Lawmakers are trying to keep the Black River power plant at Fort Drum from closing by changing the state’s definition of renewable energy to include the burning of wood, known as forest biomass. This process has been scientifically proven to pollute more than coal.

Environmental groups were rattled last month by the introduction of legislation that seeks to change how the state’s 2019 Climate Act accounts for greenhouse gas emissions. But the new bill, sponsored by democratic State Sen. Kevin Parker, also sneaks in another clause that many overlooked.

It suggests changing the definition of what is considered renewable energy under the state law to include electricity produced from burning wastes like cow manure—a process known as “anaerobic digestion”—and wood, a process known as “forest bio power” or forest biomass.

The inclusion of forest biomass in particular concerns the environmental community because it’s been scientifically proven to produce elevated quantities of carbon emissions. Adding it to the state’s definition of renewable energy, environmentalists say, would be a significant step back in phasing out its use in New York, and would set a bad example for the rest of the country.

And the language in the bill includes a curious caveat: the new definition would apply only to power plants producing forest biomass “as of December 31, 2022.” Environmentalists who spoke to City Limits said the time frame signals a move from lawmakers to stop the shutdown of ReEnergy Black River, the last biomass power plant with a government contract left standing in New York.

Located near the northern border upstate inside a U.S Army base known as Fort Drum, the plant supplies electricity to the base and is marketed as “the largest renewable energy project in the history of the U.S. Army.” Black River relies on a contract with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to function, but the 20-year agreement expires in May and the state has shown no intent in renewing it.

“​​We were concerned about the Fort Drum plant. And we hope that we might get more attention towards it, and get folks to negotiate and figure out what we can do [to keep it open],” Parker told City Limits.

A few months prior, Parker and two Republican Senate colleagues sponsored another bill that seeks to recognize the facility as “a renewable energy system,” and extend its contract with NYSERDA. The plant officially stopped running on March 31 and is now engaged in a series of lay-off activities, according to ReEnergy Holdings, the company that owns the facility.

Meanwhile U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee and an avid supporter of the plant since its opening in 2014, reportedly spoke to leaders in the state Assembly and Senate to keep Fort Drum’s plant from closing earlier this year.

“Elected officials have been lobbying the state to provide funding for this facility and keep it operating using very disturbing language that claims forest biomass is clean [energy],” said Laura Haight, U.S. policy director at Partnership for Policy Integrity (PFPI), an environmental organization that opposes efforts to keep the plant alive.

“Burning [forest] biomass is not carbon neutral. That’s been completely debunked by science for over a decade,” Haight added.

The green label that yields profits

The ReEnergy Black River plant in Fort Drum stayed in business by repurposing “forest residue” from sawmills in the area and burning them to produce energy. The electricity generated from that process powered the military base at Fort Drum thanks to a contract the company signed with the U.S Department of Defense.

The facility has 60 megawatts of generation capacity and describes itself as “a catalyst for sustainable economic growth in New York’s North Country and Central New York.”

But forest biomass production is being phased out in New York because it has been scientifically proven to pollute more than coal, a fossil fuel that releases toxic substances including the greenhouse gasses responsible for climate change.

Black River’s biomass power plant is permitted to emit more than 2,500 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt an hour. Meanwhile, coal plants, which New York has phased out due to their climate impacts, emit 2,180 pounds of carbon per megawatt an hour.

Despite that, the plant at Fort Drum’s biggest source of revenue came from calling itself a clean energy source. ReEnergy Holdings told City Limits that it didn’t make money from selling its electricity to Fort Drum, but turned a profit instead by selling clean energy certificates known as Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) to the state environmental agency, NYSERDA.

A REC is a certificate that represents one megawatt-hour of renewable energy delivered to the electricity grid. These credits are purchased by NYSERDA and resold to companies that emit greenhouse gasses so they can get exemptions from polluting in exchange for delivering green energy to the grid.

But since the Climate Act passed in 2019 and excluded biomass from its definition of “renewable energy,” NYSERDA can’t keep doing business with the company.

The agency has kept six contracts with biomass facilities across the Empire State since 2004, but five of those agreements have already expired, according to NYSERDA. The contract with the ReEnergy Black River plant in Fort Drum is the only contract still active, and the agency says it too will cease in May.

