By Claire Carlson for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Deborah Van Fleet for Nebraska News Connection reporting for The Daily Yonder-Public News Service Collaboration

A federal grant of $62 million to the nonprofit Center for Rural Affairs in Lyons, Nebraska, will help build residential solar-power installations for Nebraska families who usually can’t afford the cost-saving systems, the center’s director said.

The Center for Rural Affairs is one of 60 grantees across the country that will participate in the Solar for All program, a Biden administration initiative that is part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The program will provide a one-time injection of $7 billion nationally to help people who would normally have a hard time paying for residential solar production capacity.

“The people that have built solar have tended to be middle income and higher individuals or institutions that have the discretionary resources to do the upfront costs or do the financing,” said Brian Depew, executive director of the Center for Rural Affairs.

The center has advocated for economic justice and environmental stewardship in Nebraska’s rural communities for more than 50 years. The Solar for All project will serve all of Nebraska, not just rural areas.

“People with less fiscal capacity have not yet been able to participate fully in the benefits of solar energy,” Depew said. “That’s what we’re trying to change.”

The Center for Rural Affairs received word of the grant in April (2024). Depew said learning about the large grant was a “surreal” moment for his organization. 

“It’s a major award for the Center for Rural Affairs,” Depew said in a Daily Yonder interview. “Just the magnitude of the award and the size of the project that we’ll be able to do.”

The Solar for All program comes out of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency estimates that 900,000 households across the country will benefit from the solar projects funded by the program. Recipients range from state governmental agencies to nonprofit organizations like the Center for Rural Affairs. 

Once the awards are allocated to the organizations such as the Center for Rural Affairs that will distribute the funds to recipients, eligible households in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, U.S. territories, and tribal nations will be able to apply for grants, technical assistance, and loans to pay for solar panels. 

In Nebraska, this opportunity will most likely open to residents in the next two years. “There will be an up to one-year planning period where we will further design…the application period [for grants],” Depew said. “We hope to start piloting some actual solar installations during the planning period, but it could be a full year before we are really up and ready to take applications from a broader array of people.” 

Depew credits the Center for Rural Affairs’ success in getting this award to the number of stakeholders they conferred with during the application process. The center met with more than 50 stakeholders from rural, suburban, urban, and tribal communities in Nebraska to get their input for a program proposal that made sense for their communities. What made it into the final application was a three-part strategy for implementing residential solar in Nebraska. 

The first strategy is community solar, in which public utilities manage the solar arrays and eligible residences could benefit from the solar through a subscription service or by owning some of the panels. The second is multifamily affordable housing solar, in which the center would work with utilities, developers, or low-income housing financing partners to deploy solar at multifamily residences. And the third strategy would be directly providing grants or loans for rooftop solar to individual residences. 

The center’s Solar for All application proposed allocating each of the three strategies one-third of the total project funds. This could change as they work on the details in the planning process that will take place in collaboration with the EPA over the next year.

“All of the projects are required to be residential-serving solar, and they’re required to serve low to moderate income individuals and individuals living in historically disadvantaged census tracts,” Depew said. 

The EPA identified these census tracts using the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, which is part of the Biden administration’s Justice40 Initiative to ensure 40% of federal environmental investments go to communities that are “marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution,” according to a press release. Some of these census tracts will include rural communities, but people can also qualify at the individual household level regardless of the census tract they live in. 

The Solar for All money will be disbursed over a five year period. The Center for Rural Affairs plans to put some of the money into a revolving loan fund so they can extend the funding beyond the five years. A complete list of Solar for All awardees may be found here.


Claire Carlson wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.


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Leaders of some nonprofit organizations in Arkansas are not happy with a recent tax cut package passed by the Legislature.

The law reduces the tax rate for people who make more than $25,000 a year. The corporate tax rate was also reduced from 4.8% percent to 4.3%. Opponents of the cuts said they only benefit the wealthy.

