The Senate Commerce Committee voted Do Pass last Wednesday on the PACE bill. So this win/win proposal is on its way in the upper chamber. But it’s having a tough go in the House because we live in a state where representatives propose such dim bulb ideas as a bill that would allow for light bulbs manufactured in Missouri to be stamped “made in Missouri”. Seriously. In contrast, PACE is a bill for grownups. It would allow homeowners to get long term loans for energy upgrades by applying to municipalities that have opted in. The bill would enable homeowners to see cash savings from the very first month they upgraded, it would create green jobs, and it would cost the state … nothing. What’s not to like? Twenty-eight other states have already instituted similar programs.

Our job is to make the House leadership notice good fortune when, wearing sequins and a sash that says “GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY”, it jumps up and down waving its arms in front of them. Let me inspire you to take the initiative by reprinting these grafs from a posting two years ago about Jim Trout’s run for the Senate seat in Kirkwood/Webster:

[Trout] told me that in the latter half of the nineties, Representative Sue Shear (D-HD 83) worked for several years to get health care coverage for poor disabled children. At the time, only parents at the poverty level could get coverage for such children. Insurance companies turned a cold shoulder to disabled children whose parents earned more than poverty level, even if the family could scrape together the money for premiums. Shear was proposing MC Plus, a program that enabled parents earning $39,000 or less to insure a disabled child; it guaranteed coverage and gave them some help from the state on a sliding scale.

One spring, Trout called Shear and asked where the bill stood in the legislature. It’s dead, she told him. The chair won’t let it out of committee. Trout asked her who the committee chair was, but he didn’t call the man. Instead, he called fifty of his friends and asked them to call the man–and to keep him on the phone with their complaints. Apparently, a lot of those fifty people did as they were asked. The bill made it out of committee in a jiffy and passed.

I’m writing in lieu of calling fifty people individually. And I can’t ask you to bend the ear of some committee chair, since no committee’s got the bill. You’ll need to call Speaker Ron Richard’s office (573-751-2173–ask for Kristen) and Majority Leader Steve Tilley’s office (573-751-1488). The PACE bill is HB2178.

Tell them that Missouri could save up to 30 percent of its energy costs just by creating more efficient buildings. But don’t come across as some Greenpeace-crazed, granola-munching hippie: they don’t want to hear about slowing climate change. Focus instead on eliminating the need to build another power plant. They still remember what a touchy subject that is. And even those who think climate change is some librul hoax know it’s a good idea to use less foreign oil.

Stress that the beauty of this legislation is that it is not an example of government poking its nose into people’s business. Instead, it’s a bill that simply allows citizens to do good for their state and their country even as they solve their own problems. PACE would let people do for themselves, at no cost to the state in these recessionary times. Think of it as deregulating consumers.

Right now, the leadership is overlooking a chance to gain bragging rights for years to come as the party that created thousands of jobs without spending a cent, merely by offering citizens a chance to do the right thing.

We’re not alone in pushing this project. Members of MAAEP (MO Assn. of Accredited Energy Professionals) have spent several days in the Jeff lobbying legislators. And last week MAAEP members Byron DeLear and Tom Appelbaum went to K.C. to quietly promote it to bankers and other business stakeholders. Here’s hoping DeLear and Appelbaum convinced some of those people to call legislators.

It’s worth the trouble to contact Richard and Tilley. Remember Jim Trout’s success story. But even if we don’t get it passed this spring, we’ll lay the groundwork to get off to a roaring start next January. So make those calls. I’ll be phoning Richard’s office and Tilley’s office later in the week, and I better not hear that I’m the only one. Don’t make me call y’all individually. … Okay, okay, that’s an empty threat. I don’t have phone numbers. But you get the idea.

Today’s P-D endorsed Jim Trout in his hotly contested senate race against Eric Schmitt to take over Gibbons’ seat.

But Mr. Trout brings an unusual level of energy, hard work and imagination to the race. He’s had remarkable impact as a citizen activist: advancing energy-efficient housing, helping to win significant reforms to state eminent domain law and promoting campaign finance reform.

James Trout has the makings of a distinguished lawmaker. His low-key manner would serve him and his district well. He is the better choice.

