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The California city of Palm Desert is taking the lead in organizing local governments to tackle the obstacles coming out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to PACE - Property Assessed Clean Energy financing. As readers of this blog will recall, Los Angeles county spent months holding meetings and planning for the roll out of its own PACE program known as LACEP - the LA County Energy Program. That all came to a screeching halt last July when the mortgage giants objected to the design of the PACE programs.

Now Palm Desert is fighting back, voting to allocate $25,000 as seed funding for a non-profit education and advocacy organization to be called “Energy Independence America” that will be operated by EcoMotion.  The Palm Desert press release is repeated in its entirety here:

Palm Desert to Again Lead on Clean Energy Financing Kicks Off Formal PACE Advocacy Effort to Overcome Federal Obstacles Palm Desert, California, the city that spearheaded Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing in 2008, is leading the charge to overcome federal obstacles placed in the way of this popular program. Palm Desert has committed initial seed funding of $25,000 to EcoMotion to form a non-profit education and advocacy organization for PACE, called Energy Independence America, and is urging cities and counties throughout the country to get behind this important effort. Interested parties can request to be on the list for Energy Independence America updates.

“It is absolutely infuriating to me that the federal government has thrown a roadblock in front of local government’s efforts to clean up our environment, reduce our carbon footprint, and make our country more energy independent,” said Councilwoman and immediate past Mayor Cindy Finerty.

Property Assessed Clean Energy financing was rapidly sweeping the nation as “one of the most innovative municipal finance programs in modern history,” according to The Harvard Business Review. It had spread to twenty-five states throughout America, but growth was abruptly interrupted on July 6, 2010 when the Federal Home Finance Agency (FHFA), caretaker of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, summarily announced that it would no longer honor mortgages with PACE liens securing residential energy improvements.

In response to the FHFA proclamation, residential PACE programs across America came to a grinding halt. Palm Desert, the State of California, and six other entities sued the FHFA. But in the past ten months, despite lawsuits and lobbying, no progress has been made in moving FHFA off of its position. At the Palm Desert PACE Solutions conference in March, participants agreed that concerted action will be required to remove this major roadblock to PACE and return it to its potential as a “game changing,” revolutionary financing mechanism.

On April 14, 2011, Palm Desert City Council voted unanimously to support a systematic nationwide effort to overturn FHFA’s administrative determination. This effort is known as Energy Independence America. “We are planning to reach out to all stakeholders affected by FHFA’s decision, from public entities that benefit from PACE programs to the private homeowners who benefit from efficiency and generation improvements, as well as the manufacturers and contractors who install them,” said Ted Flanigan, President of EcoMotion, the entity hired by Palm Desert to organize Energy Independence America. “Not only does PACE represent huge benefits for our environment and our nation’s energy independence, but also a $100+ billion industry in energy efficiency and renewable energy.”

Jim Ferguson, former Councilmember and Mayor of Palm Desert and the person credited with driving AB 811 through the California legislature, has agreed to a key spokesman for Energy Independence America. Per Ferguson, “We are going to exert every effort possible on the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government so they see the short sightedness of preventing homeowners from spending their own money to cure our nation’s environmental and energy woes. We’ve had a huge outpouring of cities and states looking to Palm Desert to, again, take the lead on clean energy financing.”

To get more information, you can contact Virginia Nicols at EcoMotion: (949) 450-7153 or email her at: vnicols@ecomotion.us.

We wish them all the luck in the world and we urge anyone with connections at their city to urge their city council to join up.