SLECC Key Challenges and State and Local Solutions Database
Challenge/Local/State
Fragmented, complex, and unstable incentive programs, with inconsistent messaging and rigid rules, make it difficult for homeowners, renters, and contractors to plan, stack benefits, or move projects forward, leading to missed opportunities and abandoned retrofits.
Challenge/Local/State
Competitive, fragmented grant systems overwhelm limited local capacity and disadvantage smaller jurisdictions and CBOs. Oversubscribed programs with complex requirements favor well-resourced applicants, divert scarce staff time from implementation, and reinforce inequities.
Challenge/Local/State
Streamline and modernize state grant applications through a common application, longer timelines, simplified requirements, and upgraded digital platforms. A unified, equity-centered grant system would reduce administrative burden, improve transparency, and expand access for under-resourced applicants.
Challenge/Local/State
Build sustained, community-centered engagement beyond project cycles. Local and regional agencies should move from one-off, grant-driven outreach to long-term partnerships with CBO networks and ongoing community advisory bodies. These structures enable continuous involvement, reduce engagement fatigue, and ensure underrepresented communities have lasting influence over climate and energy decisions.
Challenge/Local/State
Rising Electricity Rates Undermine the Household Electrification Value Proposition. High and rising electricity costs discourage households from switching from gas to electric systems, slowing a key pathway for emissions reductions. Despite available incentives, electricity rates remain high relative to gas, leading many households to delay electrification and limiting the value of energy efficiency measures that could otherwise reduce demand and bills.
Challenge/Local/State
Work through trusted community-based organizations (CBOs), CCAs, RENs, and other local intermediaries to deliver outreach for retrofit, electrification, and resilience programs. These navigators provide clear, consistent, and unified messaging that reduces confusion and helps rebuild trust in communities affected by past misinformation or bad actors. Effective navigator models include language access and equity supports—such as translation, interpretation, childcare, and food—to ensure engagement is accessible to low-income, rural, Tribal, and linguistically diverse communities. By meeting residents in trusted settings and cultural contexts, navigator-led outreach increases awareness, credibility, and readiness to participate in retrofit programs.
Challenge/Local/State
Offer concierge-style technical assistance to help households and small businesses move from interest to completion. Project-specific support includes explaining retrofit options, navigating requirements, stacking incentives, completing applications, and coordinating next steps. By highlighting available rebates and providing direct enrollment assistance, concierge services reduce drop-off from program complexity, increase participation, and improve equitable access to energy efficiency, electrification, and resilience upgrades.
Challenge/Local/State
Chronic Staff Capacity Constraints. Small, rural, and under-resourced jurisdictions often rely on one planner to manage CEQA, General Plan updates, grant applications, and GHG inventories and CAPs, leaving little capacity for sustained climate planning or implementation. Climate work is added onto existing roles, and complex, non-user-friendly state guidance further exacerbates inequities with better-resourced jurisdictions that have dedicated climate staff.
Challenge/Local/State
Coordinate Regionally to Integrate Incentives and Deliver Turnkey, Multi-Benefit Retrofits. Local governments can participate in regional coordination frameworks—such as collaboration tables or hubs—to align retrofit funding, permitting, and outreach across jurisdictions. Through this coordination, agencies and partners can integrate funding sources behind the scenes using referral systems, bundled incentives, and turnkey retrofit offerings, enabling residents to access a single, streamlined pathway for cooling, electrification, panel upgrades, and resilience improvements.
Challenge/Local/State
Regional collaboratives or higher-capacity jurisdictions can serve as conveners to assemble project teams, administer grants, and provide shared technical and administrative support for smaller agencies. By collaborating regionally on funding applications, jurisdictions can reduce redundancy, share administrative capacity, and expand equitable access to competitive public funds.
Challenge/Local/State
Center grassroots leadership and lived expertise through shared decision-making. Local agencies should include grassroots leaders, CBOs, and Tribal partners in co-designing plans, projects, and outreach—treating lived experience as equal to technical expertise. This approach strengthens trust, relevance, and community ownership while improving participation and implementation.
Challenge/Local/State
Confusing Rate Designs and Lack of Trusted Information Limit Electrification Adoption. Renters and homeowners face complex electric rate designs and lack clarity about whether they are on the most affordable rate for electrification. At the same time, residents often lack clear, trusted information about electrification costs and program benefits, with communication gaps and low trust—especially in disadvantaged communities—limiting participation in retrofit and electrification programs.
Challenge/Local/State
Centralize and Standardize State Data Access for Local Planning. The state should centralize and release standardized, planning-ready climate, energy, utility infrastructure, and transportation datasets for local governments, potentially through a shared data portal. Improving accessibility and consistency would reduce navigation burdens and support effective CAP development and implementation.
Challenge/Local/State
Establish a coordinated statewide clean-energy transition authority or strategy that aligns affordability, reliability, and decarbonization goals across CPUC, CEC, IOUs, and related agencies. This unified framework would address fragmented decision-making, manage system cost drivers, protect households from rising energy bills, and prevent redundant or conflicting infrastructure investments while advancing an equitable energy transition.
Challenge/Local/State
Aging Housing Stock Raises Pre-Retrofit Costs and Complexity. California’s older housing stock creates major barriers to electrification and resilience upgrades. Many homes require costly pre-work—such as electrical panel upgrades, insulation improvements, roofing repairs, or appliance replacements—before zero-emission technologies can be installed. For historic or complex buildings, cumbersome permitting and compliance requirements further slow implementation. Together, these building-specific conditions make retrofits difficult to scale and disproportionately burden low- and moderate-income households, risking widened inequities without affordability-focused program design.
Challenge/Local/State
Reform state retrofit funding and incentive systems to be integrated, flexible, and predictable—enabling incentive stacking behind the scenes, covering pre-condition repairs, expanding eligibility, allowing adaptive use of funds over project lifecycles, and providing stable, rolling funding so residents and contractors can proceed with confidence.
Challenge/Local/State
Establish and strengthen regional, cross-sector climate collaboratives that unify cities, counties, agencies, CBOs, and land managers to coordinate climate-risk data, resources, and resilience actions. These multi-stakeholder networks integrate energy, housing, public health, and land management strategies, enabling aligned responses to cascading climate impacts—including extreme heat, wildfire, air-quality hazards, and post-disaster recovery needs.
Challenge/Local/State
Regional Collaboration and Shared Staffing Models. Local governments can partner with regional agencies to jointly develop GHG inventories, CAP components, and CEQA or planning tools, standardizing methodologies and sharing data to reduce duplication and cost. Regional or pooled staffing models allow smaller and under-resourced jurisdictions to share technical capacity for CAP updates, compliance tracking, and implementation, improving alignment with state frameworks and sustaining program delivery despite limited local staff.
Challenge/Local/State
Fragmented funding, technical assistance, and information systems create confusion and inefficiency for applicants. Misaligned programs, timelines, and lack of centralized information increase duplication of effort and inequitable access.
Challenge/Local/State
Use clear, culturally rooted, and multilingual communication tailored to community context. Local agencies should deliver outreach and facilitation in residents’ preferred languages and cultural formats, using plain, relatable messaging rather than technical jargon. Effective engagement goes beyond basic translation to ensure relevance, accessibility, and trust, while maintaining open, multilingual communication channels that connect communities to programs and elevate community priorities in planning and decision-making.
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