Federal Climate Spending at the County Level - John Gioia, Contra Costa County Supervisor

This week's episode of the Climate Money Watchdog's podcast features a long time environmental leader in local government. John Gioia (joy-a) is county supervisor for California's Contra Costa County representing 210,000 people in the San Francisco East Bay area, right across the Bay from San Francisco. He was elected in 1998 and has been re-elected five times with  high margins. He has had many years of official work on environmental issues, including serving on regional government boards such as the California Air Resources Board, the Bay Area Quality Management District Board,  the Bay Area Conservation and Development Board and is Vice Chair of the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority. This work has led him to have extensive experience working with state and federal funding at a local level and why we asked him to do a podcast episode with us to talk about ups and downs of working with all the requirements and issues that state and federal environmental funding bring to local government entities.

In this episode, we have wide ranging discussions of various issues that will be raised with increased climate and environmental funding. This includes a detailed discussion on the many complications of federal spending for electric vehicle charging stations. Publicly funded EV charging stations is one of the larger programs in the recently passed federal infrastructure law with $7.5 billion appropriated and $5 billion of that amount going to the states. This is one of the programs that Climate Money Watchdog is watching because of the amount of the funding mixed with the complexity of local, state and federal governments working together. Supervisor Gioia gives great insight to the complex issues that arise for local governments to make these types of appropriations a success.

Supervisor Gioia grew up in the diverse city of Richmond, California and has a BA degree from the University of California, Berkeley where he also earned a law degree.

We hope that you will listen to this unique episode with a local government official who brings up issues that many in the national climate movement may not have thought about. Supervisor Gioia is my county supervisor and I look forward to his advice as we continue to follow and investigate on how the climate money is spent.

Dina Rasor, Executive Director of Climate Money Watchdog.