Council Sustainability Committee - Regular Meeting

That's great. Let's have a call to order. This meeting is being conducted with a virtual component. Anyone wishing to address the Council Sustainability Committee virtually may join the meeting on Zoom using the link or phone number and webinar ID shown on the screen. When I announce the item on which you wish to speak, click on the raise hand feature in Zoom or dial star nine on your phone. When I call your name to provide public comment, if you are participating via phone, please press star six and unmute yourself. And then for people in attendance, please fill out a speaker card, which you can find on the sign-in table to the left of the door. And so I am one. Do we have any speaker cards? Roll call. Fill out the speaker card.

Yeah.

Paul, everybody's here? Chair Showalter here. Member Clark. Member Hicks here. Great. All right. And then we have item three, which is approve the minutes. Does anyone have any comments or questions about the meeting minutes? Okay. Thanks. Thank you. Would anyone like to move a motion to approve the minutes?

So I can ask for public comment?

Yeah, I think we need to have public comment. OK. Would you like to make public comment on the minutes? No. OK. Anybody online? OK. So we can go ahead with the vote. All those in favor of approving the minutes?

Aye.

Aye. Okay, that passes unanimously. Now we come to item four, oral communications. Item four is oral communications from the public. This portion of the meeting is reserved for people wishing to address the committee on any matter not on the agenda. Speakers are allowed to speak on any topic for up to three minutes during this section. State law prohibits the CSC from acting on non-agendized items. Would any member of the public like to provide comment on an item that is not on the agenda?

Yes. You're welcome. Thank you. I'm going to speak about a lot of different numbers. And so I thought it'd be kind to put them on a piece of paper so you could see them as I was talking about. So at the last city council meeting, I commented on what I felt was a need for a funding source to do wonderful things for sustainability. And just in the last couple of days, I've come up with one. So it is To say that the user utility tax, which has risen so rapidly the last few years, represents a windfall. Money that people have paid in order to get electricity and gas in their homes and businesses have done the same. The city has taken a 3% tax on all of that money. And as the price of gas and electricity have risen, the tax revenues have risen. In the past, $4.8 million a year from natural gas and electricity was the city's take, and it went to the general fund. All that money is still going to the general fund, and what I'm proposing is that the city take only $4.8 million for the general fund and return the rest via incentives and other programs to people who electrify their vehicles or their homes. The simple one pager that I handed out gives you the data about how much has been collected, the data about how much the price of electricity and natural gas have risen. It gives you the data about how far you could go with $2.8 million a year for incentives. If the incentive amount were $2,000, you could do 1,414 incentives. That's one incentive for 4% of the households every year. Over 20 years, that would be one incentive for 80% of the households. This is a significant amount of money. And so, although this is not on the agenda, and it's not in the current sustainability five-year plan, I hope it will become part of the plan and of the budget for the coming fiscal year.

Thank you very much. Okay. Is there anybody online? Okay. All right. All right. We'll now close the oral communications item and move to the discussion action items. And we have number five, new business. And five one is the decarbonization goal analysis. This item will be presented by Sustainability and Resiliency Division staff, Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Chair Schulter. I'm pleased to be joined this evening by Ms. Lucky, Program Manager within the Sustainability and Resiliency Division, as well as our colleagues from Cascadia Consulting Online. They're available to answer any questions at the end of our presentation. This evening, we're here to be presenting the results of our decarbonization goal analysis. This is the work that basically underscored the development of the draft list of actions to be included in our five-year decarbonization plan, as well as helped us to answer the question of whether or not staff would recommend accelerating the city's currently adopted 2045 decarbonization goals. By way of brief background, Council directed, well, I guess, yes, Council directed staff to answer this question. Could we accelerate our decarbonization goal? And what would... it take to achieve that. So part of that process involved understanding the impact of federal, state, and local actions on emissions projections, and then understanding what the kind of balance, if you will, of emissions left to the local level would be for various decarbonization years. Next slide. a little bit more detail. We've been in discussion about this decarbonization goal analysis for some time. Our first discussion after the contract with Cascadia was approved was in June, where we started to look at the assumptions and some of the local actions that staff were proposing for modeling. So we couldn't model everything. We wanted to winnow down to a list of approximately 10 local measures that we thought would have the highest potential for emissions reductions. We also talked about some of the assumptions that were included in our first take on how to proceed with the analysis. CSC asked that we reconsider our growth assumptions and asked for some additional analysis to be undertaken. In November, we returned to the committee. We reviewed the updated forecast based on the feedback from CSC and we, sought approval, which was given from this committee to complete our list of local actions for modeling. In December, we looked at the final list of local actions and also started to look at the draft of what would be in the five year decarbonization plan based on this analysis. And then in April, we looked at the final version of the draft list of five year decarbonization action plans, actions prior to the council study session, which occurred last Tuesday. And now I'd like to hand it over to Ms. Lucky. She's going to tell us a little bit more about the analysis and its results.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. This slide illustrates the three admissions scenarios that were evaluated, with the first being the business as usual, So this shows without any climate policy or interventions through the market that our emissions would grow in Mountain View by 13% by 2045. And that's largely due to population and employment growth, which we updated based on feedback from the CSC. And then the next scenario, we looked at the adjusted business as usual. So this includes existing regional and state policies. As you know, we did, look at some of the federal policies, but then they were rescinded or removed or delayed. And so what we were left with from our business as usual is a 59% reduction in admissions as a result of state and regional action. So that is really great news that there is still movement in this area from what we found in the analysis. And then the third scenario is the local action scenario. We were able to look at nine local measures to see what their impacts would be on emissions by 2045. And as we revealed late 2025, they were very small. We modeled, we showed an analysis of five modeled actions and an additional fours being shown tonight as the total. And we're still at about 7% below the business as usual with local action. So in total with the ABAU and the local action, we're able to reduce emissions 66% shown right now. And that still leaves a significant gap to achieve by 2045. Next slide. So what's driving the emission reductions? what we observed from the analysis is that a lot of the emission reductions are coming from regional and state, regional state and market transformation, just not necessarily inside the city's control. And these are leading to substantial reduction. So the top four that are modeled were the EV market trends, and this did include the incentive. So when we're looking at the EV market trends, it was basically the the sales trends that we've been seeing over the last few years in Santa Clara County, which has been about 41%, and thinking that that is going to continue. That was modeled when the IRA direct pay incentives for EVs were available. So things could change. As we know and stated in the council meeting, fuel prices are also driving people into, no pun intended, into EVs. So that's still a positive signal. And then we've got the Bay Area Air District rules, which would prohibit the sale and installation of gas appliances, meaning natural gas water heaters and natural gas furnaces for space heating, starting in 2027 for water heaters and later on space heating. And so that's another significant reduction of over 100,000 metric tons. So it's quite significant. We also have the state's SB 100 renewable energy portfolio standard. That's another 50,000 and our low carbon fuel standard that is a state standard. So with these top four and some additional state policies, we are at 59% reduction from our business as usual scenario. Next slide. Building electrification remains one of the most important decarbonization strategies identified in the analysis. And because of the Bay Area Air District rules that are proposed, we anticipate to see emissions reductions as a result of that. And it's going to very much accelerate emission reductions for Mountain View, leading to a 92% reduction in building emissions by 2045. Next slide. When we looked at the modeling for local building actions, what we were seeing is that you wouldn't get quite as large of an emission reduction as the Bay Area Air District. However, the local actions can help accelerate emissions reduction so we can meet our 2045 goal. It can help make sure the implementation is successful. We looked at reach codes, electrification outreach, and education through programs like the Year of the Water Heater campaign. incentive programs like the city's current rebate for $2,000 for a water heater to replace your gas with the electric heat pump and permitting assistance. We also looked at additional actions like time of sale. Those did result in fewer emission reduction potentials. And so what we're viewing is that as kind of a contingency planning, but also kind of being mindful of, you know, which of these actions will give us the largest emission reductions that is most feasible, maybe has less complex administrative work around it, but it still is an option. So the key takeaway about the local actions are they complement regional efforts and reduce emissions and reducing emissions that are higher priority. Next slide. This slide is intended to demonstrate what happens if things change. So what we're potentially seeing, if the Bay Area Air District delays, weakens, or rescinds the appliance rules that I just covered about gas furnaces and gas water heaters, with the air district rules, we don't see a lot of reductions with the reach codes because it kind of supersedes it after a while. Like you see the reductions with the reach codes and then it kind of fades away because the Bay Area air district rules really take over. But without the air district regulations, reach codes really become a substantial emission reduction local action where you see 30,000 tons reduced. It still doesn't quite get to the 107,000 1,000 ton emission reduction that the Bay Area Air District rules would get to. It covers about 29% of what the Bay Area District Air District rules would have covered. So our transportation emissions, they still remain pretty large both now and in the future is what our analysis found. And it will represent about 63% of our core emissions in 2045. And this is, again, we're You've seen continued use of gasoline, commute patterns. We're not certain about the EV adoption rates given the changes we've seen and the potential reduction of incentives and regulations. So it does remain at the greatest opportunity for local action in providing, whether it's enabling infrastructure or other pathways to get people into EVs that make it more convenient and easy. Next slide. One of the greater insights from the analysis was when looking at all of the transportation local actions, expanding EV charging showed the greatest emission reductions compared to other actions like EV outreach and education is at 4,000 metric tons of reductions versus expanding multifamily EV charging at 22,000. So that was a pretty strong indicator of spending some time and effort in trying to understand how charging and connecting people to charging can help get them into EVs and help them stay in EVs as well.

