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SPUR 2007 ANNUAL REPORT
PROGRAM UPDATES:
SPUR's Top Policy Goals for 2008
This article appears in the April 2008 issue of Urbanist
Sustainable Development
Our goal at SPUR is to establish San Francisco as a leading global city in sustainable development.
SPUR’s entire mission has been motivated by a strong environmental ethic: this is the reason we try to direct growth into compact urban forms and away from sprawl, the reason we work so hard to improve public transit, the reason we worked to establish the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Today, our sustainable development program tries to forge new ground, focusing on new approaches to the natural resource flows in and out of cities. This is the age of global warming, water scarcity and a growing fear of ecological collapse. But it is also the era of high performance building techniques, renewable energy generation and smart infrastructure planning. San Francisco, because of its urbanity, is already more ecologically sound than most of the settlement in America; our goal is to build on this legacy from the past by making this city the most sustainable it can possibly be.
Climate Policy Project
More than 500 cities in the United States have committed to comply with the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, an extraordinary outburst of democratic activism intended to get around the effective blockage at the federal level. Unfortunately, the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement has not been matched with action. No city is even close to attaining its greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and, to our knowledge, no city even has a rigorous plan for getting there. The San Francisco Foundation funded SPUR to begin work to add rigor to the urban global warming agenda by developing a plan for responding to climate change in San Francisco. SPUR has begun a process of estimating the costs and benefits of all of the major potential interventions into the city’s carbon metabolism.
Check out the City’s Climate Action Plan at www.sfenvironment.org/downloads/library/climateactionplan.pdf.
ClimatePlan
In 2007, SPUR participated in ClimatePlan, a new regional coalition focused on promoting land use policies and public investment in California to achieve AB 32 greenhouse gas emission reductions targets. Last September, ClimatePlan was one of several groups across the country to release a new report published by the Urban Land Institute. The report details the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that could be expected with smarter growth development and makes the scientific case that smart growth is a critical part of solving global warming.
Learn more about the ClimatePlan coalition at www.climateplanca.org.
Peakers debate
SPUR testified before the Board of Supervisors to oppose the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s proposed contract with J-Power to install and operate “peaker” combustion turbine power plants in southeast San Francisco – on the grounds that the peakers are a harmful and short-sighted solution to local energy production and reliability. The PUC has claimed the peakers are necessary to meet state-imposed electricity reliability requirements, and to enable the shutdown of the existing Mirant plant in that neighborhood. However, SPUR’s analysis revealed the City can likely meet reliability needs with projects such as the transbay cable, renewable energy, conservation and demand management — and also can propose a new, greener energy plan to the state. In addition, the peakers would not be substantially cleaner than the existing plant, once the existing plant’s diesel turbines are shut down as required in 2009.
Green Building Task Force
SPUR convened a group of experts to review the report and recommendations of the Mayor’s Task Force on Green Buildings and Supervisor Peskin’s proposed Green Building Design Ordinance. The committee sought to balance the desire to increase the sustainable performance of buildings with the desire to keep new bureaucracy to a minimum. Ultimately, SPUR offered support of the mayor’s proposal based on its inclusion of requirements for all new buildings to exceed California’s Title 24 requirements; integrate on-site stormwater detention and treatment systems; and include dedicated space for compost and recycling functions.
Also related to green buildings, SPUR held a brainstorming session about the City’s Residential Energy Conservation Ordinance regarding what needs to be done to introduce some more modern changes to requirements for energy efficiency upgrades to existing buildings at time-of-sale. We also heard about a proposal to develop a home energy rating system to complement RECO.
Learn more about the City’s green building task force at www.sfenvironment.org/our_programs/topics.html?ssi=8&ti=19.
City wastewater master plan
Over the last two years, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has been drafting a 30-year master plan for San Francisco’s wastewater system, to be released this spring. Our sustainable development committee has been monitoring the plan’s development and has prepared guidelines to help inform the public’s evaluation of the plan upon its release this fall. The master plan seeks to increase reliability and sustainability of our wastewater system by upgrading aging pipes and facilities, minimizing sewer overflows, and addressing specific neighborhood and environmental justice concerns like odor and flooding. SPUR will propose several criteria — including its ability to minimize sewer overflows and flooding, establish seismic reliability and maximize the beneficial reuse of resources (biofuels, biosolids, reclaimed water) extracted from wastewater — as benchmarks for judging its adequacy to meet sustainability and reliability goals. We will publish the guidelines this summer.
Read a draft of the City’s wastewater master plan at www.sfsewers.org.
Water system improvement project
Last September, SPUR’s sustainable development committee commented on the draft Program Environmental Impact Review of the SFPUC’s Water System Improvement Program – based in a belief that the PEIR should be as robust and compelling a document as possible, and should include specific recommendations to provide the most stable, reliable water supply to the Bay Area while minimizing significant negative environmental effects on the river and its ecosystems. In a letter to the City’s Environmental Review Officer, SPUR recommended for the final PEIR to strongly reiterate the primary purpose of the WSIP — to improve the reliability of the water system that serves 2.5 million people in the Bay Area — and to consider additional opportunities to mitigate or avoid decreased flows in the lower Tuolumne River.
For more information on the SFPUC’s Water System Improvement Project, visit www.sfwater.org.
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