Each month, LCV shares five stories about the impact of our work. This month, we’re focusing on a clean water win in Texas, expanded solar access in New Jersey, how we’re getting money out of politics in Michigan, democracy wins in 20 states, and how we’re organizing nationwide to protect public lands.

This Month’s Stories

1. Community Partnerships Lead to Texas Water Win

LCV’s Chispa Texas program successfully collaborated with local organizations to protect coastal ecosystems and frontline communities from a damaging and costly water desalination plant.

Why It Matters

• This win protects communities, helps ensure clean, affordable water, and safeguards coastal ecosystems.

What Is Desalination?

• Desalination plants use a lot of electricity to produce fresh water by removing salt from ocean water.
• The proposed Corpus Christi desalination plant would have discharged 51.5 million gallons of concentrated brine per day.
• The increased salinity would have damaged coastal ecosystems, endangered sea life, and threatened the state’s oyster industry, tourism economy, and the communities that depend on them.

How We Won

Chispa Texas helped secure this win by:

• Investing in years-long partnerships with local groups.
• Building relationships and responding to communities’ unique needs.
• Organizing press conferences to educate the media, the public, and elected officials.
• Engaging with city council members to educate them about related fiscal, environmental, and community issues.
• Hosting events and protests.
• Mobilizing people to submit comments and speak during Texas Commission on Environmental Quality permit hearings and city planning and council meetings.

Working Across the Aisle

The coalition’s persistence won support from elected officials across the political spectrum, as evidenced by this video of Corpus Christi Councilwoman Carolyn Vaughn voicing her support:

What’s Next

Despite mounting victories over several years, the permit for the desalination plant remains active, and the polluting industries that would benefit from the plant aren’t giving up. Chispa Texas and local partners are now working to get the permit pulled to finally put an end to this proposed project.

Related: Read about Chispa Texas’ recent victory halting nearby heavy industrial rezoning.

2. Increased Solar Access for Renters, Businesses, and Homeowners in New Jersey

LCV’s state affiliate helped push forward recent legislation that will nearly quadruple community solar capacity in the Garden State — providing cheaper, cleaner solar power to hundreds of thousands more homes.

What Is Community Solar?

Community solar allows homeowners and businesses to buy into shared, offsite solar projects and reap the cost savings of clean energy on their power bills. This provides access to solar power for those who are unable to install solar panels on their properties, such as renters and residents of multi-family buildings, and removes the barrier of installation costs.

How We’re Increasing Solar Access

LCV’s state affiliate, New Jersey LCV, has been at the forefront of advancing New Jersey’s clean energy future since 2018, when LCV’s Clean Energy for All (CEFA) campaign was launched. The CEFA campaign, which was piloted in New Jersey during Trump’s first term, works to secure state and local policy solutions that promote the development of clean energy and phase out the use of fossil fuels in more than 30 states. Today, more than 40% of people in the U.S. live in places committed to 100% clean energy, up from 1% before we launched our campaign.

New Jersey LCV helped get the community solar legislation passed by:

• Working with labor allies to negotiate and partner on the bill.
• Running paid canvasses in key legislative districts, knocking on over 36,400 doors and delivering 1,015 yard signs in support of 100% clean energy.
• Leading a multimedia communications campaign about clean energy, including social media, educational video series, press coverage, and paid print, TV, and radio ads.
• Organizing a lobby day with partners that connected clean energy advocates with their elected officials.
• Placing targeted ads that drove nearly 6,000 constituent messages to legislators in support of clean energy.

Why It Matters

New Jersey has about 180 megawatts of community solar power online, and an additional 720 megawatts of planned projects. This legislation builds on this success:

• Providing enough electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes by expanding solar capacity by 3,000 megawatts.
• Benefiting low- to moderate-income households by requiring that at least 51% of community solar subscribers meet this income criteria.
• Guaranteeing that solar subscribers save money on their electricity bills.
• Helping meet rising electricity demand by bringing more clean and renewable energy online.

According to Governor Phil Murphy, “Today there are roughly 650,000 homes throughout the Garden State that are powered by solar energy. With these bills, we’re going to increase that number to 1 million homes by 2028.”