Next slide.

So the overall conclusions drawn from the analysis was to maintain our carbon neutrality goal. So you still have a significant gap that we're going to have to keep revisiting every five years and figure out how we can close that gap further and further and reevaluate what's going on in the market, what's going on in our broader policy context, and focus on our five-year planning horizon and adapt to our changing policy landscape. So our next step is that staff will return with a final five-year prioritization plan to the CSC and the city council this year. So thank you so much. We appreciated your guidance and collaboration throughout the CSC meetings and working toward finalizing this analysis. We're here to answer any questions. Again, as Ms. Lee mentioned, Cath Media, the team that helped develop this model is on standby on Zoom to help us answer any questions that you may have. Thank you.

I guess I'll ask a question. I never know some of these things. I never know whether they're statements or questions that are all about. It seems to me that one of the big things with putting together this, the five-year plan, is can you offer incentives for financing? And One of the reasons I'm thinking, there are many reasons I'm thinking about that, but one of them, the example would be what Council Member McAllister brought up at the last council meeting on this subject, which I thought was super important. He was saying that we can't make people buy electric cars and electrify their buildings because it's too expensive. But when you look into it, it costs a bit to set up. But over time, it actually, from all the reading I've been doing, costs less. So that, to me, says financing. That's what you do when, you know, you want a job that makes more money, but you need to go to college first. You don't say, well, college is too expensive, so I just want to do it. But typically... Or you want to buy a house, but you don't have all the cash to put down. Typically, in that sort of case, and those are much smaller cases than houses in college, you finance. So is there talk about financing in a big way? Because I'm not hearing very much in the staff reports about that. Or maybe I've lost it. So tell me more.

Thank you for the question. We deliberately did not answer the question around how will we pay for all of this work. This initial analysis was really like, where are the emission reduction potentials? And same for the study session to counsel. The focus was not really the funding side of the implementation. It was just too soon to have that part of the discussion. That being said, we have seen some movement in the financing space. And of course, there are incentives that are available both through the city, through Silicon Valley Clean Energy, and then regional incentives and at various points along the way, there are federal incentives as well. So lots of stacking of incentives that have been available and continue to be available. In terms of financing, we've seen the most progress from the utilities. So on-ville financing is something that exists through PG&E. Silicon Valley Clean Energy also applied to be able to offer on a pilot basis on-ville financing for electrification measures. And then they collaborated with Peninsula Clean Energy. Mountain View participated in the staff team that helped to issue an RFP for financing services. So if not on-bill financing, then could there be third-party financing alternatives that would be made available to SBC and PCE customers? The results of that RFP, I don't think that they selected a provider that essentially rates were not competitive enough, but there is still the on-bill financing option. which is a good fit for many customers. PG&E also offers a municipal example of this as well, and we have had discussions with Public Works around whether we could take advantage of that for decarbonization efforts within the city as well.