You can watch that low-key manner:

Frank Popper, who made “Can Mr. Smith Still Go to Washington?”, a film about Jeff Smith’s 2004 candidacy that was on the short list for an Oscar nomination, just produced a seven minute video about Trout:

Bet you didn’t know that having lots of money can be a disadvantage in a state senate race, did you? As of thirty days after the primary, Eric Schmitt (pictured at left), hoping to hold Gibbons’ seat for the Rs in SD 15, had raised $268,927, whereas the Democrat, Jim Trout, had only raised $50,307. So the Republican had more than four times as much money. Guess which one of them thinks too much cash can hurt a candidate.

Trout asked me: “What the heck is he raising $268,000 for a senate race for? The fact that he’s got that much doesn’t unhinge me.” Now before you dismiss that opinion as sour grapes, consider his point of view:

Early on, he designed a plan for this race, and he’s raised enough money to run it according to plan. As far as he’s concerned, a candidate with money to burn will burn it unwisely. It’s called throwing money at a problem.

Trout, on the other hand, canvasses every day with five volunteers. Not only does seeing him and his workers at the door familiarize Kirkwood and Webster Groves residents with him, all those contacts also yield data he can use for targeted mailings.

And in the process of wearing his shoes out, he’s noticed a difference between this campaign and his 2006 House race: it’s fairly common for Republicans to tell him that they no longer believe in the Republican platform. That’s something he wasn’t hearing two years ago.  

Democrats who worked the Obama booth at the September Greentree festival in Kirkwood also noted the shift in this once staunch Republican stronghold. Kathie Davis posted this on the West County Dems listserv:

At Greentree Festival in Kirkwood our Obama booth was mobbed by supporters. We sold over 200 yard signs, about 70 bumper stickers, 40-50 window signs, and several hundred buttons. We also registered about 100 new voters.

Many people mentioned to us that the Republican booth was not busy and hardly anyone was there.

Before Michael Bersin reminds me that the plural of anecdote is not data, let me say that both Kirkwood and especially Webster Groves have been trending Democratic in the last two election cycles. In Trout’s Webster Groves house race in 2006, he lost by only 249 votes. Next door, in 2005, the Kirkwood seat fell into Democratic hands for the first time in fifty years. The next year, Rick Stream won that seat back for the GOP from Jane Bogetto, but it was close: 51.2% to 48.8%.

Jeanne Kirkton is running a strong race for an open seat in the district where Jim ran, and she looks likely to win. That’ll help him, as will the fact that the senate seat is also open. In fact, the stars are so well aligned that fundraising has gotten easier. Since that squeaker of a primary against Steve Eagleton, Trout has been raising twice as much money as Schmitt. He’s still way behind in that category, but he’s unconcerned about it.

Trout pointed out that we’ll know after November 4th whether all these omens mean what we hope they do. “I’m running against a young alderman who’s got all this hair.” Jim’s betting that voters are less concerned with hair than with the way Republicans have been burning the furniture to keep the house warm.

When I spoke to Jim Trout in mid July about his primary race against Steve Eagleton for the state senate seat Gibbons is vacating in Kirkwood (HD 15), Trout pointed out that if Eagleton won the primary, Republicans would go after him on grounds that his claims of Missouri residency were not legitimate. Trout said that he was not willing to go toe to toe with another Democrat over that issue but that Republicans would not be that squeamish.

He said that it is not the duty of the Secretary of State to spend state funds investigating the matter, but that Republicans would most certainly investigate such questions as where Eagleton renewed his driver’s license and his professional realtor’s license, as well as where he paid income taxes. Once they turned over the fruits of their investigations to Carnahan’s office, Eagleton might well find himself taken off the ballot.

In that case, I asked, would you be able to take his place on the ballot? No, he told me. He either had to beat Eagleton in the primary or forget it. And the likelihood of him defeating Eagleton wasn’t something the smart money was betting on. Eagleton (Senator Tom’s nephew) had a name like an 800 pound gorilla—hard to beat even if it just sits there and does nothing. Trout tells me that sometimes he could almost hear the snickers of those of who thought he was tilting at a windmill.

Trout and his volunteers got to work on a disciplined ground game, phoning or knocking on the door of every Democrat who regularly votes in primaries. Trout knows that Eagleton also had some volunteers on the ground, though how many he couldn’t easily measure. It looked as if Eagleton relied more on mailers and radio ads.

Last Tuesday evening, Jim edged by his opponent 50.2 percent to 49.8 percent. Jim said that at the victory party he looked around at the 30-40 people in the room and understood that by their intense efforts in the last few days of the campaign, each one had probably delivered an extra 35 votes or so, and that that had been enough to put him over the top.