Related: New Jersey Increases Energy Storage While Reining in Costs for Ratepayers

3. Getting Money Out of Politics in Michigan

LCV’s state affiliate, Michigan League of Conservation Voters (MLCV), is advancing a ballot initiative that aims to prohibit polluters from contributing to political campaigns.

What This Ballot Initiative Will Do

• MLCV and its partners are seeking to bar utility companies and government contractors from making political donations to candidates running for state office.
• Specifically, the initiative aims to prohibit regulated utility monopolies and companies that have or are seeking contracts above $250,000 with the State of Michigan from making donations to political campaigns for the officeholders who regulate them.

Who’s Involved

• MLCV is part of the Michiganders for Money Out of Politics coalition, which also includes Clean Water Action, Climate Cabinet, Community Change Action, Detroit Action, Michigan United Action, MOSES Action, Progress Michigan, and Voters Not Politicians.

What’s Next 

• To move forward, the Michiganders for Money Out of Politics coalition must collect 356,958 signatures within 180 days — and they launched a statewide campaign to do just that.
• After signatures are collected, the proposal first goes to the state legislature, which has 40 days to decide whether or not to adopt it or let it become a ballot initiative for voters to decide.

Why It Matters

Getting corporate money out of elections helps ensure that elected officials answer to the communities they serve.

4. States Across the Country Strengthen Democracy

To combat the climate crisis and protect our democracy, we need a government that hears, protects, and reflects the people it represents. To this end, LCV and our 30+ state affiliates work to safeguard and expand access to the voting booth by organizing, mobilizing, and advocating for strong pro-democracy policies across the country. This year, we’ve scored some major victories.

This Year’s Biggest Democracy Wins

Additional Democracy Wins

In addition to the victories outlined above, LCV’s state affiliates helped pass or protect pro-democracy legislation in Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Maryland, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

What’s Next in 2025

LCV’s state affiliates are engaged across the country, including in Indiana, Maine, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where we are:

• Working to advance legislation that protects voters and expands access to the polls.
• Pursuing fair redistricting maps that will ensure that voters are fairly represented in Congress no matter where they live.
• Pushing back against onerous voter ID requirements, as well as proposed restrictions on voter registration and vote-by-mail.

5. Public Lands Defense Continues in Arizona

Last month, LCV launched a nationwide campaign to protect our irreplaceable public lands and waters from the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks.

Our most recent event was hosted by LCV and Chispa Arizona during an annual Latine community Grand Canyon camping trip. Events like these are critically important for raising awareness about the Trump administration’s threats to our public lands, lakes, rivers, and coasts.

Irreplaceable Treasures

• Protecting natural ecosystems helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increasing our ability to mitigate the climate crisis.
• Public lands and waters are economic drivers for communities, generating tourism dollars and supporting small businesses across the country.
• Our nation’s pristine waterways, soaring forests, and sprawling deserts provide habitat for rare flora and fauna, clean water sources for cities and towns, and opportunities for outdoor recreation.
• Public lands are historically and culturally significant, and many contain sacred sites that are important to Tribal and other communities.

Arizona Specifics

• It took more than a decade of work by Indigenous communities and allies to protect the Grand Canyon from uranium mining, and these protections are now at risk.
• The LCV and Chispa Arizona event highlighted the importance of sacred places and resources, including Grand Canyon National Park and the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument.
• We worked with local artists who created painted communal tents representing our defense of Madre Tierra (Mother Earth) for use during the event.

The Importance of Coming Together

Chispa Arizona Federal Organizer Dana Orozco reflected, “This weekend we saw that people are united in the defense of our lands and waters from greedy corporations that want to extract resources and ruin them in the name of profit. We stand in solidarity with our Indigenous relatives, who are impacted first by the destruction and pollution of the natural resources they depend on, and to our future generations who deserve to experience the beauty and sacredness of our lands.”

Overwhelming Nationwide Support

• 74% of people in the U.S. oppose the closure of national public lands, and 71% oppose selling public lands to the highest bidder, according to a Trust for Public Lands poll.
• 96% of Idaho residents think public lands should be in public hands.
• 88% of voters are concerned about the pollution of lakes and rivers.
• 82% of voters think the U.S. should protect more of its lands and waters.