Okay, that's all very interesting. I understand separating the how we'll fund it from the what we'll do. But in many ways, it seems like the questions are inseparable. Like you could do much more if you had financing or many people who would say, like, I've heard that people move on the average, maybe it's not true anymore, every five years. So if something is going to pay you back in 10 or 15 or 20 years, you're not, nobody's going to do it if they can't, or many people won't do it unless. So whether in terms of a list of things that we should work on,

there's a big difference whether you can finance it or not we we do have um at a high level one thing that was included in the original list of uh local actions that we would add to our five-year plan um financing and funding pursuing financing and funding opportunities so it wasn't like a specific dollar amount that we would secure x number of dollars but that we would investigate kind of in the similar vein as pursuing legislative opportunities through the creation of the local government climate alliance. So that is included at the very high level to focus on that in the next five years.

Okay, so I'll save the rest of my things for Q&A. Chris?

Just really broadly, trying to, how everything fits together. So we had our sessions, we had our study session. We'll provide feedback on this tonight. This will come back in the fall, next week, to us and or the council.

This is intended to, we wanted to present the full analysis. We've used the results of this analysis and included feedback from the committee. We just wanted to come back with, here's the final work, you know, we can show our work, if you will. This doesn't require further action. What will come back to both CSC and the council is the actual five-year plan. um decarbonization plan which would be based on the work that is contained within this analysis yeah and then are there any other like large items we're trying to tackle before the end of the year with respect to this committee's work the end of the fiscal year or the calendar um in the fall we will be bringing um forward a discussion on municipal decarbonization and because it's sort of the tandem piece to accompany the community-wide decarbonization approach. We'll be diving deeper into the transportation emissions and EV charging. We had been talking about having a discussion around that as we launched the multifamily EV charging incentive program. Those are the primary things and then preparing to bring this five-year plan to council before the end of the year.

I just wanted to make sure I had all the pieces. Yes.

It's possible that we will have discussion about the zoning incentives related to decarbonization. Although we don't know if going straight to council, based on timelines really for when the codes need to be adopted, whether it goes through EPC and then to council or EPC CSC council, but it will be vetted.

Well, I have a couple. First of all, I just want to confirm this. I mean, we've been talking about it a long time. And first of all, one of the things that we talked about is how important getting EV chargers is at multi-family housing. Now, my understanding is the reason for that is because we've actually been very successful at getting it in single-family homes. So we don't need to work on that anymore in a sense. And there are some existing incentives. But multifamily housing is a barrier. And in addition to that, a tremendous amount of our population lives in it. And we expect that percentage to be maintained or increased. So it's both the barrier and the big percentage that it is for us. So if we lived in a community that, you know, we had 200 people live in an apartment, it wouldn't happen necessarily. But we don't. okay so i just wanted to confirm that those are you know there isn't any other secret reason that um we should be aware of i think that the access the level of access to ev charging is lower uh at family so less access and the fact that it represents a significant proportion of our housing percent of our units yeah it's huge and it's and also just the controls i mean the controls of the people who live there is really difficult. Whereas in a single family home, typically the owner, even if the owner doesn't, even if it's a rental, the renter probably deals directly with the owner. Whereas that's not the case for an apartment. The owner could be five walls up or something from whether. You know, okay. All right. And then the other thing I wanted to say is that I'm really pleased to see the numbers here. It seems like there weren't that many numbers in the report. And did we get the presentation to us electronically?

The attachment had the numbers. We did not send the PowerPoint in advance.

So can we get that after the... The attachment was included. Was it included? It was. Okay. Sorry. I, for some reason, did not see that. Anyway, this is a great PowerPoint and I'm really pleased to see the numbers because I think for many of us, that just makes it so much easier to understand. and particularly to talk to our residents about, you know, why we want to do this. You know, like, why do you want to do a heat pump? Not just because you're going to save money, but, you know, talking about how it's taking off the GHGs that a car would take off, for instance. I mean, I think people really, you know, people really care about the magnitude of that. So I'm glad to see that. Okay, so then let's go

Chair, if I may, I wanted to just add that the model was built to be dynamic. I think we saw in the last year how much our assumptions had to change because of everything kind of shifting beneath us. So, for example, the model currently assumes full compliance with the Air District rules. because all the Air District has done has been sort of a straw poll discussion around modifying the requirements or increasing the number of exemptions. If they ultimately end up at 40% exemptions, we could adjust our model and say, well, what does 60% compliance look like instead of 100%? We haven't adjusted it yet because no formal action has been taken by the Air District, but Same for EVs. If we see the trend shifting, we can adjust the projection. Maybe adoption maintains, you know, stays high or increases or decreases if gas prices decline absent incentives. So we can make adjustments and report back to the committee and shift which actions are pursued within the five-year plan.

That's good. That's always good. kind of goal of a computer model is that you can put in different parameters, but normally that doesn't happen. I know, right?

So now it's like weekly.

We'll get to do that. All right. So I think with that, it's time to have public comment. And let's see, does anyone like to speak? Anybody else? Very welcome.

Hello, so six or nine months ago, Ms. Lee told me that most of the remaining emissions in 2045 would come from vehicles. And I could not understand why that was. But now looking at page five of table three and the goal analysis, I understand why. It's because it says this analysis assumes that the EV sales rate of 41% of new cars being EVs will remain constant over time all the way up to 2045. I would not make that assumption. I suspect none of you would make that assumption either. It also says there is minimal research regarding heavy-duty electric vehicle sales proportions. So the model estimates that this metric reaches 10% by 2050. So zero to 10% in the next 25 years for heavy-duty vehicles like the Kodiak and Tesla semi-trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles. So when the assumptions deviate that far from what I think reality is going it's no wonder that you get to a conclusion that building emissions are the second worst of our problems. I would maintain that building emissions are absolutely going to be the first worst of our problems in 2045, because so many different decisions have to be made by landlords who own buildings, tenants who occupy them, single family homeowners, All those appliances that need to be replaced are a much heavier lift than getting people to decide that EVs, which have so many advantages even today, are not going to be the dominant form of motor vehicle in the future. If we are still personally using motor vehicles, if we're all in Waymos and equivalents, they will certainly be electric in the future. So I would encourage you to take a much deeper dive personally to the questions, to the assumptions that underlie this analysis and the analysis that comes next. To the extent that I hope you will ask for a specific list of the assumptions year by year. And the only reason that the emissions from cars go down is because at 41% a year every year, it does drive out certain amount of the fossil fuel vehicles. But in reality, As we get faster and faster charging, as we have electron stations replacing gas stations, I mean, there are already cars in China that can charge in 12 minutes. And if you can charge in 12 minutes, why do you need a big battery that makes your car cost a lot of money? Why don't you use a 35... 30 or 35 kilowatt hour battery that's cheap so that the vehicles first cost when new is much less, and you can know you can fill it up at any electron station anyway. It's just, it's not very forward. And in fact, the latest data in this page is from five quarters ago. This is the work that we paid for a long time ago. It's not been updated in any useful way.

