Category: State Talk

Flexible academic tracks. Early exposure to the workforce. Financial support for students pursuing work-based learning opportunities. Transitional learning programs that extend beyond secondary education.

Rep. Bob Behning has seen how those education models work in other countries (the Swiss vocational model, for instance).

Among his goals with the recently signed HB 1002: Use lessons learned from those systems to reinvent the high school experience for students in his home state of Indiana, in a way that makes learning more impactful and gets them career-ready.

“A lot of kids see little value, and are finding less and less relevancy, in high school,” says Behning, a chief sponsor of the legislation.

“A bill like HB 1002 changes the paradigm. It provides the academics [that students] need, but embeds it in a work-based learning experience.”

 New Career Scholarship Accounts for students

Central to Indiana’s reinvention plan is the creation of new career scholarship accounts, or CSAs.

With the new law in place, participating students will be allotted up to $5,000 each for the costs associated with career education — for example, enrollment in a youth apprenticeship program, career coaching services, community college coursework, certification examinations, and transportation to and from job-training locations.

A total of $15 million will go to CSAs over the next two fiscal years.

Students who choose an apprenticeship track will be paid by their employer. The amount of time a student spends off campus in a CSA-funded program will vary.

“If you look at what we would consider a traditional youth apprenticeship, you’re probably looking at starting in your junior year where you may spend one to two days [a week] at an employer,” Behning explains.

“By the time you’re a senior, you could spend two to three [days], and by the time you’re the equivalent of what would be a freshman in college, it could be up to three to four days.”

To accommodate these students’ unique school schedules, the state Board of Education will establish a new path for a high school diploma that aligns with a work-based learning model.

Another key component of HB 1002: ensuring that younger K-12 students are aware of and prepared for the new training opportunities.

By the end of this year, state education leaders will develop new standards for a “career awareness course” that introduces students to the CSA program. The course also will show students which industry sectors are in high demand, identify the education and workforce training prerequisites needed to enter various fields, and offer individualized career-plan counseling.

Schools will be required to offer this career awareness course to ninth-graders by 2030.

Goal: More students earn a workforce credential

In order to qualify as a CSA program, the work-based experience must culminate in a student earning a credential — for example, an associate degree or an industry-recognized certificate.

For each student who successfully earns a credential, a $500 grant will be awarded to his or her school as well as the CSA-participating entity (a business or career-and-technical education center, for example).

“Today, the credential really is your currency in the labor market,” says Jason Bearce, vice president of education and workforce development for the Indiana Chamber of Commerce and a proponent of HB 1002.

“Employers do a lot of training. A fair amount of it doesn’t result in any kind of recognized certificate or industry credential that would be recognized outside of that place of business. We think that’s a missed opportunity [for workers].”

Bearce also says an increase in credential attainment can have broader, positive economic effects.

“At one time, competing for a business expansion or relocation was primarily about, What’s the tax incentive package? What’s the regulatory environment? What’s the cost of doing business?” Bearce says.

Today, though, site selection often hinges on this question: “Who has a critical mass of highly skilled human capital?”

A highly credentialed workforce helps make the case.

Concerns about potential for ‘new patronage’

How will the state locate and secure work-based learning and training opportunities for potentially thousands of students?

HB 1002 outlines a role for “intermediaries.”

“[They are] the facilitator that brings the employer and the student together,” Behning explains.

“It can be a not-for-profit, it could be a for-profit, but it would be the group that’s in the middle that’s [an] aggregator of potential opportunities for kids.”

The state’s new budget includes $5 million for “intermediary capacity building” over the next fiscal year.

“We are giving some seed money to intermediaries,” Behning says. “Long term, the goal would be that they would be funded as a fee to employers for embedding an apprentice in your business.”

Opponents of HB 1002, such as Rep. Ed DeLaney, believe the administrative burden of operating the CSA program and funding of intermediaries will be exceedingly expensive.

And since qualified CSA programs must include a credential component, DeLaney says this new strategy will undercut the value of existing career-and-technical courses being offered in schools and could lead to decreases in school funding.

Additionally, although participating CSA employers must undergo a rigorous process to demonstrate the high value of their on-the-job training or apprenticeship offering, DeLaney is concerned the new law could lead to an unequal playing field that favors partisan alliances.

“I think it will benefit those businesses that are most adept at getting government grants,” DeLaney says. “To some extent, this does run the risk of being what I call the ‘new patronage.’ ”

During legislative debate over the measure, opponents and even some proponents of HB 1002 said a better plan of action would have been to begin the CSA program as a smaller, more targeted pilot initiative, or to phase in the new model with a small cohort of established intermediaries and employer partners.

