Last week, 31 mountain community leaders sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to protect the IRA tax incentives in the current budget negotiations. It is a powerful message from communities that are feeling the impacts of climate change every day.
The tax incentives, introduced as part of the historic Inflation Reduction Act, provide valuable funding to help communities upgrade local infrastructure with clean energy projects, create jobs and strengthen our local economies, while also providing financial relief to residents and building climate resiliency in some of the most vulnerable, front-line climate communities.
If the tax credits are substantially changed or repealed, the Mountain West stands to lose over $36 billion in investment and over 36,000 jobs.
Now, it’s your turn! Please take a moment to call your Representative to let them know how critical it is to protect these tax credits in the current budget conversations. Your voice matters and will provide real-world context to how truly important these tax credits are to their constituents.
Making a call to your Congressperson’s office is very easy, and it matters. The person who picks up will typically be a staff assistant or an intern, or you may need to leave a voicemail. Calls are tracked by staff and reported to the Congressperson daily so the more calls that are made on this issue, the more powerful the message will be to act.
The budget reconciliation process is happening on in the House of Representatives right now, so please make a quick call or leave a message today. Two easy steps:
- Use this tool to find your Representative and their phone number:
https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member
Members of Congress have both DC and district offices. Many times, district offices have a lower call volume, meaning you may be more likely to speak with a staff member from their local district office than if you were to call their DC office. Or please call both! - Feel free to use these talking points:
- My name is xxx and I live in xxxx and I am a constituent of Representative xxxx.
- Tell them a bit about you – are you a small business owner? A homeowner with kids?
- As you know, The stakes are particularly high for mountain towns. Shorter winters, drought conditions, and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns have strained our economies, making it more important than ever to ensure our local economies remain resilient. Our communities cannot afford uncertainty about energy costs or infrastructure investment.
- I am calling today to let you know how important the clean energy tax credits are to me and my community.
- Specifically, as budget conversations are taking place, we ask you to protect the residential tax credits—the 25C Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit and the 25D Residential Clean Energy Credit. By taking full advantage of these two credits, the average single-family homeowner would save $1,880 per year, cutting energy bills by two-thirds.
- I also ask you to preserve direct pay provisions such as the 45W Commercial Clean Vehicles Credit, the 30C Alternative Refueling Property Credit, and the 48E Clean Electricity Investment Credit have enabled our towns to upgrade municipal vehicle fleets, build refueling stations, and develop electricity generation projects that stabilize long-term energy costs.
- Rolling back these incentives would introduce significant uncertainty for households, small businesses, and local governments alike, stalling projects that are already underway and limiting future investment opportunities.
- If the tax credits are substantially changed or repealed, the Mountain West stands to lose over $36 billion in investment and over 36,000 jobs.
- I respectfully urge you to preserve these important tax credits and, likewise, to avoid any measures that would weaken or otherwise limit the impact of these provisions on our economies. Doing so will ensure continued economic prosperity, energy affordability, and job creation in our communities.
- Thank you very much for your time and if Congressman/Congresswoman xxx would like to discuss this in more detail, please reach out anytime.
- My name is xxx and I live in xxxx and I am a constituent of Representative xxxx.
Thank you for taking the time to make a call, we truly appreciate it. Once you do, please report back to us and let us know how it went at [email protected].