Are they online?

Yes. Mary DT. Can I? Of course.

It's important. Get your name. Later.

We can do it after.

We can do it after. We just need it so that we get your name right in the minutes. Oh, okay. So go ahead and get it.

Katie Patrick. Hi. Hi. I wanted to talk about the school district and some thoughts I had about how we can better collaborate with the school community. I've got a daughter at Amy Amaya and I've been hosting an earth club and teaching different earth classes and just really trying to understand how the school bureaucracy works to try to activate the parent community. And from what I can tell, there's about 4,000 houses in the parent community in the school district. So there's 11 schools. And they account for probably about 15% of the emissions or the population. And I've spoken to the school district. I went to their board meeting a couple of weeks ago. And from what I've been able to gather from our own principal and our own sustainability lead, which seems to be even a volunteer position or maybe a couple of hours like tacked onto the side of their job, There's no consciousness about this, the impact of these 4,000 homes. They're doing a lot of work on the campus specifically because they can control that directly. But I don't think we even have a name for, like, what is this family community? I'm just calling it the family community because I don't even know if we have a name for it. But the school community is very unique. I don't think there's anything like it, that we have such an ability to potentially mobilise all these families. families, I mean, most of us probably all have kids and we know how involved the parents are. So what I would like to see in some of the action plans is even like a line item for how we would, the marketing and the outreach and the incentives for how we would get out to these communities. And I don't think it can be done just through a single incentive or a top-down program. We need to have more of a metastructure So there is somebody in each school that's champion this. Even if I do it as a volunteer, like I can't champion every single school and be in every school. I only have a child in one. And the sustainability manager whose job is to just maybe oversee like the recycling bin, they have like very minimal kind of impact in what they're doing, isn't enough to mobilize this. But to really think about, you know, do we have somebody at each school that's going to take the lead, that if you do want to say like, hey, we're going to do like an EV charger incentive program or we're going to have like a heat pump week in the school, that they're going to be that person who's going to champion that because we all know that teachers and everyone at schools are super busy. Even if you did incentivise it, it wouldn't get enough traction unless there's somebody doing it, someone like me or someone there that somehow formalised in the school system. So that's it for me. Thanks.

Now we have Mary D. Teo. Mary D. Teo.

Good evening. Hello. Much of the city's plan relies on the Bay Area Air District Rules 9-4 and 9-6. Rule 9-6 was originally scheduled to start January of next year. The Bay Area Air District Board is planning to revisit the decision in October of this year, I believe. At the most recent Bay Area Air District Board meeting, staff presented recommendations that included postponing the implementation of Rule 9-6 by nine months from January next year to October, And including exemption process that would result in for low income situations and complicated slash costly installations that they estimated would rule out about 38% of the cases. So at that meeting, the Air District Board gave feedback to staff's recommendations of the 18 board members who gave feedback, only 10 supported staff's recommendations and eight board members did not support moving forward, but instead spoke in favor of some longer indefinite postponement or wanted to make implementation voluntary. Six members did not provide feedback. Most, I think, were not there. All four Santa Clara County representatives voted in favor of staff's recommendations. I especially appreciated our Vice Mayor Clark's thoughtful comments about the importance of leaders taking action when it becomes clear that past decisions such as building a natural gas infrastructure need course correction. In addition to the postponement and the exemptions and the sort of close situation on the board, there's also a risk that a lawsuit could delay the implementation. So my asks are these, that staff update the goal analysis to reflect the nine-month delay and the expected 38% exemption rate. Please correct me if I've got that number wrong, but I thought it was 38% initially. that staff start planning to implement the administrative updates they talked about, such as the reach codes that they mentioned in this proposal, and not just to rely on the reach code moving forward. Third, that staff try to estimate how our Mountain View exemption rate is likely to compare to the expected 38% overall exemption rate since we have such a high percentage of renters. And, um, fourth, that our city council members send a note of support and appreciation to the Santa Clara County, uh, Bay Area Air District representatives and ideally to, um, any, uh, And then, you know, I guess ideally also to any bad members who voted against moving forward with Rule 9-6 to let them know that we're in support of that. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Anyone else online? Yeah. Okay. All right. So that brings us back to council for discussion. And... This is, what kind of action is there for this? This is just random information. Okay, so who would like to go first?