Both of the bills that Sen. Parker sponsored would allow the company to continue selling RECs by changing the definition of renewable energy to include biomass production. But only one included language to extend the contract with NYSERDA “until November 30, 2034​​.” This bill was introduced in last year’s legislative session and was put back on the table in February of this year, according to Sarah Boggess, ReEnergy Holdings vice president of external affairs.

The company hopes the legislation can still turn things around.

“[The February bill] contains the type of language necessary to save the facility at this very late stage,” Boggess told City Limits. “There’s a brief window of time that a restart could potentially be possible if the state were to extend the facility’s contract with NYSERDA. But that window is a matter of days.”

The company also sent a petition to the New York Public Service Commission in July of last year “to commence a proceeding to fairly and accurately compensate” the Fort Drum plant with government subsidies, or it would be forced to “cease operations.”

Meanwhile, 21 environmental groups signed a letter reviewed by City Limits opposing the allocation of state funds to keep the Black River Plant from closing, claiming it will cost taxpayers money “without advancing compliance with New York’s renewable energy or climate mandates.”

But Boggess said the Fort Drum plant’s pending shutdown has been “heartbreaking” for the company. Not only did ReEnergy Holdings spend $50 million to convert the site from coal into a wood burning power plant when it was purchased in 2011, but “it supports so many jobs and has provided benefits to Fort Drum,” Boggess added.

The plant employed 30 people and claims to support “more than 300 direct and indirect jobs” as it buys residue from logging companies and mills in the region to fuel its operations. Jefferson County, where the plant is located, is 26th of 62 in poverty among New York State counties, according to a recent assessment by the county’s Community Action Planning Council.

“These are real people whose lives are going to be upended by the closure of this plant. And I think the state and the company has a responsibility to help with that transition and provide new job opportunities,” said Haight, the policy director of PFPI.

The group is among those denouncing Black River’s attempt to change the definition of renewable energy in the Climate Law, which sets strict targets New York must hit in lowering its greenhouse emissions over the next few decades.

“Instead they opted for a bailout that would change an entire [climate] law and produce a major step backward in a nation-leading definition of renewable energy,” Haight added.

Debunking the carbon neutral myth

Back in 2016, the United Nations cited biomass in its definition of renewable energy, but over the past decade, scientists say they have succeeded in debunking the myth that burning forest residue to produce energy can be sustainable.

The forest biomass industry has thrived in the U.S. by selling the idea that their product was carbon neutral, in other words, it doesn’t contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. They argue that by replanting the wood that they burn, new trees grow back and absorb the carbon, canceling out what was released during the burning process in the first place.

“That carbon is getting [absorbed] by regrowing the forest. And the forest is growing faster than its being removed,” said John Bartow, executive director of Empire State Forest Products Association, a trade organization that has worked closely with ReEnergy Holdings.

“As long as growth exceeds mortality and harvest, the use of wood to produce energy will yield us the greatest climate benefit that is out there. Because you’re using a renewable energy resource,” Bartow added.

But Dr. Robert Howarth, a renowned biochemist who helped put together New York’s Climate Act, says the forest isn’t growing fast enough to replenish all of the carbon dioxide that is being released and that “it may take 100 years for the forest to regrow” and offset those emissions.

After years of deliberating on what fuels should be considered renewable under the Climate Act’s definition, forest biomass “didn’t make the cut,” Haworth told City Limits.

“They don’t reduce [carbon emissions] fast enough and so what we really need to focus on is using energy produced from wind, solar, hydro power to produce electricity that runs heat pumps and homes and electric vehicles on our roads,” Haworth explained.

Today, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states does not “automatically consider or assume biomass used for energy [as] ‘carbon neutral,’ even in cases where the biomass is thought to be produced sustainably.”

Scientists who have contributed to debunking the carbon neutral theory say the biomass industry fails to account for greenhouse gas emissions that are released leading up to the wood’s combustion at a power plant. Harvesting, transporting and processing the material before it arrives at the plant requires the use of heavy machinery like trucks, which typically run on fossil fuels that emit large amounts of carbon.

