Property-Assessed Payments for Energy Retrofits
Many American states have mechanisms whereby interested
municipalities can provide property owners with low-interest loans to
finance home energy retrofits financed through a surcharge on the
owner’s property tax bill. Such a program, known as Energy Local
Improvement Charges, Energy Community Improvement Plans, Property
Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) or Property-Assessed Payments for Energy
Retrofits (PAPER), allows municipalities to offer a no cost service
financed by property owners who wish to participate in such a program.
This provides homeowners with a financing mechanism that can make such
activities more attractive and feasible for
landowners, and allow municipalities to borrow efficiently against an
incremental tax revenue stream and/or to issue bonds to provide capital
for these improvements. It would further provincial climate change
objectives and offer additional flexibility for homeowners to
participate in existing eco-action plans and available programs. Similar
programs were pioneered by California and New York State and have now
spread to 12 other states and are being investigated by two Ontario
municipalities with assistance from the Ontario Power Authority (OPA). A
brief overview and a case study are provided in an attachment to this
letter.
AMO believes that Ontario has before it an historic opportunity to
build/utilize legislative tools such as this to revolutionize our
building stock and to further the province’s leadership of
the new, green economy and we have supported this initiative since
January 2010. AMO and staff from a number of member municipalities
have participated in a working group to discuss the PAPER mechanism
which has contributed to the following two papers from the David Suzuki
Institute:
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