renovated for a nonprofit, but that project was abandoned. “It was kind of a raw canvas — it was pretty well ready to go,” O’Connor said in an interview.
Developer Mike O’Connor shows off the green roof of the Hotel Verdant in Downtown Racine on Thursday, Sept. 26. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
O’Connor and his business partner built their business, Dominion Properties, starting in the early 2000s with a focus on apartment buildings. Central to their business plan was lowering operating expenses by “chasing efficiency” on heating and related costs — adding insulation and high-efficiency furnaces.
In 2014 they went further, building a 20-unit apartment to meet high-efficiency standards known as LEED (for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) set by the U.S. Green Building Council.
Lenders weren’t interested in an apartment block, O’Connor’s first idea for the Racine building, and there was no market for office space, he said. Then the pair hit on the idea of a boutique hotel — a standard feature in many historic downtown neighborhoods worldwide but nonexistent in Racine.
The city welcomed the proposal, seeing it as a likely draw for tourists as well as an asset that the city’s corporate leaders would value for visiting business travelers.
“We thought if we’re going to build, we’re going to build sustainably,” O’Connor said. “That fit well with what the mayor’s vision was.”
The 80-room Hotel Verdant opened a year ago. It’s heated with geothermal energy and boasts a rooftop full of solar panels that cover most of a green roof planted with sedum. The plant is a source of shade as well as a feature to reduce temperatures on the roof surface and in the surrounding air.
The hotel project preceded the Inflation Reduction Act, but this year the federal law provided an unexpected benefit: Dominion Properties qualified for green energy tax credits, and was able to resell the credits to a third party, O’Connor said.
Projects yet to come
More projects are on the drawing board. Racine will announce a new municipal building that meets “net-zero” standards, meaning its operation does not produce emissions that add to the carbon already going into the atmosphere. And the city’s water and wastewater utilities are on the verge of planning a major investment in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions as well.
That idea came from a Climate Mayors colleague, Mason said. But he’s counting on the federal infrastructure and the inflation act’s climate programs to make it possible.
“More than half the energy the city consumes is from our water and wastewater utilities,” Mason said. “Without something like the bipartisan infrastructure law, it’s nearly impossible to imagine — how would you get to a net-zero water and wastewater utility? But now we are seeing other communities across the country that are using the [Inflation Reduction Act] and the infrastructure law to do exactly that.”
President’s announcement Thursday is just one piece of a big clean energy picture
Racine’s climate sustainability focus extends to the city’s policy with developers — and it has courted developers who share that perspective.
When a developer proposed a new apartment complex on a riverfront corner downtown, city officials included a requirement for 5% of the parking to have electric vehicle charging stations. “And the developer was like, ‘Well, at least — we’re going to need more than that,’” Mason said.
Developers and key local employers have told him they view expanded EV charging capacity as an important amenity to draw customers or prospective employees. “We want to help incentivize that for local businesses here who want to be able to do that,” Mason said.
Even with the growing private sector interest, he sees an important role for government to play spurring the growth of renewable energy.
“I think the more we can get ahead of the market, the more we get a competitive advantage by having those resources available for people who want to live here or work here,” Mason said.
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