Okay, so I just wanted to say I really appreciated the report and particularly the graphic that showed the local versus the non-local, you know, state and federal actions and what they contribute, I thought was really clear. I guess the thing that I found, the thing that I found The main thing I wanted to comment on was that we're in kind of what you said, that I'm glad to hear this model is built to be dynamic because even since it was put together, I see changes. The big one that hit me, let me see what I got from the report, was EV market trends. And it was about the availability of federal EV tax incentives, you know, those going away. And that, of course, is still true. But the dramatic change in gas prices recently really affects, you know, makes it almost out of date, you know, since it was written. Because a quick online search tells me that geopolitical vulnerabilities like the Strait of Hormuz and depleted reserves and refining capacity restraints, et cetera, as a result of them, there may be sustained historically elevated gas prices for the foreseeable future. So that changes some of what you would predict in terms of EV adoption. And who knows how long that would last. Also, EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs may become much cheaper to run, as well as I've read about some cities adopting actions to address or to incentivize microcars and neighborhood electric vehicles. along with other kinds of micro mobility. So not just scooters and so forth. I guess there's one that's available called the Wink for about $8,000. That's a fully covered car. I'm looking into it for my children. So that's why I know about it. So I just feel like we may be able Maybe this relates to what Mr. Kearney said, but we may be able to speed up EV adoption. And I'm glad to hear that the model is built to be dynamic, but I would like to particularly keep our eyes on that particular realm of things, because I think that's something that we may be able to speed up. Let's see. And I would like to integrate that with our TDM, actually, because I'm finding it a little too much stick and not enough carrot. I think that people, particularly as a person who has had young children around, I think only carrots making your life more difficult is not the route we should be going. I don't think we should make anybody's life more difficult, but particularly a very difficult transportation schedules. So that's one thing I wanted to keep our eyes on. I also, as I hinted in my questions, I think that financing, and for that matter, incentives, because for both buildings and cars, for many people, it's the initial price that puts them off. And I think they often don't know that down the road, Like I said, I thought council member McAllister's statements were extremely important because I think that's what most people are thinking. It's just too expensive for me when it may actually save them. So I want to make sure that we're taking actions that allow people to capture the money it will save. I'm reading Bill McKibben's book, Here Comes the Sun. which is a good book to read while all these sort of negative things are going on nationally because it's all about the increasing cheapness of things run by the sun. And I feel like we could capture more of that in our five-year books and be more positive around that. Let's see if I had anything else. Yeah, so I'm particularly interested in seeing eventually anything about financing or incentives, because those are the two ways to cut the initial startup cost for these things. And I think it's hard, as I said during the question, it's hard even to make predictions about what adoption will be if you don't know you know, if we were going to give everybody very large incentives, the adoption numbers would be much, much higher. Or if we had on-bill financing, it was really easy to do for everyone. So I guess that's another big thing I would like work on even regionally. You know, there's no reason to hog it to ourselves. And I liked the idea that Mr. Carney brought up in terms of, I don't know whether that would be a whether the UUT, not only for us, but for, I mean, we must not be the only city experiencing that. There must be other cities in the region and it'd be great if that would become a regular practice so that everyone would have incentives. And then And that also makes me think about what Mr. Carney has brought up as well about the rising cost of gas. It seems like that's something that we could talk about regionally. Ways to work through that using financing and incentives to get as many people as possible off of the gas. So I'm seeing all those work together as a package. And I guess the last thing I'll say is that I guess I talked a little about political changes. The other thing that this doesn't and can't encompass, of course, is technical changes, which I think are happening pretty rapidly. So I look forward to our discussion on EV charging in rental units, and I think that's really important. But if there's very fast charging, it may be something we end up not wanting to do if very fast charging all over the place. So I guess my, I come back to what I said in the beginning that I'm glad the model's built to be dynamic because I think that's very.

Chair, if I may just add a, comment in response to your observations. One of the things that I could emphasize about the model is that it underscores a portion of what we plan to include in the five-year decarbonization plan, but not all of it. We recognize that there are very important actions that we should pursue that we maybe can't model specific emissions reductions for, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do that. So things like financing or regional solutions to incentives. In some cases, even short-term trends that we're seeing, like gas prices, maybe we can't put that in a 20-year model, but we can track that and pursue that in discussion and look for opportunity within that. So the model isn't meant to be fully comprehensive. We will certainly work on things that are not. It's just meant as one of the tools in identifying local actions.

Okay, good to know. Oh, I had a couple other comments I see now. One is that in terms of schools, I like what the speaker said. I know that when I had kids in elementary school, I mean, she's kind of right, your whole world is elementary school. Those are the people, those are all your friends. And no one else wants to talk to you. And so I don't know if there's a way of, so I think it is a good way to get outreach and education to families who basically don't go anywhere else. And maybe linking it with school block in some way, having a school block, I don't know, something along those lines or some way of doing, going like the neighborhood, the council neighborhood committee meetings, maybe going to school meetings. I don't know, something along those lines, I think she has a point.

We do participate in school events when we're invited. This year, we hosted the city's Earth Day event and also went to one of the local schools' Earth Day events. And we had temporary heat pump water heater tattoos, temporary tattoos for children and stickers. And I think we had even stuffed animals. Oh, no.

Coloring books.

Coloring books related to our heat pump water heater program. I know that I made my parents avid recyclers as a school child because that was what was the thing in the 90s. So certainly there's great power in children compelling their parents to do things. So we certainly...

Oh, and I do think it would be good to send a note of appreciation for the, or support as Ms. Davio suggested.

Thank you. We can work with Ms. Gilmore. The city did send the letter of support to the Air District at the initial, at the onset, on the onset.

But it's not going to come up again until October. We can resend. You don't have to send me an individual. Thank you.

I've got enough of both sides of that and a lot of

lot of profane emails unfortunately um but uh yeah i think with respect to the air district as was noted uh you know we had some uh not everyone was president we don't necessarily know where everyone stands but um we had enough we kind of moved forward with frameworks that need to be worked through on the exemptions pieces and all those things. So hopefully the coalition holds together, we will see. I think with respect to the law, I mean, I look at this from a really high level. I think the time, money, and investment that we're putting into this model, hopefully it serves as a baseline or a framework that we can update over time as you mentioned dynamics so that you know if if ev adoption rates don't match our assumptions we can adjust those if new technology changes and um you know individual ev charters no longer make sense for whatever reason uh or or the macro political or economic changes As long as we can adapt fairly quickly and update things, I think that's the most important piece as opposed to what is on paper today, because it will change naturally, hopefully in a year or two. But yeah, I think from my perspective, we just want to make sure we have a good baseline and a good model that's adapted all over time so we don't have to go through this whole process every few years. And whoever's on this committee a few years from now will have a baseline to work from.

