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During her 11 year stint as the sustainability manager for Columbia, Mo., Barbara Buffaloe cooked up a lot plans to adapt the city for climate change and cut its carbon footprint. The college town planned to buy renewable energy and electrify its buses, among other things. All of it would serve the goal of cutting the community's emissions 35% by 2035.
But Buffaloe faced one giant roadblock: funding. In a section labeled “tension point,” the city’s 2019 climate action and adaptation plan bluntly said that paying for the programs would be difficult and could require a rebalancing of priorities and, potentially, new taxes and fees. In the meantime, the city focused on what she described to me as “incremental improvements.”
Then, almost overnight, the opportunity to implement changed with the passage of a series of federal infrastructure laws, including and especially the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The 2022 law opened up new avenues for cities to fund infrastructure projects. “In the last two years, we have seen significant strides towards meeting these goals because of the historic investment we’ve been receiving from the federal government,” Buffaloe told me in September.