Behning, who believes the need for comprehensive work-based learning for students is too imperative to wait for a pilot study, anticipates “a fairly slow uptake [to the CSA program] just because it’s a new concept rolling out.”

 

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She lives in and represents a part of North Dakota’s coal country.

In the future, Rep. Anna Novak hopes her district also becomes known as a place where rare-earth elements and critical minerals are extracted and processed, and made into products essential for today’s economy.

It’s the reason she sponsored this year’s HB 1511, a measure signed into law earlier this year to attract companies able to use the state’s abundant supply of lignite coal as a “feedstock” to extract some of those metallic elements and minerals.

“What’s really exciting about this for me is that the products have to be processed on site. You can’t ship it somewhere else. … I have a feeling that not only will the elements be processed on site, but we will be able to produce things like lithium batteries and so forth right here in my district,” Novak says.

Under North Dakota law, companies pay a severance tax on each ton of the coal that is mined.

But HB 1511 exempts companies from this tax for the first million tons of coal used as a “feedstock” for mineral extraction. It also includes a sales tax exemption related to facility construction or expansion.

“We have a tremendous business friendly environment in North Dakota, our coal mines are already permitted, and we have the Energy and Environmental Research Center,” Novak says.

That center, housed at the University of North Dakota, recently secured a $8 million federal grant to conduct research on extracting rare earth elements from the state’s lignite coal and developing technologies related to recovery and manufacturing.

The center also is competing to be the home of an eventual $124 million commercial demonstration facility. The goal of this project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, would be to produce up to 1,000 tons of rare-earth elements annually — a significant amount considering the United States currently imports between 5,000 and 10,000 tons per year.

It all points to a potential economic opportunity for North Dakota, in an area of national importance. “A critical mineral has both outsized economic and national security implications,” says Chris Berry, the president of House Mountain Partners and an expert on supply chains for battery metals.

A CANADA-U.S. PARTNERSHIP

Mineral resources, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare-earth elements are essential components of batteries, electric motors, and many other advanced technologies.

They are crucial to making everyday products, electrifying transportation systems, and meeting climate-related goals and obligations for the United States and Canada.

In both countries, there is growing concern about a heavy reliance on imports of these minerals, both as raw materials and refined, as well as on a global supply chain often controlled by China. For example, Berry estimates that China owns or controls 75 to 80 percent of the entire supply chain of rare-earth elements, 80 percent of cobalt-refining capacity, and 65 to 70 percent of lithium refining.

So, what is to be done?

The good news is that the United States and Canada do not lack for a supply of critical minerals in the ground.

According to the nonpartisan Wilson Center, the United States has 750,000 metric tons of lithium reserves and Canada has 530,000. Additionally, the U.S. has 53,000 metric tons of cobalt reserves and Canada has 22,000.

However, there currently is a lack of capacity to mine, extract or process these reserves. And while a permitting process is needed to ensure safe and responsible extraction, it can be time consuming; at a site, the time it takes to go from initial greenfield status to mine development can be as long as 15 years.

To build up domestic production and North American supply chains of these minerals and metals, Berry says, policymakers need to place “a full-scale focus on permitting timelines … harmonizing permitting requirements on the state, provincial or federal level across borders.”

The two countries have committed to working more closely together, through agreements such as the Canada-U.S. Joint Action Plan on Critical Minerals Collaboration.

Under this plan, the nations have agreed to share information and data, diversify supply chains, promote trade and investment opportunities, and collaborate on research and development.

“Canada is an important supplier of 13 of the 35 minerals that the U.S. has identified as critical to economic and national security,” Canadian officials said in announcing the joint action plan in 2019. (The U.S. list has since grown from 35 to 50.) “We have the potential to become a reliable source of [others].”

FEDERAL, STATE INVESTMENTS

New federal laws, programs and investments also are in place to increase domestic production.

On the U.S. side of the border, the Inflation Reduction Act is providing a tax credit equal to 10 percent of the costs related to the production of critical minerals. This tax credit can be applied twice if the company mines and then refines the minerals.

Efforts are ongoing, too, to locate critical minerals. The Earth Mapping Resources Initiative (a collaboration between the U.S. Geological Survey and state geological surveys, funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021) is identifying potential sites around the country.

Federal funds are supporting other types of research, too.

The work on lignite-coal extraction at the North Dakota research center is one example; another is the U.S. Department of Energy’s support of the Illinois Basin Carbon Ore, Rare Earth and Critical Minerals project. It is exploring the potential extraction of critical minerals from the Illinois Basin’s coal resources.