A study produced by the environmental advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) examined each step in the forest biomass supply chain. It looked at a specific scenario in which forest residue collected in the U.S. is converted into wood chips and shipped to the U.K to be burned for energy. The analysis revealed that more than one third of carbon emissions in the process occured off-site, rather than at the power station.

“No matter where you’re burning the wood, there will be emissions in addition to the emissions released by the [smoke]stack. So when you don’t account for those emissions, you are missing a major part of the climate impact,” said Sami Yassa, a senior scientist at NRDC who worked on the study.

Just like burning fossil fuels, burning wood produces a series of “air pollutants that cause an array of health harms, from asthma attacks to cancer to heart attacks, resulting in hospital visits and premature deaths,” the study added.

For Yassa, adding forest biomass back into the definition of renewable energy in New York State will signify a step backwards in phasing out the practice of burning wood for energy nationwide. There are 135 biomass power plants operating across the country that reported burning solid wood in 2022, according to data shared by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“If the U.S. Congress, or individual states attempt to erroneously claim that forest biomass is carbon neutral, It will threaten to set back our efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change. It could severely erode the Biden administration’s goals to achieve emissions reductions in the short term,” Yassa said.

Parker’s bill, which seeks to change how the Climate Act accounts for greenhouse gas emissions and tweaks the definition of Renewable Energy to include biomass, came up in recent budget negotiations with Gov. Kathy Hochul, but the governor has since backtracked on her support for measures cited in the bill.

Lawmakers are continuing to negotiate the state spending plan, which is now more than a week late.

“We are working closely with the legislature to secure a state budget that includes the most impactful climate initiatives in recent history. All of this will be done against the backdrop of affordability, so that we’re reaching our climate goals while protecting hardworking New Yorkers,” Hochul said in an emailed statement.

“It’s a complicated question,” said Rosalind Black, citywide housing director at Legal Services NY, which aids tenants under the landmark city initiative to provide free representation to low-income New Yorkers facing eviction in housing court. Though the results have been overwhelmingly positive, the program has never been funded to cover every eligible tenant. 

One question came up repeatedly during a recent hearing at City Hall: what would it take to ensure that New York City’s Right to Counsel program, which provides free lawyers to low-income tenants facing eviction, lives up to its name?

The initiative, passed by city lawmakers in 2017 and billed as the first in the nation to provide “universal access” to housing court attorneys for those eligible, has struggled in recent months to keep up with demand, prompting calls to both slow down the speed of eviction cases and increase city funding in order to add staff.

“Have you collectively at any point come up with a number that would make you whole?” Councilmember Diana Ayala, who chairs the City Council’s General Welfare Committee, asked a panel of nonprofit attorneys.

“It’s a complicated question,” replied Rosalind Black, citywide housing director at Legal Services NYC which, along with the Legal Aid Society, received the program’s largest contracts last year.

Did the city want to know what it would take to meet their current obligation to represent about 35,000 households per year, while offering brief advice to others? Or how much it would cost to represent the likely tens of thousands of tenants who qualify for representation, yet will inevitably be left out unless the program is scaled up?

Black and her colleagues were not prepared to answer either question at the March 27 hearing. But they’ve since settled on two figures they say would build meaningfully on the roughly $110 million they currently receive per year.

An extra $125 million would allow legal services providers to fairly fund their current contracts, according to estimates signed off on by Legal Services NYC, the Legal Aid Society, New York Legal Assistance Group and others. With $226 million more, they expect they would be able to cover an anticipated 71,400 qualifying cases in the coming year—only about half of which they’re currently contracted to take on.

Absent from the total $461 million ask is the cost of representing all tenants over 60 facing eviction regardless of income, an offering poised to kick in this August under separate legislation passed by the Council in January.

Cases covered

Now in its sixth year, Right to Counsel funds legal services organizations to provide representation to tenants who earn 200 percent of the federal poverty level or less, or $49,720 for a family of three. Prior to its inception, tenants seldom had access to counsel when their landlords sought to evict them through the courts.

Cynthia Aderogba, a Queens tenant, appeared in housing court last week to meet with her free lawyer, who she matched with a few months ago. “It made a really big difference,” she told City Limits. “And it also brought a sense of comfortability for me, because I felt like I wasn’t by myself.”