The margin of victory Trout eked out depended on more than just effective campaign chess, though. The content of his message also mattered, Trout believes. He understands that when companies look for a place to locate, they’re looking for affordable colleges and affordable and fair health care delivery systems. They’re looking for an infrastructure that isn’t crumbling.

Without those assets in place, companies will get substandard workers and will end up paying the price for the way state government cuts corners. Republican insistence on doing government on the cheap is costing Missouri jobs. Trout says that Republicans haven’t been taking care of the farm. They’ve been burning the furniture to stay warm. Companies don’t want to locate in that kind of environment. If they’re looking to locate, they’d rather go to Iowa than Missouri.

Not that Eagleton would necessarily disagree with Trout’s message, but Eagleton’s own literature didn’t have as much vision. He focused instead on preventing internet bullying, for example, and on making sure that there was funding for papillomavirus testing. Both issues are worthy of attention, but they’re not going to grab voters who find themselves swimming against an economic riptide.

In any case, Trout squeaked by and now looks forward to facing Republican Eric Schmitt. Schmitt, who had no primary opposition, has had a year and a half to raise money and has accumulated $160,000. Trout is basically starting from scratch on the money front, but he says the offers of support are coming in quickly now.

And he says that this traditionally Republican district is statistically now about 50/50. In other words, polling shows the voters about evenly divided on party preference; more than 10,000 Democrats took ballots in the primary, compared to fewer than 10,000 Republicans, even though the Republicans had a hot gubernatorial contest to lure them to the polls; and, finally, McCaskill got 53 percent in the district in 2006.

The foul mood of the electorate this year gives Jim further reason for optimism. Republicans are on the defensive. He’s noticed that quite a few yard signs for Republican candidates are printed on blue backgrounds and don’t mention party affiliation. He plans to make sure that Kirkwood and Webster Groves residents know who the Democrat in the race is. Then, too, he says, Nixon and Obama will be playing a tune that attracts the majority of voters.

So he and his volunteers are planning to contact all the independents in the district next. That’s about 13,000 people. Let’s see, he and his crew have been knocking on about 500 doors a week. By my calculations, if they maintain that pace and call the same number of people, they should get to all 13,000 independent voters by D-Day. And if they can convince a little more than half of them to swing in his direction, he’ll be a state senator.

Taking the Senate back from Republicans will be a tough task this year if it can be done at all, but it won’t happen without the seat Gibbons is vacating in Kirkwood (SD 15). It is possible to get that seat, though. In 2004, Gibbons pulled only 51.9 percent of the vote, as compared to 59.4 percent four years earlier. Jeanne Kirkton got 46.4 percent, with the rest of the votes divided up between the Libertarian and Green party candidates.

Ya think maybe with the incumbent gone we could roll over the top of that hill? With the right candidate, yeah.

Steve Eagleton has a name that will go a long way toward defeating Republican Eric Schmitt, but our former senator’s nephew has no history of voting in Missouri, he has no history of running for office, and he’ll be painted as a carpetbagger from Georgia.

As far as we can tell from the teensy bit we’ve learned about his ideas, he’s a Democrat, but the information on that score is pretty much boilerplate.

“Across St. Louis County and Missouri, families are struggling with the skyrocketing cost of healthcare, college tuition, and a lagging economy. Unfortunately, our state’s Republican leadership too often continues to embrace policies that take our state backwards.

“I am running for State Senate because I know Missouri can do better. We must fix the health care crisis, keep college affordable for every family, and support life saving stem-cell research and the world-class jobs it brings.

When Jim Trout heard the downside to Eagleton’s candidacy, he felt he could not stay out of the race:

“I hadn’t planned on jumping into the race, but absent a candidate who could win and had the will to win, I couldn’t leave it unattended.”

Trout’s motives are all well and good, but still Eagleton has that name. Trout’s not a hard name to remember, but it ain’t Eagleton either. All Jim has to overcome his primary opponent’s advantage is progressive ideas, experience at running a disciplined campaign, and, yes, some name i.d. from his previous run for HD 91.

In 2006, he lost by a hair (50.7% to 49.3%) to three-term incumbent Kathlyn Fares. Coming that close to winning a seat that’s been in Republican hands for at least twelve years indicates that Trout works to win. And he is at least known now in that section of SD 15.

