Dear Mayor Taylor and Councilmembers, We, the members of the Environmental Quality Commission’s Climate Action Plan Subcommittee (Josie Gaillard, Tom Kabat, and James Payne), would like to thank you for all the work you’ve done to make Menlo Park a leader on climate change – passing our first Climate Action Plan, leading the way in the country with the Reach Codes, and now considering this much needed new Climate Action Plan. Just as your strong leadership on confronting the COVID-19 crisis has helped to keep our community safe, continuing strong leadership is needed to protect Menlo Park and keep its residents safe from the climate crisis. We cannot solve either COVID-19 or climate change on our own, but the foresight the Bay Area showed in being the first region in the country to shut down in response to the pandemic undoubtedly saved lives both here and across the entire country, and we need to similarly catalyze global change to confront the climate crisis, and that starts by setting and achieving a bold goal in our city. Because of the significant time and resource constraints placed upon the city by the COVID-19 crisis, we have enormously pared down our original drafts of the updated Climate Action Plan to the six proposed actions you are discussing tonight. After extensive analysis, we concluded that these are the six actions that will be most impactful at reducing our carbon emissions, and that are also most time sensitive to prevent the city and residents from losing money on assets that will become stranded. If Council decides to adopt staff’s recommendation to set the zero carbon by 2030 goal for Menlo Park, begin work toward that goal with the six actions we’ve identified, but to delay implementation of 3 of the proposed actions (#2, the citywide EV goal; #4, the VMT reduction target; and #6, the climate adaptation plan), we, the EQC CAP subcommittee, recommend the following modifications in order to minimize delays of these actions as much as possible: -Action #2: Please empower EQC to work with staff on setting goals for EVs and gasoline sales reductions for the community, tracking progress and marketing the goals to the community -Action #4: Please consider expressing support for a 25% reduction in VMT and request that the Complete Streets Commission be empowered to present strategies to Council for achieving the goal -Action #6: Please request a quarterly update from Public Works on adaptation plans being developed at the County level -Metrics: Request that progress against the 9 metrics identified in the CAP be reported to EQC quarterly and Council annually Thank you for considering these suggestions to help guide the work-plans of commissions and staff toward effective protection of our community and especially its most at-risk neighborhoods. Best Regards, EQC CAP Subcommittee members (Josie Gaillard, Tom Kabat, and James Payne) Received on Tue Jul 14 2020 - 17:04:45 PDT