Though the results have been overwhelmingly positive—the vast majority of tenants who get lawyers are able to stay in their home—the program has never been funded with the expectation of covering every eligible tenant. The pandemic, which accelerated the program’s citywide expansion, simply made this reality impossible to ignore.

“We all need to acknowledge that this program is massively underfunded and is never going to meet this need unless it grows,” Black of Legal Services NYC told City Limits.

The Office of Civil Justice, or OCJ, which operates within DSS, administers the Right to Counsel program. Its annual reports track how many households receive legal representation, and how many face eviction without a lawyer.

For example, the year ending last June saw city-funded eviction defense for 23,483 households. Looking just at the period from April to June, 63 percent of tenants who appeared in housing court had legal representation, down from 71 percent for that period in 2021.

Yet the reports do not include information on tenant income, making it hard to know how many qualifying households miss out. In order to estimate how many tenants will likely qualify for Right to Counsel in the coming year, providers had to make certain assumptions.

First, they set 120,000 as the number of anticipated eviction filings per year, extrapolating off of monthly filing rates late last year, which were still below pre-pandemic levels.

Black then discounted 30 percent of that total to account for cases in which the tenant settles outside of court or never shows up, based on analysis by the financial advisory firm Stout Risius Ross LLC, which has studied the cost of Right to Counsel programs nationally.

“Thirty percent reflects a relatively high rate of connection to legal services based on the analysis we’ve done elsewhere in the country,” said Stout manager Neil Steinkamp. “And that expectation would be consistent with a city that has had the right to counsel for a while, has had a lot of outreach related to it.”

Black cut the resulting volume by 15 percent to account for tenants who will likely out-earn the program, landing on 71,400 eligible cases.

Steinkamp noted that estimating income eligibility is particularly difficult, because courts don’t collect that information. Researchers must look to academic studies, and the information collected by attorneys themselves. “It can still be valuable, but you have to appreciate the limitations of it,” he said.

Contracts for the year ending in June show full representation requirements of 32,900 cases, plus further service targets that can be met either through full representation or brief legal advice to a tenant facing eviction. The city, which structures its contracts to pay for “units of service,” stressed that providers have built-in flexibility, and can count three advice sessions as one unit of full representation.

This is not the preferred scenario, according to Marika Dias, managing director of the Safety Net Project at the Urban Justice Center, a Right to Counsel provider. “Obviously the providers want to meet the full representation goals, but that’s not necessarily possible under the current conditions,” she said.

Dollars and cents 

Calculating the cost of Right to Counsel is difficult, in part, because the Adams Administration and attorneys disagree about how the city’s various legal services contracts should be categorized.

The providers point to what the city refers to as Homelessness Prevention Law Project contracts, which include explicit directions to represent households “pursuant to the NYC Right-to-Counsel law.” A batch reviewed by City Limits for the year ending in June is worth about $112 million.

But the city said it currently funds tenant legal services with $166 million, combining eviction defense with counsel for tenants seeking apartment repairs and rent reductions. The latter are supported by Anti-Harassment Tenant Protection (AHTP) contracts.

The city says the two are inextricably linked, since AHTP attorneys can keep tenants from getting to the point of eviction.

But providers insist AHTP is distinct and should be funded separately, and that blurring the lines has come at a cost to tenants seeking repairs as well as lawyers pulled in two directions at once. Their demand for an additional $125 million would build on the Homelessness Prevention Law Project contracts, and factors in 25 percent salary increases for about 480 lawyers currently working on Right to Counsel.

The $226 million they seek for the suspected larger universe of Right to Counsel cases could help hire more than 880 additional staff attorneys at current salaries—no 25 percent boost—plus paralegals and intake staff.

“We weren’t trying to be more conservative just for conservative’s sake, but there are just so many unknowns,” Adriene Holder, chief attorney for the civil practice at the Legal Aid Society, told City Limits.

Meanwhile, some unionized staff attorneys are pushing for a cap of four new cases per month that could further impact program costs.

Joanna Laine, a Legal Aid attorney and member of her union’s bargaining committee, said expanding the program without reducing caseloads would be futile, as attrition will worsen. She has about 70 open cases herself, a situation she described as a nightmare.

