Convening the Sierra – Fall 2026
September 25, 2026
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SBC, CTA, and the Town of Truckee presented on local workforce development, electrification, and regional climate action at the 2025 CCEC Forum!
By: David Jaeger & Kaeleigh Reynolds
The California Climate and Energy Collaborative (CCEC) hosted its annual forum in San Jose, CA, on July 9–10, 2025. As part of this year’s event, Sierra Business Council (SBC), in partnership with the Climate Transformation Alliance and the Town of Truckee, presented a panel titled “Powering Local Climate Action: Strategies for Collaboration, Workforce, and Decarbonization.”
The panel showcased various local programs and strategies the Truckee Tahoe region has leveraged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Anna Klovstad, Vice Mayor of Truckee and co-founder of the Climate Transformation Alliance, opened the presentation by sharing the development process for our regional collaborative and how critical building community coalition is to progress. SBC’s David Jaeger followed by describing CTA’s regional building electrification program, Go Electric Truckee Tahoe, which administers local contractor training and workforce development for heat pump retrofits and technical assistance support for home and building owners looking to navigate electrification projects in a snowy, mountain climate. Truckee Town Council Member, Courtney Henderson, rounded out the panel with progress the Town has made advancing local mandates and policies that reduce emissions and enhance community resilience.
This session provided time and encouraged attendees to engage in thoughtful discussion about the topics covered amongst their table-mates. Before each presentation, audience members participated in five-minute small group discussions to identify related barriers within their own communities. Following each presentation, participants were given an additional five minutes to share insights and brainstorm solutions based on what they heard. This format led to rich conversation that often had to be cut short to keep our session on track. Thankfully, panel moderator, SBC’s Kaeleigh Reynolds, effectively guided the group’s attention back to each succeeding activity.
After the session, SBC collected and synthesized the notes from these group discussions, creating a snapshot of the collective knowledge and ideas exchanged during the session. These insights, along with the challenges and solutions shared by the panelists, are summarized below.
Building Community Coalitions and Movements
Challenges
Session attendees highlighted elements that may be lacking if coalition building is running into roadblocks:
Audience members also pointed to a lack of balance between talk and action, carrots and sticks, and adaptation and mitigation focus, which can limit the success of coalition building. Additionally, inability to curb the image of climate as a ‘rich white people’ issue can result in a reduced coalition that doesn’t represent the community.
Solutions
After Anna Klovstad presented about CTA and building a local climate coalition in the Truckee Tahoe region, participants identified the following strategies to address the barriers to building community movements:
Most responses indicated a need to work with a diverse range of participants to build a truly representative coalition. This includes diverse age groups (youth workforce development to senior advocates), diverse sectors (public, private, and nonprofit), and especially a diverse range of community groups representing all local races, ethnicities, and backgrounds.
Implementing Building Electrification
Challenges
Session attendees identified multiple barriers to creating and implementing regional building decarbonization programs:
Multiple responses also indicated a lack of political will or interest in electrification. How successful regional building electrification programs are largely depends on the level of interest from both residents and local government officials.
Solutions
After David Jaeger’s presentation about the Go Electric Truckee Tahoe regional electrification program, attendees wrote down the following potential solutions:
Many responses highlighted the need to support contractors to have a local workforce able to provide electrification services. This may involve collaboration with technical schools and unions. Additionally, contractors must believe that there will be projects available for them to build their business to motivate electrification training, so building local interest is generally critical.
Local Government Climate Action Implementation
Challenges
Session attendees noted the following barriers for local governments pursuing climate action:
Local governments also often struggle to engage and build trust with all community members to bolster grassroots support for climate action initiatives.
Solutions
After Courtney Henderson’s presentation about the Town of Truckee’s climate action efforts, attendees identified the following solutions:
Generally speaking, attendees noted that if a local government is motivated to pursue climate action, they need to start at the ground floor and build community interest and knowledge to ensure that programs are not only popular but also effective.
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Two SNEW services that are often requested by Sierra Nevada public agencies are energy benchmarking (sometimes including AB 802 reporting for buildings
California’s 2026-27 legislative session wrapped up September 1 after a turbulent final week of negotiations over wildfire policy, funding, and the state budget. While a last-minute proposal on wildfire liability ultimately stalled, the Legislature did restore and increase funding for climate resilience through Proposition 4 and the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF)—a meaningful outcome for Sierra communities amid a challenging state budget year.
The final plan includes $329.5 million for wildfire and forest resilience through Prop 4 and $118 million for wildfire prevention through GGRF. While these investments are an improvement over the June budget, wildfire resilience funding remains near historic lows, with no clear plan for sustained investment in future years.
Read more about the final budget, Prop 4 and GGRF allocations, and what’s next for wildfire and climate resilience in the Sierra.