His experience at campaigning will be useful, but here’s an intangible about him that Eagleton had best not overlook: Trout is a little engine that can. He took on the entire Republican legislature in 2006 by filing a lawsuit claiming that lifting campaign contribution limits was unconstitutional. And–despite having a judge named Limbaugh–he won. It doesn’t come much more can do.

I don’t mean to disparage Eagleton. He may be a highly principled man who longs to serve citizens. But he doesn’t have a history we can look to that proves it. Trout does. He was a political activist for years before he ran for office.

He told me that in the latter half of the nineties, Representative Sue Shear (D-HD 83) worked for several years to get health care coverage for poor disabled children. At the time, only parents at the poverty level could get coverage for such children. Insurance companies turned a cold shoulder to disabled children whose parents earned more than poverty level, even if the family could scrape together the money for premiums. Shear was proposing MC Plus, a program that enabled parents earning $39,000 or less to insure a disabled child; it guaranteed coverage and gave them some help from the state on a sliding scale.

One spring, Trout called Shear and asked where the bill stood in the legislature. It’s dead, she told him. The chair won’t let it out of committee. Trout asked her who the committee chair was, but he didn’t call the man. Instead, he called fifty of his friends and asked them to call the man–and to keep him on the phone with their complaints. Apparently, a lot of those fifty people did as they were asked. The bill made it out of committee in a jiffy and passed.

This senate race comes at the moment when Jim Trout can give it his attention. He’s a development consultant, and he has just launched the largest, greenest community in the Midwest (in Eureka). The wells are dug, the utility lines are in and building is about to start. The carbon footprint for the homes will be 1/3 that of normal homes.

Now that he’s turning his full attention to politics, Trout says that he’s been pleasantly surprised at the phone calls he’s been receiving from leaders of various political organizations that can lend him support. People know him and respect him.

I think that if he can beat Eagleton, he can beat Schmitt. Gibbons only won 51.9 percent of the vote four years ago, and he was an incumbent–which is worth 3-5 points. Against a non-incumbent, in a year where the economy is going to flay many a Republican, a hard working, progressive candidate can take that seat.

First, though, Trout will have to get past that name.  

Shades of 2004 when Russ Carnahan edged Jeff Smith out of the race for Gephardt’s seat. Carnahan had one virtue: his name. But that was enough–barely–to overcome the intense grassroots canvassing of Smith’s campaign.

The question is whether Tom Eagleton’s nephew, Steve, will successfully put his name to the same use in his race for the Democratic nomination in SD 15, the district Michael Gibbons is relinquishing in his quest to be the next AG. The thing is, though, that Eagleton’s bid will confront a speed bump four foot sinkhole in the road that Carnahan didn’t have to get past: Eagleton is already being painted as a carpetbagger.  

He’s from Fulton, Georgia, where he renewed his realtor’s license a couple of months ago. He has no realtor’s license here, so apparently his livelihood is still in the Atlanta area. It’s true that Eagleton bought property in St. Louis a couple of years ago and in Kirkwood, specifically, last October–two or three weeks before the deadline so that he’d be qualified to run there. Those purchases give him the deed to some property, but they don’t really make him a resident. In fact, so far no one’s found any record of him ever voting in Missouri. (Ask Brock Olivo how much trouble that issue has caused him.)

For a couple of years now, Eagleton has been looking to move back here, where his name would give him political leverage, in order to run for office. He’s been shopping around, having considered running for the County Council from South County a couple of years ago. Word is that more recently he looked at House races in District 94 (Lavender vs. Stream) and 82 (Schupp vs. Frank or Plescia). But the issue of his being a, shall we say, expatriate (someone raised in St. Louis and now living abroad) may have kept him from being welcomed with open arms by those he talked to.

Enter Jim Trout. “Trout” isn’t a tough name to remember, but it’s no Eagleton moniker either. Still, Trout decided to jump into the primary race. He felt as if he were coming a little bit late to the party as an uninvited guest, but he believed that district 15 needed a more convincing candidate than Eagleton.

The backstory on the race is that the Dems had had hopes of taking Gibbons’ seat from the Rs, and some of them were bitterly disappointed when their golden boy, Democrat Kevin Gunn, was lured away to a seat on the Public Service Commission, a bit of bait cleverly dangled by Blunt near the beginning of the filing period.

Eagleton jumped in to fill the gap left by Gunn, but this will be a chancy district to win, and Trout was not convinced that Eagleton would necessarily be a serious candidate.

