Dear Mayor Combs and City Council Members,
I continue to be grateful for your leadership and ongoing commitment to addressing the climate crisis on behalf of the Menlo Park community. Adopting the Climate Action Plan (CAP) in July 2020, along with the climate-neutrality-by-2030 CAP target, was a major milestone that cemented Menlo Park as a true leader. Please don’t let up on this important effort – we need all of the actions that were approved in the CAP to meet our 2030 target. The sooner we get started with equitable measures to reduce pollution across every sector within Menlo Park, the more we will all benefit. In particular, Menlo Park’s leadership to phase out polluting fossil fuels from our homes and buildings is critical.
The Staff Report prepared for your discussion concerns me, as it leaves open the possibility of rolling back the CAP target and/or delaying one or more of the high priority CAP measures. In my opinion, such action would send a terrible signal to surrounding communities and perhaps many others that climate action is no longer such a top priority and that it is reasonable to delay measures in the face of competing priorities.
While Council and City staff are no doubt faced with resource constraints and challenges, particularly in the face of the pandemic, as a center of innovation we must look for creative solutions to bridge the gap and avoid further delay. As a reminder, successive City Council’s passed on the initial Menlo Park GRCC recommendation – from 2007 - to adopt a CAP calling for climate neutrality. Many interim years were lost due to inaction and we are now paying the price, which will only become more steep with further delay.
I support the recommendations of the Environmental Quality Commission and the Complete Streets Commission, and urge you to direct staff to continue working with these Commissions to implement the CAP with the appropriate sense of urgency that the Climate Crisis calls for.
Sincerely,
Mitch Slomiak
Menlo Park resident and former Environmental Quality Commissioner
