Hello, honorable Mayor and members of the Council:
I'm writing, again, to continue to urge your strong leadership and action on projects, policies, and reporting tools that can ensure our small and agile city addresses our global climate emergency through every means possible. While I am incredibly disappointed by our city's recent stalemate regarding the essential Climate Action Plan strategy of banning natural gas recently due to opinions, not facts, relayed by a small portion of our community, I hope there remains a strong interest in advancing meaningful, replicable, emissions reduction actions that can accelerate our implementation of the (once leading) Climate Action Plan.
To that end, please consider approving Item JI for an all-electric fossil-fuel-free green community center/backup system to serve our beloved Belle Haven neighborhood. The more Menlo installs future-state demonstration systems of this size and type, the more likely community members will understand their operations and benefits over dirty conventional systems of our past. Moving this direction is a small, but critical step, towards accelerating our adopted Climate Action Plan, which appears to be lagging in its implementation (noted natural gas setback included). Thank you for revisiting the Plan's progress under item L10, by focusing on the highest-impact actions our city can take AND ways we can further emulate policies and programs that are meaningful for our shared climate. Visualizing this through continuous reporting - ideally through public-facing dashboards and campaigns - can also help residents envision their role in this incredibly consequential work. Your Environmental Quality Commission has offered areas of substance to improve the sustainability performance and resilience of our City, please advance their recommendations and amplify them to prove again that what Menlo (residents, businesses, industry, and government) does matters - to our community and climate.
Thank you - Erin Cooke, Allied Arts resident