Oh really? And what makes Trout so sure that he’d be a better candidate? For the answer to that question, you have to come back on Monday.  

The metro St. Louis area isn’t a greenitarian’s utopia.  Hardly.  But there are folks aiming to change that.

Since Scorecard.org ranks St. Louis as the second worst city in the country as far as pollution, their efforts are needed and welcome.  A simple chart here shows how awful we are.  We’re ranked #19 in smog and #10 in particle matter.  We get an F from the American Lung Association. 

The city of St. Louis is taking some baby steps toward greener buildings to relieve our pollution and plans to take bigger steps.  The only thing definitely happening is that the two new recreation centers being built will be green buildings.  And the rumor is that the new Centene building will also be green.

But behind the scenes at City Hall, lots of discussions are going on, with considerable excitement.  Alderman Wessels has proposed resolution 154, which basically mandates that the city adopt an energy efficiency policy to encourage rehabbers to create green buildings.  This resolution isn’t just high-falutin’ blather, either.  The powers that be seriously want to make an impact on our ability to breathe the air here.

But far away from St. Louis city hall, in Eureka, even more exciting green plans are happening–plans for a green community that may well become a model nationwide.

Jim Trout, who came oh so close to putting the Republican state rep out of office in Webster Groves last November, is working his day job there as a development consultant.  A builder asked him to design a community of homes around a golf course, but with the housing market in such a slump, Trout felt the project would only succeed if it filled a new niche.

The Greens at Fox Run will certainly do that.  The wells are dug, the utility lines are in, and the homes are being designed–truly green homes that will cut the carbon footprint of the owners by fifty percent.  I’ll come back to how that will be achieved, and it’s some nifty news. 

Besides saving energy, these green homes will use sustainable materials: in other words, for example, no old growth wood, but rather new growth, native wood that can be easily regrown.  Furthermore, the houses will be healthy for their inhabitants.  Most people don’t realize that in this age of well-caulked and insulated airtight houses, the air they breathe in their homes is often more poisonous than what they would get outside–even in a city like St. Louis.  That’s because most homes emit gases–from the carpets, from the paint, from … any number of items.  These homes won’t do that.

The final attraction is that this will be a concierge community, meaning that it has a banquet hall and an outdoor pavilion.  The concierge is the organizer, the person who makes things happen.  He might plan neighborhood picnics, weddings,  or dinner for two.  He can also run errands–for example make a Walgreens run for ten or twenty families at a time.

How handy.  That’s a nice feature, but the main drawing card for this community is the energy savings, and the chief way of achieving them is using water to both heat and cool the homes.  Running underneath the community are pipes that carry 200 gallons of water a minute.  The technology now exists to extract both heat (in the winter) and coolness (in warm weather) from the water itself.  Get this:  heating, cooling and hot water for these homes will cost the homeowners virtually nothing.

Even the water that the technology depends on is used sustainably.  It is pumped out of the aquifer, used, and pumped back in–just as pure as when it was first pumped out.  And the equipment that will harvest the energy from the water is four times as efficient as anything you or I could buy on the market in the way of air conditioning units or furnaces.

Bottom line then?  The equipment is extraordinarily efficient, the fuel is virtually free, and the homes breathe fresh.  This community will be the first of its kind in the Midwest and one of the first in the nation.  As such, it has enthusiastic support from a number of influential quarters.

The Missouri Association of Realtors has endorsed the idea of a state “greenfield” tax credit, now being authored by Senator Jeff Smith.  Politicians, architects, the DNR–all are interested in pushing this concept because it is one area where Missouri will, for a change, be first instead of 49th.

One small, but telling indicator of the interest this project is generating is that the MLS, the website prospective homeowners can use to search for properties, is about to add a new button–a green button.  In addition to searching by price range or number of bedrooms, buyers will now be able to search for green homes.

Trout feels that this community will set a standard which buyers will quickly demand in new homes.  The tax credit, which will be capped at a low amount, will speed up the process of making such homes a reality.  He feels that in three years, anyone building a house worth more than $150,000 will be building it green–that’s with the tax credit to encourage the change.  But even without a tax credit, such change would probably be inevitable.  It would just occur more slowly–in, say, seven or eight years instead.

I often drive down the Innerbelt and see the windmill at the green Alberici building near Page Ave.  Too bad it’s one of a kind, I’ve often thought.  That’s going to change.  Soon.