Washington climate grants spent $8.5M on e-bikes and salaries, not cleaner air

Washington Democrats sold the Climate Commitment Act’s air quality grant program on the premise that communities hardest hit by pollution would finally see real results. But a new report from the Washington Policy Center finds that nearly $8.5 million in grants spent last year delivered almost nothing to those communities.

Todd Myers, the center’s environmental director and the report’s author, reviewed 20 grants distributed under the state’s Air Quality in Overburdened Communities program. He found just one project that actually reduced pollution at a reasonable cost. The rest went to staff salaries, overhead, political advocacy, e-bike subsidies, and community meetings with no measurable effect on air quality.

This fits a pattern SeattleRed has covered extensively, including the state’s history of inflated Climate Commitment Act accounting.

Advocates paid, communities ignored

Myers laid out the findings on The Jason Rantz Show on Seattle Red 770 AM.

“Most of those were for community outreach, which included political advocacy,” he said. “You mentioned the Somali Independent Business Alliance, the Urban League, for example. They attached a budget that was 80% staff and 20% overhead, no actual helping people reduce air pollution and things like that. A lot of it went to community meetings.”

A Yakima Valley grant recipient refused to share data from those meetings with Myers, claiming the records were HIPAA-protected.

“I asked one group in the Yakima Valley who was doing community meetings and things like that for their data, and what did they find? They told us that they couldn’t share the data, that there was a process and that they were HIPAA protected. Well, that’s just nonsense. They are just trying to hide the data. That one in particular also created a seven-body community council to do this, and paid the members of the council $2,000 each, for what we don’t know, because they haven’t released the data,” Myers said.

E-bike subsidies and community meetings replaced real pollution cuts

Another grantee told Myers that wildfire smoke was the community’s top air quality concern, then acknowledged it could not address it because the grant scope did not require it to. MyNorthwest previously reported that just 0.1 percent of total CCA spending went to air quality projects.

E-bike subsidies were another favored use of funds. A University of Washington study commissioned by the state Department of Transportation found that giving residents money for e-bikes did nothing to reduce how much they drove.

“If you give people free money, shockingly, they use it, and they do buy the e-bikes, but it doesn’t actually reduce the amount that they drive, so it doesn’t have the impact that’s claimed,” Myers added.

Urban League’s defense: the contract got renewed

One grantee had planned to replace 20 wood-burning stoves, a genuine source of particulate matter. When Myers followed up asking how many had been replaced, the answer was zero. The grantee wrote an online guide instead and kept the money, he said.

“When we put out our report, somebody asked the Urban League, is this true, what are you doing? And the Urban League’s response was, well, we must be doing something right, because our contract has been extended. The Department of Ecology simply renews the contract. Is it because they’re actually producing reductions in pollution? No, of course not. There really is no oversight or accountability for actually helping people avoid asthma triggers and reducing air pollution,” he said.

One project out of 21 actually reduced pollution

The sole success in the entire grant program was a Spokane project that applied chip seal to a dirt road, measurably cutting the particulate matter that triggers asthma attacks. One out of 20.

The Washington Policy Center previously exposed a $45 million CCA program subsidizing electric vehicle purchases that reduced CO2 emissions by just 0.03 percent. That program was not renewed after the findings went public.

Myers argued the failure is not a series of accidents.

“It’s part of the Washington State approach that says we’re going to spend money on things that sound good and feel good that meet these political goals, like helping overburdened communities,” he said. “But when you actually look at the results, it doesn’t deliver anything. This is why we constantly talk about what leaders we are, and then when you actually look at the policies, we’re not leaders. We fail again and again and again.”

Listen to The Jason Rantz Show on weekday afternoons from 3 p.m. – 7 p.m. on Seattle Red on 770 AM (HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here. Follow Jason Rantz on X, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.