“We need sustainable wages and above all sustainable case caps,” Laine said. “If we aren’t able to keep the experienced attorneys we already have, we’re not going to be able to build up the program to sustain it.”

Facing the gap 

In the near term, legal services providers have their eyes on City Hall. The City Council has called for an additional $195 million for civil and criminal public interest lawyers in the budget due in June, with a tentative demand of $70 million for Right to Counsel—an amount they acknowledge won’t expand the program.

Manhattan Councilmember Shaun Abreu, a former tenant attorney himself, said that he plans to push for more—a task that will be made easier if state lawmakers pitch in. “I’m telling you right now, that this council is going to hold the line on Right to Counsel,” Abreu told City Limits.

DSS did not comment on attorneys’ demand for $461 million. However, an agency spokesperson said courts should slow down cases to ensure tenants don’t face judges without an attorney in the near term—a position DSS officials had refused to take at last month’s oversight hearing.

According to an emailed statement, DSS is “supportive of any efforts which would help slow down the calendaring of cases by the courts.”

A recent Tuesday morning in Queens Housing Court showed how attorneys are struggling to keep up with demand under the current scope of Right to Counsel.

Four lawyers with Communities Resist were tasked with client intake that day. The organization is an AHTP provider, contracting with the city to help tenants sue their landlords for things like compelling repairs. But it has recently been pulled into assisting with Right to Counsel on a rotating basis.

“Our work is supposed to be meeting with tenants… having tenant association meetings, which we still have to do even if we’re here, right?” said Lino Diaz, a senior staff attorney on call that day.

Of the 50 tenants who signed up for legal assistance, 24 were ultimately deemed income-eligible for Right to Counsel. Another 14 earned too much to qualify, and a further dozen showed up despite not having court appearances that day. Communities Resist ended up taking on nine tenants, offering brief legal advice to the others.

Mona Fletcher, a part-time nanny and speech pathology student, sat outside of the intake room Tuesday having failed to match with a lawyer on a previous court date. “There was a nice gentleman in there, he just gave me a little bit of advice, but he said that he couldn’t represent me because he had other cases,” she told City Limits.

Going before a judge without counsel is intimidating, she added: “For someone like me that is in school, trying to finish up, this weighs on my mind.”

Being the first city in the country to implement a right to counsel program for tenants puts New York in a unique position, according to Holder of Legal Aid. There’s no textbook to follow when it comes to adequate funding.

“Right to Counsel is in its infancy stages,” Holder said. “And everyone wants us to run and twirl but we’re barely out of the crawling stage. So people need to understand that we’re going to need to continue to refine how this work is done, but we need resources to do it.”

Annie Iezzi and Frank Festa contributed reporting for this story.

A day care employee in Oxon Hill, Maryland, was arrested Saturday after police said she recorded herself abusing kids.

Prince George’s County police said that they charged 23-year-old Kayla Greenwell with multiple counts of child abuse and assault.

A video recorded Wednesday appeared to show Greenwell picking up, slamming and tripping kids at the Oxon Hill Center For Early Learning. Police verified that she recorded some of the alleged abuse on her phone during their preliminary investigation.

The police department was sent videos of Greenwell by multiple people on Friday, including an unaired video from Fox5 News. With help from the community they were able to quickly identify her and obtain an arrest warrant.

Ledarra White’s 3-year-old son attends the day care and she says that she’s considering pulling her child out.

“They come to school, [it’s] supposed to be for a learning environment in somewhere safe while their parents are away at work,” White told WTOP.

The day care sent a letter to families that says they immediately took action and fired the employee. The letter also says the day care reported the incident to child protective services and police.

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“Hopefully, she gets everything she deserves,” White said. “Those are innocent kids.”

I’m not sharing the video of the children being seemingly abused at this day care in Oxon Hill. But I reached out to the center who said the woman on camera no longer works there & “they are following protocol.” PGPD is here on scene @WTOP pic.twitter.com/vc196K1vY3

— Cheyenne Corin (@CheyenneCorin) April 7, 2023

The day care also said all background checks for the employee were conducted and came back clear.

This is still an ongoing investigation and police ask that anyone who has information relevant to the investigation immediately call detectives at (301) 772-4930.