At the state level, North Dakota has the new tax credit for critical-mineral extraction, while a budget bill passed by the Michigan House in May (HB 4249) would allocate $15 million for new public-private research hubs that advance the processes for recycling and reusing critical minerals.

Additionally, Michigan Technological University and the only operating nickel mine in the United States, Eagle Mine, have received an $8.1 million federal grant to develop technologies and processes to supply critical minerals for electric-vehicle batteries.

Private industry in the Midwest also is jumping at the opportunity to develop the region’s critical minerals and battery technology industries.

Talon Metals in Minnesota has an agreement with Tesla to provide at least 75,000 metric tons of nickel concentrate over six years from its proposed mine in Tamarack. And in Ontario, Magna International Inc. will invest $470 million to build a new electric vehicle battery factory in Brampton.

The post A binational push on critical-minerals production, supply chains seeks to address national risks — and holds potential regional opportunities appeared first on CSG Midwest.

As renewable energy’s market share grows and large wind and solar facilities proliferate, many states are allowing a smaller-scale alternative: “community solar.”

The U.S. Department of Energy defines community solar as “any solar project or purchasing program, within a geographic area, in which the benefits of a solar project flow to multiple customers such as individuals, businesses, nonprofits and other groups.”

Community solar projects can be owned and operated by a for-profit company or nonprofit community organization, or have utilities “sponsor” them.

Customers within the service area of the utility in which the project is located “subscribe” to a percentage of its electrical output and receive an electric bill credit for their share.

One goal for community solar is to place renewable energy projects on land or spaces that would otherwise go undeveloped or unused, says Matt Hargarten, vice president of campaigns for the Coalition for Community Solar Access.

“There’s a lot of land near urban areas where there isn’t a lot of incentives for developers to go there,” he says. “A lot of them are built on warehouse rooftops — think Amazon [warehouses] — a lot of states encourage that.”

At the start of this year, 22 states, including Illinois and Minnesota, had enacted laws enabling community solar by specifying that such projects are not utilities, and authorizing “virtual metering” so subscribers can benefit from the community solar production.

Such laws are necessary because most states consider any entity that generates and sells electricity to be a utility subject to state regulation, Hargarten says. “I don’t know of any state where you can do third-party community solar without [an enabling] law in place,” he says.

Laws in place, changing in Illinois and Minnesota

In Illinois, the Future Energy Jobs Act from 2016 (SB 2814) created the Solar for All program, under which the Illinois Power Agency or utilities bought renewable energy credits from qualifying community solar projects in low-income areas.

The Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (SB 2408 of 2021) expanded the program by including community solar among myriad renewable energy initiatives intended to help collectively meet the state’s goal of 100 percent clean energy by 2050. This newer law:

• allows individual community solar projects to generate up to 5 MW of power, up from 2;

• boosts annual funding for community solar, aiming to raise its statewide generating capacity from 213 MW to 1,500 MW;

• shifts the project selection process from a lottery to one based on a project’s score on siting and other criteria; and

• increases annual Illinois Solar for All funding from $10 million to $50 million, allowing for the annual purchase of 3.8 million renewable energy credits through 2030.

Those credits are divided among varying types of renewable energy projects, with 27.5 percent designated for community, rooftop and residential solar — the third-highest share after wind energy and utility-scale solar.

Minnesota, which was the first Midwestern state to enact community solar legislation (HF 729 of 2013), recently updated its law.

The 2013 law required the state’s largest electric utility, Xcel, to establish a community solar “garden” program option for its customers, with generation capacity of up to 1 MW. Xcel is required to buy electricity from those gardens under a formula that was modified in 2016 to become an annual recalculation of the value of solar energy.

Under HF 2310, signed into law in May, this existing program will be joined by a new community solar garden initiative starting in 2024. It will be run by the Minnesota Department of Commerce and is targeted for residential subscribers.

As of next year, new gardens must have at least 25 subscribers per megawatt, at least half of whom must be from low- or middle-income households. That emphasis on reaching less-affluent residents makes Minnesota’s new program a “modernized best of class” for state-based, community-solar laws, Hargarten says.

HF 2310 also lets community solar gardens generate up to 5 MW and eliminates a requirement that subscribers live in the county or adjacent county where a garden is located.

‘Stand on their own’

Community solar can be attractive to legislators for different reasons.

“For me, it’s about competition; it’s about the monopoly the power companies have and it’s about the high power rates in southeast Wisconsin,” says state Sen. Duey Stroebel, author of this year’s SB 226, which would authorize community solar and grant rule-making authority to the Public Service Commission. “It’s a way to push back against high power rates.”

