Electric carshare vehicles are finally plugging in along St. Paul’s East Side, months after a federal funding fight nearly derailed the project entirely. The city sued the federal government to preserve money for HOURCAR’s Evie program, and the chargers started drawing power there in July 2026 — the tail end of a saga that began when the U.S. Department of Energy tried to cancel the grant altogether.
The dispute traces back to October 2025, when the Department of Energy announced it was canceling 321 grants for renewable-energy projects nationwide, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune. St. Paul had been administering a federal grant for HOURCAR, the non-profit that runs the Evie car-sharing program, and the cancellation halted work to install vehicle chargers on the East Side. The Trump administration said the grants would be rescinded because they did not suit the administration’s policy goals, and the Department of Energy stated the project no longer effectuated program goals regarding feasibility due to a shift in the department’s priorities, per the Star Tribune’s reporting.
St. Paul didn’t let the cancellation stand. The city joined a lawsuit with other grantees against the federal government, and by that November, St. Paul and clean energy advocacy organizations had filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging the cancellation of 321 grants worth over $7.5 billion violated First Amendment protections against viewpoint discrimination and Fifth Amendment equal protection guarantees by targeting Democratic-leaning states, according to the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. St. Paul and other plaintiffs alleged the federal funding cuts targeted Democratic cities and states, and city officials say St. Paul has brought or joined five actions against the federal government since 2025.
A Judge Orders the Money Back
The legal pressure worked. A judge ordered the Department of Energy to release the money back to St. Paul in February 2026, and per a court declaration, the city had already spent more than $300,000 of its $560,000 grant and was reimbursed $207,000. Russ Stark made a declaration in the lawsuit laying out those figures for the court, according to the same court record cited by the Star Tribune.
That win mirrored a broader pattern playing out in federal courts. A federal judge in Washington, D.C. overturned the Department of Energy’s revocation of $82.1 million in clean energy grants across five blue states in June 2026, following an earlier January 2026 settlement that had already restored $27.6 million to affected awardees under similar equal protection claims, according to Utility Dive. The following month, Department of Energy attorneys acknowledged in court filings that the October 2025 cancellation of $7.6 billion in clean energy grants was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state — an admission that contradicted earlier public testimony from Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Utility Dive reported.
Racing the Clock on the East Side
Even with the money restored, HOURCAR was still racing a deadline. The vehicle charging project was subject to deadlines for spending COVID-19 relief funds, and HOURCAR had to finish the work by the end of 2026. Amanda LaGrange said the project had 11 months to be completed after repeated starts and stops, and she noted that installing chargers requires construction — not something that can be rushed once permits, contractors, and neighborhood coordination are involved.
The stop-start funding also took a toll on relationships in the neighborhoods where the chargers were going in. LaGrange said repeated project interruptions eroded trust with neighborhood groups, and HOURCAR had to reengage those organizations before installation could resume. St. Paul ultimately bought six car chargers, and HOURCAR installed vehicle chargers near community organizations’ buildings on the East Side before the network finally came online.
Where the Chargers Landed
The finished network reflects years of neighborhood input. St. Paul’s EV Spot Network East Side expansion placed dual-port Level 2 chargers across six community-selected locations, including Rose Avenue East, Duluth Street, Birmingham Street, Westminster Street, and 3rd Street East, according to the City of Saint Paul. The city had also expanded East Side charging infrastructure by installing four on-street stations near Metro Transit’s Gold Line Bus Rapid Transit stops at Mounds Boulevard, Earl Street, Etna Street, and Sunray Transit Center, giving Evie vehicles and public EV drivers dedicated charging along a major regional transit corridor.
Evie itself is an all-electric, free-floating carshare service that now includes more than 150 shared vehicles, and it has expanded to St. Paul’s East Side as part of this latest buildout. HOURCAR, founded in 2005, operates as the largest non-profit carshare service in the United States, managing both round-trip hub vehicles and its free-floating Evie fleet, according to Move Minneapolis. HOURCAR runs the Evie car-sharing program citywide, and its Access Plus plan offers Twin Cities residents with household incomes at or below 50% of the Area Median Income access for just $1 a month, a discount developed after community engagement with ten local organizations.
Private Dollars Cushion Federal Uncertainty
Utility support has helped stabilize the program even as federal dollars wavered. Xcel Energy gave a $500,000 gift to support the program, according to LaGrange, expanding its funding partnership with HOURCAR to extend support for make-ready charging infrastructure and rate-discount subsidies across Minneapolis and St. Paul. Xcel Energy has provided electrical infrastructure support for the network since 2019.
Still, LaGrange said private grants do not match the scale and reliability of federal dollars, and she said federal funding cannot be replaced outright. The Evie program currently has nothing in the funding pipeline, and LaGrange worries declining federal funding could make future Evie expansions more difficult. Those future expansions, she said, would make the program accessible to more people across the Twin Cities — building on a network that, when it launched in February 2022, planned 70 curbside charging hubs across 35 square miles of Minneapolis and St. Paul and aimed to increase total public EV charging ports in the Twin Cities by 50%.
The city’s Climate Action and Resilience Plan leans on Federal Highway Administration benchmarks estimating that each carshare vehicle put into service reduces single-occupancy vehicle travel by 52,500 miles annually, with each Evie vehicle averaging 52 miles a day and zero tailpipe emissions, according to the city’s Climate Dashboard. That math is part of why St. Paul fought so hard to keep the East Side chargers alive — and why HOURCAR leaders are already bracing for the next funding fight.
