Augustana Lutheran Church Is Now Solar-Powered — But It Was 'A Long Road' To Get There

HYDE PARK — A Hyde Park church recently completed a solar energy project which became a bit of a quagmire after city officials claimed the church was responsible for decades-old fees on University of Chicago properties.

Augustana Lutheran Church, 5500 S. Woodlawn Ave. in Hyde Park, brought its 102-panel solar array online in mid-February, the Rev. Nancy Goede said.

The church awaits its March bill to determine how much power the array provided over its first full month, but it’s expected to cover “pretty much all of our electrical needs” — and could even generate excess energy, Goede said.

“It’s not clear if we’ll be able to sell excess electricity back, but our goal is to sell back into the grid,” Goede said. “We’re glad to do that, with a lot of electrical need on the horizon. But mostly, we did this project to demonstrate a commitment that I think we share with a lot of people in our area and in the U.S.: We want to see alternative energy develop.”

Augustana’s “green team,” made of members who have previously led eco-friendly projects like an environmental stewardship course for churchgoers, oversaw the solar array’s construction.

The team will celebrate the project’s completion with an April 19 service and lunch at the church, starting at 10:45 a.m. The celebration is open to the public, Goede said.

The project was supported by $250,000 in reimbursements from the city’s now-inactive Climate Infrastructure Fund. Augustana has received the full grant amount.

The solar project was hampered by debts that city officials said the church needed to pay before it could sign the grant contract, Goede said.

Before signing a grant contract, city officials performed a “scofflaw check” and determined Augustana owed $6,400 to the transportation department for loading zone and sign fees from the late 1980s, Goede said. Entities on the city’s scofflaw list are ineligible for city contracts.

Augustana’s name was listed on the account that owed money, but the church never owned the three properties in question, Goede said. The properties are on UChicago’s campus.

Church leaders went to City Hall several times and reached out to the university for help before paying the debts, aiming to prove to transportation officials they weren’t responsible, Goede said.

But “nobody was willing to say, ‘Oh, that’s right, that must be a mistake,’” she said.

Members were told during the grant program orientation that there was a hard deadline to clear Augustana from the scofflaw list by August 2024 or they had “no chance at getting a contract,” Goede said.

“We did everything we could think of to try to resolve this on our own, but we weren’t able to,” she said. “We finally said, it’s not worth it to give up the grant in order to save” $6,400.

The Chicago Department of Transportation investigated the issue until Augustana paid the fees, after which the account was cleared from the city’s system, department spokesperson Erica Schroeder said Thursday.

“We regret the oversight,” Schroeder said. “A refund can be issued for the fees paid, and CDOT will coordinate next steps to facilitate that process.”

Planning department officials had previously questioned church members’ frustrations, noting the fees Augustana paid were less than 3 percent of the grant amount the church received.

Augustana had an opportunity to dispute the fees with the planning department before paying them and signing a grant contract, spokesperson Peter Strazzabosco said in a statement Tuesday.

Nothing in the contract nor the grant program requires the city to refund the church, though nothing blocks Augustana “from seeking compensation from individuals or organizations that it believes to be responsible for a debt,” he said.

“The debt was resolved by a payment, versus a formal dispute that might have clarified the alleged issue,” Strazzabosco said. “The program does not use public funds to pay city debts on behalf of private entities.”

Emails obtained by Block Club show UChicago leaders were alerted to the issue in July 2024. One university official wrote to Goede that they were “shocked” the city had found the church responsible for the debts and vowed to “help resolve the matter.”

Following a review, city officials informed the university that the charges “were incorrectly attributed to the church, issued in error, and that no payment from the university was due,” UChicago spokesperson Gerald McSwiggan said Thursday.

As city officials investigated the fees from the ’80s, they also found a separate debt from 2016 regarding church property, McSwiggan and Goede said. The church did not dispute that “small balance” and paid it, Goede said.

“We didn’t realize that we owed money” from 2016, Goede said via email. “When the city stopped sending paper invoices and switched to email invoices, they started sending our invoices to some unknown email account with Augustana in the address. … I know that they now have our correct email address for future communications.”

The fee dispute and other slowdowns in the grant process led the church to spend “about $40,000 more of our own money” than expected, as costs of solar panels rose following President Donald Trump’s election, Goede said.

“As soon as we got to January [2025] and we were getting close to Donald Trump’s inauguration, the prices of the solar panels immediately went up then — before there were any tariffs, in anticipation of tariffs,” Goede said. “If we had been able to move faster, we would’ve been able to avoid that.”

It’s been “a long road” to complete the solar project, Goede said. The experience was discouraging, she said, considering the project aimed to show houses of worship that grant funding could help them improve their buildings’ sustainability.

“The sad thing is, it was meant to be a demonstration to other nonprofits and churches to say, ‘You can do this.’ And pretty quickly along the way, it was clear that, no you can’t,” Goede said.

“To think, could other [churches navigate a similar grant process]? Boy, you would have to be a congregation where you have an urban planner and a really great treasurer who really knows what she’s doing, and a lot of churches don’t have that.”

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