While Stroebel says the green energy angle is incidental for him, it’s front-and-center for Michigan Sen. Jeff Irwin, the main sponsor of this year’s SB 153, which also would establish a community solar program. (A companion bill, SB 152, would require the Michigan Public Service Commission to draft operating rules within one year of passage.)

“I’m a big believer in clean energy and, as solar becomes more efficient and more affordable, it becomes a better energy option,” Irwin says.

The Wisconsin and Michigan bills (neither of which had passed as of early June) would authorize projects of up to 5 MW and require them to have at least three subscribers.

The Wisconsin measure would allow community solar facilities to be up to 35 acres, but only in communities that approve them by a two-thirds vote of the host jurisdiction’s governing body.

Projects would be subject to local zoning and property taxation. (Under current Wisconsin law, people who generate electricity for others are exempt from property taxation but are subject to a tax based on gross revenues).

Subscribers would have to be in the service territory of the investorowned utility whose transmission lines the project would use.

Ultimately, Stroebel says, projects would “have to stand on their own.”

“They have to make economic sense,” he says. “If they can sell subscriptions, then they’ll be successful. If they can’t, they won’t.”

Irwin’s bill would require that at least 30 percent of a project’s output be reserved for low-income households or organizations that provide services, assistance or housing to low-income individuals (including tribal governments or tribally designated housing authorities).

According to Irwin, community solar is needed in Michigan because most residents can’t afford to install solar panels, roofs aren’t well-aligned for the panels, or tree cover makes rooftop solar impractical. Subscribing to a community solar project, then, becomes the best option.

And since local governments are afforded strong siting control, Irwin adds, community solar also is a way for utilities to avoid or overcome local resistance to large, industrial-scale operations.

The post Green choice? Community solar attracting attention in Midwestern states as a path to boost competition, meet renewable energy goals appeared first on CSG Midwest.

Rep. Kendell Culp grows corn and soybeans and raises beef cattle in a part of Indiana with some of the most productive agricultural land in the entire state.

But some of that same land also has appeal as a site for other uses, particularly renewable energy projects such as solar farms that are growing in number.

“It is an issue on a lot of people’s minds right now,” Culp says about what he hears from constituents about the actual and potential loss of prime farmland. He heard it as a longtime county commissioner, and again when he did his first-ever survey as a newly elected state legislator in the fall.

His response was the introduction of two bills this year — both of which became law — that will have the state taking an in-depth look at trends in farmland loss and land use, as well as policy ideas to keep this land in agricultural production.

“Measuring the acres lost is important,” Culp says, “but just as important is what it’s being lost to.”

Those are the two goals of HB 1557, a new law that directs the Indiana Department of Agriculture to detail losses of farmland between 2010 and 2022. The second enacted measure, HB 1132, creates a state-level land use task force, a group of legislators and others who will look at growth patterns in Indiana’s rural, urban and suburban areas. Loss of farmland will be one focus of this task force. Another will be the extent of food insecurity in different parts of Indiana.

“There is the perception that the less farmland, the less food,” Culp says. “I don’t think that’s necessarily been the reality because farmers always have been able to use new technologies to maximize production. But I do think that the issue of food insecurity and lost farmland is something we need to be more conscious of, especially if more acres start getting taken out of production at drastic rates.

“It’s also a really great responsibility we have [to the world]. People in other countries think more than we do about where their food comes from, and they know they rely on the U.S., specifically the states of the Midwest.”

Future pressures and needs

“No Farms No Food” is the message of the American Farmland Trust, an advocacy group founded more than 40 years ago to save the nation’s farms and ranches from development. The group’s Midwest director, Kristopher Reynolds, says it’s a message that doesn’t always resonate in this region because of the clear abundance of ranchland and farmland: Drive through much of America’s Heartland, and it’s most of what you see.

However, many states in this region have lost some of this land to population changes, sprawl and development in recent decades. Looking ahead, it’s not just residential, commercial or industrial development in new areas that could replace farmland.

The American Farmland Trust notes in a 2022 national study that “tens of millions of additional acres of rural land will be used for energy production and transmission in the coming decades.” Add to that increases in global population and the likelihood of more-frequent extreme weather events such as droughts and flooding, and keeping “nationally significant” agricultural land in production becomes important for “long-term food security and environmental health,” the authors note in that same report.

