City Council Members,

I read with interest the Staff Report regarding Approval of the Process for Preparing the Preliminary Draft Climate Action Plan (CAP) that you will consider at the 4/22 Council meeting. As I am unable to attend this meeting, I offer my comments in this note.

And, as a disclaimer, based on the 3/5 Council decision and discussion, I was voted by the Environmental Quality Commission (EQC) as this Commission's representative to the Climate Action Plan "core team" as it was then conceived. (This note is written as a private citizen, and not in my capacity of Commissioner.)

In reviewing the Staff Report I am keenly aware that Staff is attempting to balance the need for an efficient, timely, and technically "deep" process with the need for public participation and broad legitimacy of the ensuing plan.

Last year, as a volunteer I spent a good deal of time learning about the impacts of climate change and helping to steer a 40+-person research project to understand best practices from other communities and develop relevant, actionable, impactful recommendations for the Menlo Park community. It takes a great deal of commitment and time for a layperson to get up to speed in order to contribute meaningfully to a technical working group.

There is a strong rationale for moving forward as recommended, since the technical working group that develops the draft will consist of climate change experts from ICLEI who have worked with numerous communities and have a depth of knowledge from their organization to draw upon, as well as the expertise of our specific community held by City Staff. This should enable a draft to be developed expeditiously, free from perceived local political encumbrances, and without the necessity for further delays due to a public appointment/screening process for additional work group members. Since the decision-making timeframe is tight, further delay will effectively mean that this report cannot inform the 2009-2010 budget process.

The downside of this approach is that there will not be broad representation of community stakeholder groups at the table when an initial working draft is conceived and developed.

Yet, Staff indicates that the CAP process will include several public forums as well as on-line posting and comments of the draft CAP prior to completion and submission to Council. In my opinion, this level of public outreach is as important in providing legitimacy to the CAP as a strong, technical, non-partisan working group is to developing an effective and well-informed plan.

Under the original Staff "core team" plan, the various stakeholder groups in the community may have been under-represented. And, extending the team to all possible stakeholders would like have resulted in a working group without the depth of technical expertise to pull off such a plan coupled with a very steep learning curve for some stakeholders.

It was also suggested to Council that the EQC be the body in charge of steering the CAP process. While this might gratify me personally, I do not believe that my fellow Commissioners have "signed up" for the time and intensity of such a process (same issue as with the idea for a broad stakeholder group). Also, most ,or perhaps all members of this Commission are keenly aware that the EQC is one citizen body in Menlo Park tasked with protection of heritage trees. By diverting the bulk of the EQC's attention to CAP we would risk eliminating this important aspect of our Commission's work.

It appears to me that Staff has struck the most favorable balance for Menlo Park, and I endorse and support this new CAP development process.

Mitch Slomiak Received on Mon Apr 21 11:36:58 2008