Well, I too appreciate the report and the analysis that was done. And in particular, I kept finding myself going back to that multi-colored chart, the big triangle made up of all those different pieces and thinking about how it would be different if the components of that changed. And I think you could really give like an hour long talk easily about what does that graph really say? And maybe we should have it now. But I really appreciated that and the numbers that were shared tonight. Because in particular, I think that people want to understand the magnitude of what's happened or not. And so I think communicating that and finding various ways to communicate that is really important. And it will change over time, like you say. But the other thing I think is really important is just keeping a count. We have a reach code that we've adopted, and we can look and see how many people put in electric appliances in their homes for the last year or so when they didn't have to. They could have just wired for it. or how many didn't, and sort of adjust accordingly. So I think that kind of keeping tabs on how things really function is very important for moving forward. And I also like the financing piece. I think that's important. I know that Silicon Valley Clean Energy had a used EV car program for a while. I have not heard about it in a few months, like six at least. So I don't know if it's still existent. But I understood from some people I talked to who used it that you could buy a used car from that for like $10,000 if you get any bid. And there is quite a turnover in these because a lot of people buy them with leases. So I think that's something to I also wanted to mention the idea of working with the schools. We do have a volunteer, one of the council we'll plan items for this year is how the city is gonna use volunteers. And this is an instance where how could we use volunteers? I too was a soccer ball for a while and very, very immersed in the whole PTA, volunteering, et cetera, et cetera thing. It's true, nobody else wants to talk to you because that's a very, very good point. You get very close to those people that you do deal with on a day-to-day basis. But there are typically, you know, there's a core group of people at every school who steps up to help. And they always want to know what they can help with. So I think that we, you know, we need to make it clear that this is something they can help with. And I would also say that the connection with PTAs, at least in the schools I was with, could be helpful, like going and speaking at a PTA meeting. I mean, you don't get half the school there. You get maybe 30 parents. But those are 30 parents that are sort of the movers and shakers. And if you can get things into their packets that go home weekly, which we haven't had much luck in doing with the city, but you know, it's things are better with the school districts than they have been. So perhaps it's a possibility, but they do have weekly packets or emails that go out. I mean, when my kids were little, they were packed, but sure. Now they're emails or texts. So, you know, those are opportunities to, um, to do outreach and we have just wonderful, um, graphics and things that are already put together. I mean, right you all have really done a wonderful job with that so so i think that's something that we could you know we can we could just try and and use a little we could try and use a little different avenue and um for that so um i uh i'm looking forward to this and um i also think that I just want to say I really appreciate how resilient the sustainability team has been. You have really gone through a sea change of policy over the last year and a half. And you could have just been completely stymied by it. But you aren't. And you haven't been. I just want to, you know, I just want to mention that that's been noticed and that's really appreciated. So do you have one?

Yeah. And after that nice dramatic ending, I haven't been that very non-dramatic. I just wanted to second your point about used EVs if that's because I think in addressing many people's ideas that EVs are too expensive. I think that leasing used EVs, and I think in particular in this area, a lot of people are selling, especially their Teslas. A lot of people who bought EVs several years ago were people who were at the sort of had the money and wanted to try it out and turn them over very quick. So I think that that's a good thing to, a good part of outreach and education.

So I think that brings us to the end of item 5.1 and we can move on to 5.2 which is the sustainability action plan for progress update. And this item will be presented by sustainability and resilience Division staff, Ms. Lee, will commence the presentation. Take it away.

Thank you, Ms. Showalter. We'll just bring up the presentation, but I'll introduce the item, and I'm joined by Ms. Anderson, who will be walking you through our update. Great, thank you. We can go to the next slide. The Sustainability Action Plan Forward, we'd like to just bring New York to speed as to where we are periodically. Staff comes to this committee to give you a progress update. The sustainability action plans that the city has adopted over the years were really shaped by the Environmental Sustainability Task Force. There were two of them. that included many members of the community, leaders and sustainability council appointed task forces in 2008 and 2017. Our most recent sustainability action plan was adopted in 2019 and it was significantly informed by the 2017 task force's work. That SAP included 81 actions and seven new staff positions. And over time, the plan has been refined through discussions with this committee to focus on 57 high impact measures.

Okay, and I will hand it over to Ms. Anderson to tell us where we are.

Thank you, Ms. Lee.

Laura Anderson, Sustainability Analyst. So Sustainability Action Plan 4, which I'll just refer to as SAP for now, is nearly complete. with 91% of actions either completed or ongoing. Many of these initiatives have moved beyond one-time projects and they're now embedded in ongoing city operations programs and decision-making processes. So building electrification has accelerated through the adoption of reach codes, new policies and procedures for city facilities and direct investments in upgrading municipal buildings. Clean transportation efforts have also expanded significantly including growth in EV charging infrastructure, development of a municipal fleet electrification plan, and adoption of the Vision Zero policy and action plan. Beyond infrastructure, the SAP has supported a wide range of community programs and incentives that bring climate action into daily life. This includes rebates, like for e-bikes, heat pump water heaters, as well as outreach and education campaigns, such as Electrify Mountain View, fear of the water heater, cool block, and other efforts focused on plant-based eating and heat resilience. Implementation of the plan has also helped the city leverage substantial external funding. We've secured more than $30 million in grants to celebrate these actions. A key example of this is the Measure B application. So the Sustainability Action Plan funds actually paid to help support that application creation. it resulted in $27 million for pedestrian and bike improvements. And then there are other grants we've gotten as well where we've been able to use SAP funds as match funding. So finally, SAP has strengthened partnerships, innovation, and accountability systems. So we've been able to collaborate with organizations like SVCE, Google, and Canopy And that has enabled us to have pilot projects and test out new technologies. We've also been able to improve our greenhouse gas inventories and reporting tools, like our CDP questionnaire, which was formerly the carbon disclosure project. And these are just some of the highlights. You'll see an attachment one to the council report that there's a full action by action list.

Next slide, please.

So due to the large scope of the plan, implementation of a small number of actions remains underway. The urban forest plan has been reviewed by both the Parks and Recreation Commission and City Council with Council adoption anticipated in June 2026, so this month. The draft climate vulnerability assessment is being refined after the feedback we received from from CSC last December. And the city's community and municipal decarbonization efforts are also advancing. As Ms. Lee and Ms. Lucky just discussed in the last item, the five-year plan is in development with council consideration anticipated by the end of the year. And at the same time, the phase one of municipal decarbonization is actively being implemented. which includes electrification of city facilities, solar installations, fleet and equipment, transitions, and supporting infrastructure upgrades. There are also two transportation initiatives that remain underway. The city's e-scooter pilot is expected to launch in fall of 2026. And the last one is the Transportation Demand Management Ordinance, which technically, actually, this was written before. It was just recently adopted I think just a week or so ago, right? Yeah, so that will apply to qualifying new development projects citywide. So overall, most remaining actions are expected to be substantially complete by the end of the year and. And from then we'll move forward to the five year plan. So move to the next slide, please. So the Sustainability Fund, which is the capital improvement project that was created with the adoption of SAP in 2019, it currently has a balance of about $3.86 million. About 1.9 million is allocated to current programs, projects, and staff. but there's roughly 2 million available for near-term high-impact decarbonization investments. So this available funding reflects a combination of previously unallocated funds, unspent balances from completed projects, and funds reallocated from projects that secured other funding sources. Next slide. Staff is proposing targeted investments that focus on year-term decarbonization. So this includes $500,000 to expand the heat pump water heater rebates. This is helping residents prepare for the upcoming Air District zero NOx appliance standards that will hopefully begin at 2027. Another $500,000 to expand expand the EV charging rebates for existing multifamily housing. So this would build on the initial grant funded launch that we're getting ready to launch this summer. Another 200,000 would support continuation of the Mountain View Community Shuttle and 300,000 for EV charging infrastructure for city fleet. So this is supporting the city's compliance with our greenhouse gas free fleet and equipment policy. Lastly, we're proposing an additional $300,000 to $500,000 for solar and battery storage projects at key city facilities. So this includes City Hall, the library, and the Rengstorf Park Aquatic Center. It's primarily to support soft costs associated with the projects, and it's not for the construction and design of it, but for only consultant services permitting and staff administration These projects are anticipated to come to council for review at a public hearing in September. Next slide. So looking ahead, staff will continue implementing the small number of SAP actions that remain underway with full plan closeout anticipated by July 2027. So as the SAP wraps up, any remaining program funds will be redirected towards implementing the high priority actions identified in the five-year plan. Helping ensure progress continues towards the city's climate goals. So with that, I'll conclude my presentation and pass it back to Ms. Lee, but I'm happy to take any questions.

