Milwaukee’s Climate and Equity Plan: Mitigating Racial Inequity Through ‘Green Jobs’

The City-County Task Force on Climate and Economic Equality committed to finding ways to mitigate racial inequity through “green jobs” on Nov. 29 during the last “Community Climate Conversations” event.

The recurring Community Climate Conversations have taken place at the Innovations and Wellness Commons in Milwaukee’s historic Lindsay Heights neighborhood. The purpose of this space was to allow and encourage community members to voice feedback on the city’s climate and equity plan before the 30-day comment period ceased.

“We have a long standing issue with racial and economic equity in Milwaukee,” Deneine Powell, climate solutions and policy advocate, said.

Following the release of the climate and equity plan, the Environmental Collaboration Office compiled a list of “10 big ideas” to change the City of Milwaukee. Number one was listed as “Green Jobs Accelerator.”

“It’s important that we reimagine what a green job is,” State Rep. Supreme Moore Omokunde, special guest speaker at the event, said. “You look at somebody coming to insulate your home. Before, that was just a comfort thing, but it’s a green job. There are people who are waiting. Students are learning how to build equipment. When we talk about transitional jobs, there are entire industries that are waiting to turn dirty jobs into clean jobs.”

The city faces two issues with diverse success in green jobs: introduction and resources.

“We have to make sure we’re getting more and more young people to want these jobs,” Omokunde said. “Most of these jobs won’t require a 4-year degree. They’ll want degrees from MATC or programs like that.”

It is a primary goal of the task force to “tackle middle and high schools” with introductory information on these jobs, according to Omokunde.

Vincent High School, in the MPS district, has partnered with the agricultural programs at UW-Madison and UW-River Falls. UW-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences offers opportunities to K-12 students to be involved in work.

“We need people and innovators to come together to make this normal — a normal thing that happens in schools,” Omokunde said.

According to the task force, after employers of green jobs receive an interested job candidate from an underserved community, the next battle is getting them to and from their training. 

Milwaukee ranked 42nd in the “accessibility and convenience” category of the cities with the best public transportation.

“We have to level the playing field by providing support in these training programs,” Powell said.

Three ideas following “Green Jobs Accelerator” were healthy homes, new net-zero homes and commercial building standards.

Net-zero homes are made to use as little energy as possible and focus on clean electricity.

“Families should not have to spend more than 3% of their income on energy,” Powell said.

According to a recent analysis, roughly 6% of the Milwaukee metro population live in high energy burden, the percent of household income that goes toward energy costs, census tracts.

“The goal is to get those climate ready homes to the people and make them affordable,” Powell said.

As of now, Wisconsin energy providers, We Energies and its parent company WEC Energy Group, are continuing to burn coal. Attempting to move the state closer to carbon reduction goals, a plan is set to drop coal from the power mix by 2035.

“The city is doing a lot to acquire more solar energy,” Omokunde said. “We’ve started to examine the process of having solar farms in communities.”

According to the task force, those solar farms would not be placed in residents’ backyards. They would be locally located.

“They are finding a way to build the infrastructure where we can tap into and have it ourselves,” Omokunde said.

The commercial building standards, listed as number four in the ideas, aims to enable large building owners to reduce water and energy consumption and provide proof through benchmarking.

“What we think they may fight us on is the reporting that needs to happen so that we can actually tell if they’re doing what they said they would,” Powell said.

The Environmental Collaboration Office has created a better buildings challenge to “rebuild Milwaukee from the inside out.” It provides a program with tools and resources that building owners and property managers can access to develop and implement energy efficiency projects in their buildings.