Community Benefits Agreements Offer Meaningful Opportunities to Include Voters’ Voices in Development
By Catherine Fraser
The IPCC’s latest report underscores the urgent need to stop burning fossil fuels and remove carbon dioxide from the air by building out renewable energy and carbon removal capacity. Given the speed and scale of development needed to limit planetary warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and the imperative of centering justice and equity, community benefits agreements (CBAs) will be an important tool to ensure climate-related infrastructure benefits the communities it’s sited in.
A CBA is an agreement between a project developer and a coalition of community groups that outlines certain benefits the developer will give the community in exchange for community support for that project. CBAs can include guarantees to hire local workers on the project, pay workers a local living wage, provide money for local trust funds, fund job training and educational services, finance new community development projects like community centers, and more. A variety of development projects have used CBAs, from refineries like Chevron’s Richmond, Calif., facility to stadiums like Pittsburgh’s PPG Paints Arena.
CBAs are overwhelmingly popular. A recent Data for Progress poll finds that 59 percent of likely voters support the use of CBAs on development projects (a +40-point margin of support). And support for CBAs holds across partisan lines, with 61 percent of Democrats, 53 percent of Independents, and 63 percent of Republicans in favor.
Support for CBAs increases slightly when voters think about their own communities, with 62 percent of respondents in favor of local CBAs. Notably, when asked if they would support or oppose the use of a CBA for a proposed development project in their community, 17 percent of both Black and Latina/o voters indicate they would “strongly support” a CBA, as compared to 12 percent of white voters. Given historical and ongoing systemic racism and the predatory siting of development projects in communities of color, this finding is indicative of the need and support for CBAs that center equity and prioritize restorative justice.
At their best, CBAs can deliver benefits for communities located near new development projects. In Tennessee, Justice Democrats-endorsed congressional candidate Odessa Kelly led Stand Up Nashville’s negotiations of a landmark CBA that won affordable housing, living wages, and childcare facilities in exchange for the development of Nashville’s Major League Soccer stadium. And right now in Congress, Texas Democrats are demanding guaranteed workers’ rights on all future offshore wind development in the Gulf of Mexico.
The climate crisis necessitates new and rapid development of critical climate infrastructure like wind farms, solar arrays, and direct air capture (DAC) hubs. Voters broadly support new bills introduced at the state level in New York and nationally in Congress to deploy carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies like DAC to keep global warming below 1.5 C. Both bills require government officials to ensure new technologies and projects deliver benefits to environmental justice and marginalized communities. Moving forward, CBAs can be a critical tool to codify such benefits.
Despite the promise of CBAs to guarantee communities are consulted about and benefit from a given development, CBAs can be weak and nonbinding if designed poorly. As a result, adhering to a set of best practices is key to ensure a CBA effectively addresses community needs and concerns. These practices include:
Building a strong foundation for negotiating community benefits agreements:
Negotiations should ideally begin before a project developer has secured a land-use agreement with the government. The earlier community groups engage in the process, the more leverage they will have during the negotiating process; and
Throughout CBA negotiations, it is important for community groups to have capacity to draft public and internal-facing communications about the process, rally community members, navigate the legal system, and research and incorporate best practices from earlier CBAs. To successfully negotiate a CBA, groups should ensure they have sufficient capacity in house or consult organizations well-versed in CBAs.
Centering the “community” in community benefits agreements:
Benefits should be targeted to marginalized communities and used as a means of restorative justice. Depending on the context around a given development project, CBAs should strive to allocate 35 percent of benefits to communities of color, Indigenous peoples, low-income communities, and other marginalized groups.
Robust and effective CBAs are created by a representative and diverse group of stakeholders, including labor unions, environmental groups, community members, faith organizations, community groups, local businesses, and more. Project developers should not be allowed to cherry-pick who participates in a community coalition; and
CBAs should provide benefits that a community actually needs and wants to ensure a CBA meaningfully benefits that community. CBAs shouldn’t be just a tool for developers to gain community and governmental support to shepherd through a project without actually engaging with community groups and offering tangible and measurable benefits.
Designing transparent and enforceable community benefits agreements:
CBAs should be legally binding and enforceable, detailing how to measure and implement commitments made by project developers and including specific dollar amounts, dates, and other metrics. A CBA should establish penalties for noncompliance and make clear who will be responsible for tracking and enforcing CBA commitments; and
Community members should be regularly informed of developments in negotiations, which should take place publicly between the developer and community groups. Such groups should not be excluded from negotiations or circumvented by a private developer going directly to the government entity charged with permitting or approving a project.
CBAs in Practice
After the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team received funding from the city to build a new stadium in Pittsburgh’s One Hill neighborhood in 2007, community members created the One Hill Neighborhood Coalition and successfully negotiated a landmark $8.3 million community benefits agreement. This CBA established a number of provisions to ensure that the stadium would provide tangible community benefits, including:
A requirement to hire local workers for 40-60 percent of the 640 jobs created by the project;
A living wage guarantee for stadium workers and the right for workers to form a union;
A job center to help residents get union apprenticeships and jobs paying a living wage;
$6 million to fund community development, green space preservation, drug, alcohol, and mental health services, and educational and youth programming;
$2 million to build a grocery store in the neighborhood, which qualified as a food desert;
The establishment of a community center; and
A LEED certification plan for the new stadium.