I just wanted to add one clarification before we do questions. The seven positions that were referenced early in the presentation were spread across departments in recognition that sustainability work really happens across the city. So some were for our team, including my position, but others went into various departments across the city. There were just two within our team.

I think you have a slide for that if you wanted to share.

Okay.

Well, thank you very much for your presentation. And first, we'll have council questions. One the the the actions that are still in progress, that are

plan to be completed by the end of this whole year? Are any of those at risk? Is there any cautionary flags or anything?

We coordinated this update across all of the departments involved, but we did not hear

No, there were no concerns shared by any departments. Everything seemed to be on track.

Okay. I just didn't know of anything that was in the plan because the world has changed in 2019 a little bit, unfortunately. Okay.

The most current update The most recent change to the measures themselves within SAP was a little over a year ago. So it's not quite as dated as the 2019 original adoption.

Yes, I know it's been updated over time. I was just curious if anything was held over that we're worried about.

Well, my question is really about some of these things that have been completed. Were they all... communicated in staff reports or, I mean, like for instance, just even the second one, which was, it's ongoing, talking about monitoring of bike and trail use. Seems like, from my memory, we, maybe the, and I'm not, we get numbers on the Stevens Creek trail use with the counts that are done for the North Bay Shore. But I don't remember seeing any other counts of our bicycle use around the city. Anyway, some of these questions about how much are bike fluids. And for instance, the e-bikes. It looked like our success rate, our success criteria was, did we give the vouchers? We did give the vouchers, and that's great. But do we have any after, and we don't necessarily have to have it, but I sure hope you have it, after program surveys about how much do they use those? Do they become a part of their personal transportation, or are they sitting in the closet in their

I don't know that we have the immediate answer to your first question regarding the bike counts that are citywide. We can reach out to Public Works to inquire about that. Ms. Anderson, I know we surveyed after the program.

We did survey when the program completed the e-bike and we got results. We asked people basically how often they were using. Did it replace car trips? That sort of thing. I don't have the results in front of me, but it was, you know, pretty promising numbers. But, you know, we don't have further out. Right. Closed. Okay. Reaching out to people.

But it was enough for you to feel like we might want to do it again. Yeah. So.

Is it fair to say that there was more reference to the e-bikes being more of a primary source of transportation than. maybe the population average. So because it was an income qualified program, there was higher utilization because people truly needed these. There were less for recreational purposes than for transportation needs.

Well, even if they just replaced trips, I mean, that's what really counts as replacing trips. So I'm not, I wouldn't judge about what people, it's just the replacing trips. Yes. Yeah. And on that, depending on what your trips are for. Uh, I, I don't, but I, I'm just interested in, you know, we're putting a lot of money. Like you, you mentioned that, um, the measure B, um, yeah, grant that's, that's, you know, millions of dollars we put into bike, um, and the bike infrastructure. And I hear people kind of gripe from time to time that they don't see people using the bike trails. And so I think it would be wonderful for us to kind of keep up with that. And, um, The only big exceptions to that are the Stevens Creek Trail and the Guadalupe Trail. People seem very convinced that those are a great use of city funds and people use them a lot, et cetera, et cetera. So that's just what I'm getting at is we, you know, we, we want, we want the, um, to produce GHG reductions. And we also want people to be able to perceive that they've made a difference. And that's kind of the, so anyway, no, I, those were basically my questions relating to the, and I really appreciate you getting all this information together. I'm sure it took a long time, but I hope that it's very valuable in terms of, you know, actually doing the job.

The other thing I would say, sorry for the interruption, is that it's actually been a critical way of building the collaboration across departments because these actions, as developed based in large part on the recommendations of the ESTF-2, really did address all parts of the city organization and just the practice of monitoring and getting status updates and working with that cross-departmental team, I'd say much more than we had back at the point of adoption that we have that kind of collaboration.

Good. Yeah, that's good. Okay, so now we have public comment. Do we have public comment on this? Okay, do we have any public comment on video, on virtual, on video?

Yeah, Mary.

All right. Good evening again, Mary. I'm glad the city will continue to fund the city shuttle. I look forward to hearing the results of the EV charger and centers incentives for multifamily properties. And I look forward to the completion of electrification of the city's final 15% of the landscaping equipment. I'll be glad not to smell the gas power leaf blowers anymore once once we get those out of here. Um, item B 4.1 tells us the city completed a water heater upgrades at 18 facilities. Um, 30 of those were, um, at those 18 facilities, uh, 30, uh, units were replaced with heat pumps, but unfortunately five were replaced with tankless gas water heaters. So, um, five of the you know, five heaters were gas, 30 were electric. So that's 14% of the water heaters that stayed with natural gas. So I'm very confident, very confident. The city is very motivated to electrify and yet we were not a hundred percent successful. So, um, I think this underscores the comments that Bruce Carney has made, um, earlier and in other forums about the focus that needs to be maintained on electrifying buildings. It also helps underscore the importance of committing to end of natural gas flow in Mountain View by 2045. So if we say, you know, if that's it, 2045 is it, it's going to, I think, help provide just that little extra motivation to make those tankless water heaters be heat pumps. Thank you.

