Critics say San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer isn’t moving quickly enough on bicycle lanes, public energy or tree planting to meet the ambitious goals of the city’s landmark climate action plan.

They say Faulconer’s proposed budget, which the City Council is scheduled to approve on Monday, devotes inadequate resources to those priorities and doesn’t include a climate action lawyer requested by City Attorney Mara Elliott.

Faulconer’s staff says the budget includes $41 million in direct climate spending and $87 million in indirect spending.

They also stress that San Diego is on pace to meet the 2020 benchmarks set in the climate plan, and that the city tracks its progress more aggressively than any other city in the nation.


Critics say the 2020 benchmarks were relatively unambitious goals that new state regulations helped the city meet.

They say the 2035 goals — reducing greenhouse gases in half, having 18 percent of commuters use bicycles and a 35 percent tree canopy — require aggressive and immediate action that’s absent from the proposed budget.

“You can’t shift these things overnight — you have to make incremental progress over time,” said Nicole Capretz, executive director of the nonprofit Climate Action Campaign. “This budget is kind of like a siren’s call. 2035 seems far away, but it’s really not.”

Faulconer spokesman Craig Gustafson said last week that the city is making progress on climate goals and is a national leader.


“Mayor Faulconer strongly believes that the investments we’re making now to advance water recycling, reduce pollution and expand the use of renewable energy sources will grow our local economy and improve San Diego’s communities,” Gustafson said. “The mayor’s proposed budget includes $128 million in new funding for climate-related projects while still investing record levels into street repair and neighborhood infrastructure. You would be hard-pressed to find a higher level of commitment to environmental protection anywhere else in the country.”

Gustafson also pointed out that the city isn’t just on track to meet one of its key 2020 goals, it is way ahead.

“One of the targets along the way was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent by 2020,” he said. “An independent consultant analyzed data from the 2015 calendar year and determined that greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced by 17 percent since 2010, meaning the city is five years ahead of schedule.”

Capretz said it was a mistake for the city to establish its climate baseline as 2010, five years before the climate plan was adopted in late 2015.


“They reached the 2020 goals even before the plan got passed,” she said. “They should have been more ambitious for 2020.”

Capretz said she’s also frustrated to see no new funding in the budget for the downtown mobility plan, which would add cycling lanes, and no money for other high-priority cycling lane projects.

She said reaching the goal of 18 percent of commuters in urban areas using bicycles by 2035 will be nearly impossible without strong and steady efforts from the city. She said even the goal of 6 percent by 2020 is in jeopardy under Faulconer’s budget.

“We would need to be ramping up this year to get even close to the 6 percent of bike commuters by 2020,” she said.


Gustafson said the city allocated $2.5 million in developer impact fee funding in January to the “downtown cycle track” portion of the downtown mobility plan, and that the city is still on course to complete the project by 2020.

He said there was no need to allocate more funding this year and leave it stranded in an account, when the city can supply the remaining funds needed for the project all at once when construction is ready to commence.

On public energy, sometimes called community choice energy, Capretz criticized Faulconer for not following up $200,000 he provided in his last budget with any additional money.

Gustafson said the $200,000 paid for a study that the City Council is expected to receive this summer on public energy, where the authority to buy and sell power shifts from utilities to municipal government officials.


Many local governments in California are using public energy to ramp up use of renewable resources, such as wind and solar.

Capretz said Faulconer should have followed up last year’s $200,000 with money for a consultant to complete the second phase of the process: a business plan estimating rates, revenues and expenses.

“Proactively planning for community choice energy is essential to enable the city to transition to 100 percent clean electricity,” she said. “It is the single most powerful tool we have to reduce our city’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

On trees, Capretz criticized Faulconer’s proposal for an $880,000 cut in shade tree pruning and a lack of money for tree planting to boost the city’s tree canopy.


Several council members agree with Capretz, prompting the city’s Independent Budget Analyst to recommend that money get restored on Monday.

On tree planting, Gustafson said the city is on track to plant 2,000 trees this fiscal year and another 1,200 trees in the new fiscal year that begins July 1.

He also noted that a recent analysis found the city’s tree canopy — the overall coverage of the city by trees — is nearly double a previous estimate: 13 percent versus 6.8 percent.

Capretz agreed that was good news, but predicted San Diego will still struggle to meet the climate action plan’s goal of 35 percent coverage by 2035 without more aggressive action.


And she said it was surprising for the mayor to not be aggressive on trees, which also boost aesthetics, air quality and property values.

Ann Fege, chairwoman of the city’s Community Forest Advisory Board, has also complained that the new budget shows a lack of commitment to the five-year urban forestry plan the city adopted in early 2016.

Fege and her board are calling for more staff — four arborists — and planting 2,000 trees instead of 1,200 during the new fiscal year.

“Even though fiscal 2018 is a ‘budget tightening year,’ it is imperative and realistic to make investments in the urban forestry program,” Fege said to Faulconer and the council in a recent letter.


City Attorney Elliott has so far unsuccessfully lobbied the mayor for an additional lawyer to assist with a sharply increasing workload she has attributed to the climate plan.

“The mayor’s budget identifies $128.1 million in spending on Climate Action Plan activities, yet the one city attorney position we requested to advise departments on all that work has been denied,” Elliott said at a council budget hearing last month.

The council hearing on the proposed budget is scheduled to start at 2 p.m. Monday at City Hall, 202 C St.


david.garrick@sduniontribune.com (619) 269-8906 Twitter:@UTDavidGarrick