In exchange, the coalition agreed to support the Penguins’ development plan. The One Hill Neighborhood Coalition included 100 different community groups, was transparent about the timeline for developing the CBA, and engaged the public and community groups to encourage widespread community involvement in the CBA process. Moreover, their CBA included specific commitments and dollar amounts, and is legally binding for all parties involved and any future developer who may take over the project.
Despite the strengths of the One Hill Neighborhood Coalition's CBA, it was not a resounding success, as the grocery store created through the CBA has since closed, failing to draw enough customers to be self-sustaining. Moreover, the $8.3 million in benefits won by the CBA was just a fraction of the $245 million the Penguins received from the state of Pennsylvania to build the stadium. CBAs for CDR and renewable energy projects should focus on delivering enduring sustainable benefits that can be scaled relative to the benefits developers derice from a project.
In addition, future CBA community coalitions should ensure community groups control the CBA process. Instead of a community coalition, the city of Richmond, Calif., developed the CBA with Chevron’s Richmond Refinery directly, resulting in an agreement with benefits that community members said didn’t go far enough. Similarly, after announcing the new Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park development in Brooklyn, project developer Forest City Ratner set out to craft a CBA to quell community criticism of the project, which included new high rise buildings and the Barclays Center, where both the Brooklyn Nets of the NBA and the New York Liberty of the WNBA now play. Ratner hand-picked the community members and groups with which the CBA would be negotiated, and even created and funded front community groups to create a false appearance of grassroots support for the project, a practice sometimes called astroturfing. Despite the $200 million in government subsidies Ratner received for the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park development in return for negotiating a CBA and building the development, many of the benefits negotiated in the CBA never materialized and the commitments made in the CBA were never meaningfully enforced. The Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park CBA is an example of how the CBA process can be co-opted by a private developer to fast-track a project under the guise of cooperating with community members. As a result, CBAs negotiated for CDR and renewable energy projects must be the democratic creation of a large, diverse, and representative coalition of community groups and interests.
Data for Progress polling finds that likely voters have a vision for CBAs for projects in their community. A majority of likely voters support the use of CBAs on renewable energy developments (55 percent), industrial chemical manufacturing plants (55 percent), and oil and natural gas developments (56 percent).
As CBAs have only gained attention and recognition in recent years, many voters may have little background knowledge about CBAs or may have never heard about them prior to taking this survey. Notably, a significant share of respondents (generally around 20 percent) answer “don’t know” when responding to questions about their preferences for CBAs. Moreover, respondents are asked to quickly make a decision about CBAs, complex policy tools that may be hard to understand or contextualize right away, further contributing to these “don’t know” responses. As a result, continued education on CBAs and an emphasis on transparency in CBA development will be key to garnering public support for effective CBAs.
When asked what benefits they would most like to see included in a CBA for a development project in their community, voters most often choose labor benefits (33 percent), then funding for community services (29 percent), followed by funding for community development projects (19 percent) and environmental benefits (19 percent). Notably, Black voters choose funding for community services (37 percent) more frequently than any other group, while non-college-educated voters choose labor benefits (38 percent) more than any other group.
When asked to describe specific benefits that would be most impactful in their communities, voters call out examples, such as:
“Housing for the homeless and counseling services for mental health and drug abuse;”
Benefits which “help the elderly, veterans, and disabled;”
“Solar panels for some public buildings and open space set aside for the public;”
“That a certain percentage of the workers be hired from the local community and there be a commitment for contribution to clean air quality depending on the type of project;”
“Programs that help build up the next generation for success;” and
“Providing jobs to workers in the local community and paying them a liveable wage.”
These responses demonstrate that, when evaluating the elements of a useful community benefits agreement, voters have a keen awareness of the personal impact and benefits that could come out of a negotiated CBA.
Moreover, when asked which community groups they’d want involved in the CBA negotiation process, voters say they want small business owners (54 percent) involved more than any other community group. In Nashville, small business owners and local residents won retail space at a reduced rental rate within the new soccer stadium, highlighting the power of including their voices in a CBA coalition. Voters also select community leaders (45 percent), environmental groups (39 percent), and public interest organizations (38 percent) as groups they would want involved in the process.
Though the climate crisis demands rapid deployment of clean energy technologies, we must balance this urgency with robust engagement with community stakeholders. Communities can’t come second to the need to rapidly scale up CDR and renewable energy technologies. With CBAs, we can ensure meaningful and just community benefits while working fast to address the climate crisis. By adhering to and building on this set of best practices, and learning from the past shortcomings of CBAs, we can more meaningfully engage in a just transition to a clean energy economy.
Catherine Fraser (@cathwfraser) is a project assistant at Data for Progress.