No region has a higher concentration of that “nationally significant” land than the Midwest. For states, Reynolds says, these trends point to the need for new policies that stop low-density sprawl, that incentivize or help farmers to keep prime agricultural land in production, and that limit the loss of this land to the continuing rise in energy projects.

“As an organization, we support renewable energy, but we also recognize that it can come at a cost to farmers and to farmland,” Reynolds says. “What we’ve tried to do is identify areas [for renewable projects] that are maybe less productive in terms of agriculture — brownfield sites, for instance — or look for ways where you can still have agriculture production and solar development at the same site.”

‘Once it’s out …’

The pinch on agricultural land is being felt in Wisconsin as well. According to Sen. Patrick Testin, his state has lost nearly 1 million acres over the last two decades, and he worries about future declines due to pressures not just from other types of development or uses, but to some longstanding demographic and economic trends.

“Like in many states, the average age of our farmer is increasing, and that next generation hasn’t necessarily been there to take up the mantle,” Testin says. “And we’ve seen some of our smaller operations go out of existence.”

One policy lever used by Wisconsin since 1977 is the state’s Farmland Preservation Program. Under the program, local governments have the authority to develop farmland preservation plans and zoning districts, as well as to petition the state for approval of Agricultural Enterprise Areas (AEA). With these AEA designations and zoning districts in place, local farmers then have the opportunity to access state income tax credits by entering into a farmland preservation agreement.

Under this agreement, a farmer agrees to keep the land in agricultural use for 15 years and meet the state’s soil and water conservation standards. The tax credit is $5 per acre for land in an AEA; $7.50 for land in a certified farmland preservation zoning district; and $10 for land in an AEA and a farmland preservation zoning district.

According to the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, as of July 2021, a total of 1,061 preservation agreements had been signed covering close to 233,000 acres. Many more acres of land are eligible but not enrolled in the program.

Testin says this lack of participation points to two problems with the current program: the length of the agreement is too long (individuals don’t want to be wedded to 15 years), and the tax credits are too small. He and other legislators introduced bills this year (SB 134 and AB 133) to address both those concerns. The term of the agreement would be reduced from 15 years to 10, and the per-acre tax breaks would be increased and automatically rise in the future with inflationary changes.

“What we’re trying to do with this bill is encourage more people to participate, first of all, and then encourage more farmers to put more acreage into it,” says Wisconsin Rep. Katrina Shankland, another sponsor of the bill.

She views increased participation as a win-win-win for the state: Reward farmers for being good stewards of the land, advance the state’s conservation goals, and help preserve Wisconsin’s agricultural heritage.

“Once it’s out of [agricultural] production, it’s rarely, if ever, farmed again,” Shankland says.

‘Best opportunity for states’

Reynolds suggests that states in the Midwest develop and invest in new Purchase of Agricultural Conservation Easement programs; as of January 2022, only Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin had any farmland acreage protected via a PACE program, according to the American Farmland Trust’s Farmland Information Center.

Under a PACE program, landowners are compensated for keeping their land for agricultural use; the compensation amount is based on the property’s fair market value.

“It’s probably the best opportunity for states to protect more farmland because they’re able to leverage federal dollars,” Reynolds says.

That money comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Conservation Easement Program. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law in 2022, authorized an additional $1.4 billion for this program over the next five years. Accessing those funds, though, requires a 50 percent match. States can fill that void, and tap into newly available federal dollars, by creating a PACE program.

“We’re not making any more farmland, so we need to protect what we have — not just for production purposes, but from what we’re seeing with some of the climate projections and how it’s going to be more difficult to grow food in some other places,” Reynolds says.

“There’s also the issue of farmland changing hands at a rapid pace over the next 15 years. We want to make sure that the next generation still has access to farmland in the future.”

Michigan Sen. Roger Victory has chosen “Food Security: Feeding the Future” as the focus of his CSG Midwestern Legislative Conference Chair’s Initiative for 2023.

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EXAMPLES OF STATE POLICIES TO PRESERVE FARMLAND

• Invest in Purchase of Agricultural Conservation Easement (PACE) programs that compensate owners of agricultural land to keep the land in production and prevent development for other uses.

• Establish agricultural districts in state statute that allow local governments to identify areas where commercial agriculture will be protected and enrolled farmers will get tax benefits of some kind.

• Reduce the amount of money that agricultural producers must pay in local property taxes through the use of a differential assessment system.

• Provide tax credits to producers who lease their land or equipment to beginning farmers; establish low-interest loan programs for beginning farmers

• Create ‘right to farm’ laws that provide legal protections to agriculture producers and protect them from local anti-nuisance ordinances. 

Source: American Farmland Trust

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