Okay, thank you. All right. Can I just get your name and your circle?

Hey, Patrick, I just want to mention this because it came up in the last school board meeting on the active transportation plan. They were discussing it and in the Uh, a recent city council meeting about data that there is a device called a tell Ram spelled T E L R a M. Uh, it's only been around for a couple of years. It's sort of a recent invention. That's why people might not have heard of it. They're only about $200 and they're a little device and they can be stuck outside, uh, and wifi or data connected. And they will count all of the different, um, modalities coming by. So we'll count the cars in real time, the bikes. the walkers and they're quite low cost and they could potentially be purchased easily and stuck in some, you know, key places. Then you can get that data in real time and then feed it to the website, whatever you want to see, get a text message about it every day. And yeah, I just thought everyone should know that I think this problem of the data can be very easily solved. Thanks. Thank you.

All right. Okay, so...

This item as well was an informational. I'd only just like to hear the committee.

Well, then we get to item six. Oh, we didn't make our comments. Of course we didn't make our comments.

And it's only responding to what you said about I wasn't going to make But I actually think what you said about in your question about counting like lane use and other things, I actually think that's important for some additional reasons. I think it's good to look at not only results, so you can tell people that the money you're spending is being spent in good ways, but also, you know, maybe there's some places and some particular kinds of bike lanes, for example, that are highly used and some that are not, it's kind of been an indicator of what you should be doing in the future. So for example, I prefer biking on bike boulevards and neighborhood streets. That's one of the comments I see people making about the kinds of bike lanes we're doing now in El Camino and California that they would also like effort to be put into neighborhood streets so that's not so much a comment about that people are making so about whether to do bike lanes or not but what type works out for people better and so i think i think that may be true with a lot of other things too you know should we fund more electric scooters or neighborhood electric vehicles or e-bikes you know i think we can um get not just how much are they used, but what kinds of things are, you know, what's giving us the biggest bang for our buck? Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's, to piggyback on your comment, this is probably more a transportation, probably more a CTC thing, but, you know, any place that has, this is going to undercount, because major intersections, but any intersection with a traffic camera that is not storing data, but if it's a high-resolution camera, now with a simple piece of software, that can tell us bikes. It can even get into, is that an e-bike or not? It can do models of vehicles and give you a pretty good idea of whether it's a fully electric vehicle hybrid. You can do that with all the privacy protections imposed because our traffic cameras today aren't capturing it. license plates, the ones controlling actual traffic movements. And so you get a lot of really valuable data there from major intersections or roadways that have lanes. And then for some of the neighborhood streets and other things, I don't know if there are places in the right of way. As long as everyone understands that none of the data is actually being stored, it's purely just counts. It's spitting out what type of vehicle was where on at what time of day, then you get a pretty good idea and you can install those on trails too. There are a few cities that have done that. And I'm not sure that that's the right answer for us now, but as we replace our adaptive traffic control systems, like those having a higher height of resolution camera with enough software to not only control the traffic, but to give us basic counts about power road laser and trails and other things are paying you um and i think there's sustainability piece to that too just kind of don't want to break down that's because one thing to look at vehicle registrations and those sorts of things it's another to actually look at how they're painting where okay sorry about forgetting i don't really i wonder i don't really have any

And the other thing is, I do feel like, as we've said many times, you know, reporting things out is, you know, the process that gets to that is of itself very valuable. The interaction between departments is very valuable. And so, you know, it's an important part of the process to do that. And we're really glad to be the ones to hear it. Okay, so then that brings us to Item six, committee staff comments, questions, and committee report. I do have a request and see if anybody else has any comments or reports. No, no. Okay. Well, as all of you know, the last couple of years, we have hosted a sea level rise meeting for elected officials for Santa Clara County. And at the last one, We had kind of a couple related to the Brown Act because that led to nobody but me being from Mountain View being able to go, which was pretty ridiculous. So we've been asked to continue this custom and have another sea level rise meeting this fall. And I would like to avoid the issue of the Brown Act and a methodology to avoid that is to have a special meeting, have this meeting of elected officials of Santa Clara County be a special meeting of the Council Sustainability Committee. That would mean that both of you could come if you wanted to. And other council members could come if they wanted to just listen. But anyway, it would get around the problem. So due to the sort of issues with scheduling this, we don't have a date scheduled. Normally, it's in October or November, and that's probably going to work out this year, it would be good to have this group move to have that special meeting. So that's my request, is that we move to have a special meeting of the Council Sustainability Committee as this. And I see that. Ms. Ramberg has a comment.

Yes, thank you so much for that idea and the sensitivity around how to enable better participation. And as it's not an agendized item, I think it wouldn't be so much a formal motion and vote, but you could kind of have a straw poll indication of interest for staff to come back at some point. Okay, and that would allow us to move forward with it.

All right, so that's a better idea. Then we'll do that. So what do people think about that?

I think that's fine as long as logistically, I mean, if it's a special meeting, like, clearly we're not going to be able to do remote. So as long as we can, as long as that's okay with whatever new rules just came into effect in January. And then if it is a noticed meeting of the committee, you just have to pick a date where at least two of us come up. So we don't end up with a meeting that can't happen. And then everyone can still gather and talk, but then you're right back in square one.

That's a very good point. Make sure at least two of us. And the other thing that we sort of tossed around was the idea of making it a special city council meeting. But that would be trickier. That would mean we'd have to have four people vetting. And we thought that that was too high a bar. Just that. So going forward with this special.

I'm generally okay.

Yeah. Okay. So just for the straw poll. Straw poll. And we'll work on schedule.

We'll just have to make sure everyone knows because, you know, like this committee meeting, if there were other council members here, they can come and listen, but they can't.

participate.

Yeah, well, they might be able to speak as a member of the public. It's a little dicey, but I'm sure it will all be fine. But just whatever, whatever verbiage we need to add.

So we can kind of go forward with that. And we'll work on it. We don't have a date yet. We need to work on a date. And you're right. We do need to have at least two people on this committee who can attend and hopefully three and hopefully all of us and That's great progress. Okay. So are there any other committee reports? No. All right. Okay. Well, with that, I'm going to adjourn this meeting at 731. Thank you very much, everyone.