Kudos to City Hall on Climate and Appeals
I left the June 25 City Council meeting feeling good about our city’s government. The City Council and City Manager Dave Kiff took actions that were beneficial to both the citizenry and the environment.
For much of the past year, Assistant City Manager Jeremy Frimond and others have been working on what should go into an updated course of action on the rising temperatures that are increasingly affecting our city—and the entire planet. This effort falls under the city’s current project titled “Climate Action and Adaptation Plan.”
Public comment indicated only support for this project. Ginger Osborne thanked Mayor Sue Kempf for helping the Laguna chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby make the recent Home Electrification Fair a great success and urged the city to move fast on accessing Inflation Reduction Act incentives to dramatically reduce emissions and make necessary adaptations to climate change. Judie Mancuso, interim chair of the Environmental Sustainability Committee, stressed changing out gas appliances for electric ones. Matt Lawson said, “The climate is changing in ways that are not for the better.” He reminded everyone that the wildfires of 2020 spewed twice the amount of greenhouse gases that had been removed up to that time. Lexi Hernandez, representing the Climate Action Campaign of Orange County, liked much of the plan but wants to see benchmarks required for a CEQA-qualified plan that would “give the City more bang for its buck.” I chimed into the public comments, expressing my gratitude for the progress that has been made up to this point and urged City Hall to consider divesting from fossil fuels, like the cities of San Francisco, Berkeley and Richmond have already done. It’s patently illogical for our city to continue investing our money in the fossil fuel industry that is responsible for the climate crisis we are addressing in the CAAP.
In the council discussion that followed public input, several points stood out. First, George Weiss asked who would be implementing the provisions of what seemed an extensive climate plan being drafted. That was a difficult question to answer. From what I heard, staff would have that responsibility. A second point made by Alex Rounaghi, was that council should invest more time and effort into taking action and focusing on outcomes rather than on the planning process itself. His study of a report issued by the UC Berkeley School of Law suggested that climate action plans were not necessary for jurisdictions to take effective action on climate. Come up with three priorities and make them happen; when that’s done, come up with three more, and so on.
Other councilmembers seemed to like that idea rather than trying to do too many things and ending up with little being accomplished in the way of reducing emissions or adapting to the consequences of a warming climate. Even more intriguing was Rounaghi’s suggestion that city hall take the remaining approximately $200,000 budgeted for the CAAP and use it to set up an “energy efficiency and fiscal sustainability revolving fund” that could be used to help purchase EVs or take other practical climate actions. The savings from operating and maintaining EV fleet vehicles, for example, could be directed back into the revolving fund.
All the above deliberations were preceded on the agenda by City Manager Dave Kiff, who removed the item pertaining to raising the fee for appeals to the Design Review Board, Planning Commission, and apparently Community Development staff decisions to above $12,000. A plethora of emails and other communications were sent to Mr. Kiff denouncing such an increase because it would present an insuperable obstacle to the appeals process, and thus projects either damaging to the environment or detrimental to the public in other ways would be nearly unstoppable. I wrote one of those emails objecting to the proposed fee increase and applaud Mr. Kiff for suspending action on the agenda item until he could have the time necessary to give it a thorough analysis.
All in all, it was a good night for the environment.
Tom Osborne is an environmental writer who, with his wife Ginger, co-leads the Laguna chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby.