Syard Evans, CEO of the Arkansas Support Network and co-chair of the Arkansas Coalition for Strong Families, said elected officials are not addressing issues affecting quality of life services for Arkansans and they are concerned the cuts will affect programs.

"Day in and day out we face the challenges of people not having enough resources to meet their basic needs," Evans pointed out. "And to really live a legitimate quality of life that we want and expect for all of our citizens."

Supporters of the tax cuts said Arkansas is expected to have a surplus of more than $700 million annually and community programs will not be affected.

The new rates are retroactive to Jan. 1 and the action mean Arkansas has one of the lowest tax rates in the South. It also has the highest maternal mortality rate in the nation, the second-highest teen pregnancy rate, and the third-highest infant mortality rate. Evans argued the cuts reduce money that could go to programs addressing childhood poverty or incentives for affordable housing.

"It's not even to say that the tax cuts don't need to happen," Evans emphasized. "What we're saying is that in order for things like that to happen we have to be responsible for meeting the needs that the state is obligated to meet."

The tax cut legislation requires almost $300 million to be put into an emergency fund in case the money is needed to make up for any revenue shortfalls.


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Some Michigan mayors are out of the office this week - but still working for their cities.

They're at the 92nd meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors, with more than 200 from across the nation gathering to tackle some of the most urgent issues facing their communities. They're discussing infrastructure investment, housing and homelessness, and public safety.

After the recent mass shooting in Rochester Hills that wounded nine people, including two children, at a splash-pad event, the city's Mayor Bryan Barnett said the tragedy has shifted his priorities at this year's meeting.

"This terrible intersection of mental health and gun violence is where my focus and attention is - both in bringing healing to my community and trying to understand how we can be more effective moving forward," he said. "And I don't think there's any better group of people in America that understands personally and professionally, really, than America's mayors."

In preparation for the November election, the mayors are also expected to address their priorities for the next administration. This year's conference runs through Sunday.

Rochester Hills, a community of nearly 76,000 residents, was rocked by the shooting, and Barnett shared how his colleagues from around the country showed support.

"I've had almost 70 mayors reach out to me personally, many of them having their own stories about mass shootings," he said. "In the aftermath, they've proven to be incredibly helpful."

High-ranking administration officials and key leaders from both the public and private sectors are at the conference, including representatives from FEMA and the federal departments of Transportation and Justice.

Barnett said being the kind of leader who sets a good example for his community is important to him.

"One of the reasons I love being mayor is because I've seen so many of my colleagues, and hopefully myself as well, exhibit a different kind of leadership," he said. "The kind of leadership that says, 'OK, we're not going to point fingers, but instead we're going to try and just get things done. Move the ball down the field.'"

As the presidential election approaches, Barnett said, there will be a lot of loud, angry rhetoric - but he's convinced America is looking for a different kind of leadership.


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The stage is set for a massive investment in Oregon's plans to bring high-speed internet to everyone in the state. The second volume of Oregon's Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment proposal has been approved by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, laying out its plan for investing nearly $700 million in federal funding.

Nick Batz, Oregon Broadband office director says the goal is internet for all.

"This is a historic investment. We've never seen this much money invested in broadband by the federal government before. I'm not sure that we're ever going to see it again, and if we're successful, we're not going to need it again," he explained.

Batz notes that high-speed internet connectivity is crucial, enabling everything from remote work to telemedicine appointments, and is especially important in rural parts of the state.

Batz added the state will now begin the process of selecting the grantees that will build the infrastructure to locations that are unserved or underserved.

"The goal of this challenge process is to identify every location in Oregon that is eligible to receive BEAD funding. So, by the end of this challenge process, we will have a master list of all these locations. It's going to be somewhere in neighborhood of 120-,130-,140,000 locations," he explained.

Funding to increase broadband access has become available through the passage of Congress's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The Biden Administration is currently in the process of distributing more than $42 billion to states to increase high-speed internet connectivity.


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