Susan Auslander, at 89, is an energetic, convent-educated, white-haired Prius driver, and when her retirement community told her it was not feasible to convert to solar power, Ms. Auslander decided to push back. That push turned into a a five-year campaign.
“It became my hobby — not my obsession,” she said, as people do sometimes when evidence points the other way. “I wasn’t going to sit here in my rocking chair, clutching my pearls.”
Whether hobby or obsession, her efforts are now producing results. After years of demurrals, Meadow Ridge, the for-profit care community in Redding, Conn., where Ms. Auslander lives, recently announced plans to erect solar panels over two parking lots and the roof of one building in the complex. The panels — 1,344 in all — are expected to offset 607.2 metric tons of carbon each year.
The residents, as Ms. Auslander sees it, outlasted a recalcitrant management. The campaign took long enough that one of its original instigators, a centenarian from Scarsdale, N.Y., did not live to see it through.
On a sweltering morning in September, Ms. Auslander, wearing a white blouse and blue crepe pantsuit, led a tour of Meadow Ridge, where workers were surveying the parking lots for positioning the solar panels. From the back seat of Ms. Auslander’s Prius, Carol Morgan, 79, a retired art book publishing executive, took photographs of the workers for the resident-run newsletter.
“None of us would have stepped forward without Susan,” Ms. Morgan said of the residents’ push for solar paneling. “She energized the mission. She has a disarming, winning quality, with a twinkle in her eye.”
Ms. Auslander, who grew up in the Bronx, arrived at Meadow Ridge six years ago, after a long career in public relations and fund-raising and five decades in the League of Women Voters. In her apartment, she keeps a photograph of her mother with Eleanor Roosevelt, from her mother’s unsuccessful campaign for state senate. Susan, then a high school senior at Convent of the Sacred Heart, wrote news releases for the campaign.
At Meadow Ridge, a community of 285 apartments for adults needing different levels of care, she joined the residents’ buildings committee, and noticed that one of the facility’s biggest expenses was electricity, which cost more than $1 million a year. Her neighbors were, like her, largely retired professionals, with skills and time on their hands. Several of them had solar panels on their homes before they moved to the retirement community.
She saw an opportunity.
She formed a solar committee and began trying to work on management, without much success. “They said, ‘We looked into it when we built the community, and it wasn’t feasible,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘The technology has changed a lot since then.’”
So Ms. Auslander and her fellow residents set about rallying their neighbors.
“Some people say, ‘In 15 years I’ll be gone, so I don’t care,’” said Doug Dawson, 77, a retired packaging executive. “Some people say that, but not very many. Most think it’s a good thing to do.”
Ms. Auslander added, “Most of us are pretty blue here, politically.”
The group contacted a local solar provider, Verogy, which drafted a proposal for solar panels at Meadow Ridge, including drawings of the grounds and analysis of the costs and savings. With these, they pushed the facility’s management to give solar another look.
“The residents really led the charge,” said Katie Shelton, a development associate at Verogy. “They did a ton of legwork, and they got a lot of residents interested in the project.”
Bob Green, 85, a retired Wall Street trader and lawyer, was eager to join the cause. “We’re assertive people,” he said. “Coming here means you don’t have a job, and a lot of things change. But your personality doesn’t.”
About the facility’s management, he added, jokingly: “We had to hold their head under water. Three managers died before we got this done. They drowned in a bucket.”
With the plans in hand, Ms. Auslander and her group researched low-cost financing from the state’s Green Bank, and tax credits and grants from the local utility company. She organized field trips to buildings in the area that had solar panels.
And whenever Ms. Auslander met with anyone about solar, she sent an email to her community’s executive director. For years the answer was always the same: It was not practical, she said.
The hardest part, she said, was “not losing faith. Even some of my committee members would say, ‘Oh, it’ll never happen.’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, come on, you’ve got to think positively.’”
Then in December 2021, the facility’s owners changed management companies, appointing a new executive director.
This was an opening, Ms. Auslander thought. She wasted no time in pleading her cause, said Chris Barstein, the executive director. “Susan called me about the project for solar panels before I even walked in the door,” Mr. Barstein said. “I was completely taken off-guard, but it was a good harbinger of what was to come.” Unlike the previous executive director, he said, “I was pretty enthusiastic about it.”
Which is to say, the residents were relentless.
“At one point Chris said, ‘Please stop with the letters,’” Mr. Green said.
The solar panels should be finished by the end of next year. Brett Mehlman, the facility’s chief operating officer, said the residents’ push played a “substantial” role in the decision to add the panels, but that it was not the only driving force. “It makes sense for the long-term viability of Meadow Ridge,” he said.
For Ms. Auslander and her solar committee, the work is not yet done.
She wants to spread the solar gospel to other retirement communities in the area, including those that share ownership or management with Meadow Ridge. She is already working with another resident who leads an organization of facilities like Meadow Ridge.
And she wants more solar at Meadow Ridge itself.
Her next push is to lobby state lawmakers to pass legislation favorable to solar power. She turned to Anne Hughes, a local state senator, for instructions in lobbying, which Ms. Auslander learned could be done remotely.
Ms. Hughes said she was impressed with the group’s commitment — they even took part in a youth round table on clean energy, where they admitted that their generation had dropped the ball. “We’re training them in how to address the legislature, and that they have to keep it under three minutes,” Ms. Hughes said.
But first, Ms. Auslander said, they needed some practical help.
“I’m used to testifying in front of town councils and stuff like that,” she said. “But I have to learn Zoom.”
