Report Card: Mayor, Council need to improve on environmental quality
By: Colin Parent

On Wednesday, a coalition of 11 environmental organizations released the first ever “Report Card” to grade a broad range of environmental quality issues for the City of San Diego.

The Report Card quantitatively grades Mayor Jerry Sanders and the City Council on their votes and policies related to the environment in 2009. It is available on the League of Conservation Voters’ Web site.

The Report Card grades city officials by the numbers. Consultants were hired from Strategic Community Consulting (SCC), an independent group which provides consulting services from the UCSD Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) to nonprofit clients in the San Diego area.

SCC generated a list of votes and policy positions taken by the Mayor and City Council. SCC assigned each decision a weight on their relative environmental impact, and then decided independently whether City decisions were in accord with environmental quality. Both City officials and other stakeholders were provided an opportunity to provide input to the SCC decisions, but SCC made the final decisions.

The Mayor and a number of City Councilmembers did not do well on the Report Card. But the Report Card wasn’t commissioned to reward or to punish City officials. The focus for our Coalition is not what happened in 2009, but what will happen in 2010. The purpose of the Report Card is to identify where City officials went wrong, and how they can better protect the environment going forward.

The Report Card identifies a number of policy issues the environmental community will be watching a for next year’s Report Card. Officials will likely receive good grades if they support the following issues expected to face the City in 2010:

• Completion of an Indirect Potable Reuse demonstration project to recycle wastewater into usable drinking water and development of large-scale implementation projects.
  
• Minimizing impacts to wetlands in the proposed deviations to the City’s Environmentally Sensitive Lands regulations.
  
• Reducing the potential environmental impacts of the City’s proposed creek channel maintenance program for storm water conveyance.
  
• Implementing policies to encourage energy efficiency retrofits to municipal buildings and private residences in all neighborhoods,
  
• Appointing a Port Commissioner with a record of protecting the health and environment of communities surrounding the Port.

Over the course of the next week, members of our Report Card coalition will blog here on SDNN’s A More Perfect Union about a number of environmental issues. They’ll discuss some of the grades in the 2009 Report Card, and they’ll also talk about some issues we expect to see on the 2010 Report Card.

Because of our proximity to the ocean, and our shared love of the outdoors, San Diegans are particularly concerned about our environmental health. It is our hope that by promoting these issues with the public, elected officials will be encouraged to enact policy that carefully protects our City’s environmental quality.

The City of San Diego Environmental Quality Report Card Coalition:

The League of Conservation Voters San Diego, Surfrider San Diego, San Diego Coastkeeper,  San Diego Sierra Club, California Native Plant Society, Center On Policy Initiatives, Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation, Environmental Health Coalition, Friends of Rose Canyon, San Diego Audubon Society, and San Diego Canyonlands.

Colin Parent is on the board of the League of Conservation Voters San Diego.