A riotous meeting of the Hermosa Beach Planning Commission revealed vigorous residential opposition to more aggressive environmental stewardship proposals, potentially dislodging carbon neutrality as a goal from the city’s General Plan, and undermining an environmental consensus that has shaped the city’s politics since the 2015 vote on oil.
The meeting was part of the planning commission’s final consideration of PLAN Hermosa, the city’s multi-year effort to update its General Plan and secure approval of its Local Coastal Program. Discussion of carbon neutrality and other issues, including historic preservation, stretched the meeting far beyond traditional confines, with more than twelve hours of presentations and comment stretching over three separate evenings.
Although discussion concluded at a meeting Monday night, the language in the plan is not yet finalized for a formal recommendation to council, said Community Development Director Ken Robertson. That process will continue at a special meeting on March 13, and possibly on to the commission’s regularly scheduled meeting March 21. The City Council, who will ultimately vote on whether to approve the document, will hold a study session on the plan April 5, and a public hearing at some later date.
Every speaker during the public comment portion opposed the carbon neutrality goal. (Community members who had previously spoken positively of the goal were present, but did not speak.) After hearing the outcry from members of the community, commissioners agreed to restate the goal as one of low carbon, meeting California’s still-stringent state guidelines for greenhouse gas reductions, rather than achieving carbon neutrality for the whole community by 2040. (The goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2020 for city vehicles and buildings was retained.)
But this concession seems unlikely to placate the crowd, who styled themselves the “quiet majority” of Hermosa. These speakers contended that the carbon neutrality proposal was the work of a cabal of radical environmentalists and a mostly compliant city council, and argued that the only solution was to politically organize against environmentally inclined council members.
“You think you’ve got a full council room now, just wait. A lot of people on the hill are planning to oust the people on the council that are putting this together in the next election,” said J.C. Agajanian, referring to residents living on the hillside neighborhood north of Gould Avenue.
Others went further, advocating a recall effort.
“I wouldn’t wait till the next election to vote those folks out of office,” said former planning commissioner Steve Izant.
Although the elected officials were not mentioned by name, the speakers were almost certainly referring to Mayor Hany Fangary, Mayor pro tem Justin Massey, and council members Jeff Duclos and Stacey Armato. This was made clear at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting when City Attorney Michael Jenkins launched into a discussion of the Brown Act prompted by a speaker’s comment that the the councilmembers had already made up their minds about how they were going to vote on the plan, referencing an apparent Facebook post to that effect from Councilmember Carolyn Petty. Jenkins said that social media predictions about how members of the council were likely to vote on an issue not yet before them had the potential to create serial meetings, in violation of the Brown Act.
Fangary said that that was precisely what had happened over the weekend.
“That hypothetical is not a hypothetical. I’ve had people coming up to me, emailing me, asking me how I’m going to vote [on PLAN Hermosa],” he said.
Petty contended that it was clear from past votes how both she and others on the council felt on environmental issues, and that she was only trying to get information out to the public.
“It’s not a Brown Act violation to ensure that the community is engaged,” Petty said.
But the Facebook reference was telling in other ways. Many people at last week’s planning commission meeting referenced hearing about the meeting, and the General Plan itself, for the first time on Facebook. (A draft version of the plan was released in December 2015.) When an Easy Reader reporter requested the draft environmental impact report for PLAN Hermosa and associated planning commission meeting materials from the Hermosa Beach library over the weekend, a librarian commented that it was the first time anyone had asked for the documents.
Indeed, much of the planning commission meeting took on the tone of a hyperbolic Internet rant. The large crowd cheered speeches questioning human contributions to climate change. Former planning commissioner Kent Allen compared PLAN Hermosa to the Communist Manifesto. Many were incredulous at what they believed the plan to contain.
“You’re going to force us to retrofit our houses that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars? You’re going to force us to purchase credits for global warming that isn’t even bought into by a huge segment of the population? You’re going to ban our cars and force us to buy electric?” said resident Miles Johnson.
The majority of these comments dealt not with the carbon-neutrality-by-2040 goal, but with an alternative: achieving carbon neutrality by 2030 without the use of carbon offsets. The California Environmental Quality Act requires EIRs to include alternatives to the proposed project. At an April 2016 city council meeting, all five council members voted to instruct staff to add the 2030 option to the alternatives analysis.
Some overlap does exist between the two options. The 2030 alternative would “require on-site renewable energy generation and zero net energy as part of all new construction and major building renovations”; the 2040 goal embodied in the draft plan references efforts to “require, promote and facilitate” the installation of renewable energy technology on homes and businesses.
But according to the analysis in the draft EIR and proposed implementation measures, significantly more sacrifices would be required to achieve the 2030 goal. Among the implementation measures that were present for the 2030 plan, but not for the 2040 proposal: mandating energy-saving retrofits to existing buildings at the time of sale, rental inspection or issuance of building permits; and eliminating the use of natural gas within the city in favor of biogas and use of electric appliances. (Many energy-use experts believe that the last 10 percent of reductions of greenhouse gas emissions will be disportionately difficult to achieve, which may partially explain the dramatic difference between the two options.)
Few speakers, however, distinguished between the 2040 proposal and the 2030 alternative in their comments. And other putative policies, like the confiscation of private automobiles, are found in no city document.
