Strategies for Proactive Engagement: Expanding PACE Program Utilization by Women and Minority Business Enterprises in Minnesota
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Strategies for Proactive Engagement: Expanding PACE Program Utilization by Women and Minority Business Enterprises in Minnesota
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2022-05
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The St. Paul Port Authority (SPPA) is a national leader in administering financing for clean energy and energy efficiency projects through MinnPACE, the state’s Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program. Since 2021, the SPPA has completed over 355 MinnPACE projects worth over $225 million. Going forward they identified an opportunity to pursue a more equitable program by advancing additional projects with women and minority-owned business enterprises (WMBEs). This report represents the culmination of work for a capstone project conducted by five graduate students at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. The capstone team was tasked with helping the SPPA target their MinnPACE program to WBMEs. To identify the challenges and opportunities of expanding MinnPACE to include more projects with
WMBEs, the capstone team conducted background research, a demographic analysis, and interviews with businesses, project participants, and additional stakeholders in the Minneapolis-St.Paul area. After conducting our stakeholder and WMBE interviews, we arrived at four high-level recommendations for SPPA: 1) inrease awareness of the MinnPACE program and build trust with WMBEs; 2) accommodate WMBEs with limited resources; 3) navigate property ownership challenges, common to WMBEs; and 4) expand their internal capacity. From these findings, our team developed a variety of action items for SPPA in order to address these challenges.
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Capstone paper for the fulfillment of the Master of Science in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy degree.
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Ackerman, Dillon; Anderson, Josh; Barry, Eric; Gray, Lauren; Hestbech, Emily. (2022). Strategies for Proactive Engagement: Expanding PACE Program Utilization by Women and Minority Business Enterprises in Minnesota. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/229529.
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