Orange County Supervisors signed off on the county’s first climate action plan after an hour of debating how much they could water it down and still receive state grant funding.
While the plan encourages electrification and offers ideas on how local residents and businesses can lower their greenhouse gas emissions, supervisors were very clear that none of it would be binding on businesses and that it would not be included in their new general plan.
“There’s nothing that mandates anything on any private developer,” said Supervisor Katrina Foley, who helped draw up the plan over the past two years. “We are not mandating what is contained in the section.”
Orange County is one of the last counties in California to sign off on a climate action plan, and it’s a step they’re taking to guarantee they can compete for state grants related to environmental justice.
Supervisor Don Wagner said the entire plan is a “game the state forces us to play” for grant funding, calling it a “grotesque waste of money” before he voted in support of a bulk of the plan.
“We wasted an enormous amount of time on this,” Wagner said. “I recognize we need to have a climate action plan in order to get the funding that is absolutely critical to this government doing the basic function it needs to do.”
Supervisors unanimously supported the recommendations to improve their own infrastructure by adding things like more EV charging stations at county buildings and installing solar panels.
But the biggest debates came over a portion of the plan dubbed Chapter Four, which mapped out the community climate action plan, including recommendations for how residents could electrify their appliances and developers could make more environmentally friendly homes.
Supervisors Janet Nguyen and Wagner brought up concerns that those recommendations could confuse developers about what the county was or wasn’t requiring for new housing projects to get approved.
“I know it says voluntary and nonbinding, however the section establishes countywide goals without clear implementation parameters,” Nguyen said. “It makes everybody nervous when you’re not sure what is mandated, what isn’t.”
Supervisors Doug Chaffee, Foley and Vicente Sarmiento voted against their colleagues to approve almost all of Chapter Four, highlighting that businesses could use or disregard the recommendations.
“The reason for Chapter 4 is if we don’t have Chapter 4, we will not be able to be as competitive for state grants,” Foley said. “The concern is understood, and that’s why I’ve said every single meeting over the past year and a half these are not mandates.”
The only recommendation county supervisors didn’t make a decision on was a recommendation on building de-carbonization, which they are set to discuss again in the future.
The plan itself also specifies that none of its recommendations are binding.
“This CAP (Climate Action Plan) outlines potential voluntary and planning-level measures for reducing GHG emissions within the County’s jurisdiction,” staff wrote. “The voluntary nature of this CAP enables flexible decision-making as the County progresses.”
Nicole Walsh, senior assistant county counsel, also made it clear at the meeting there would be no binding laws passed as a result of the county’s climate action plan.
“Our comprehensive general plan update has to have an environmental justice chapter. It does.” Walsh said. “Because the climate action plan is not part of the general plan, and we are not making it part of the general plan, any environmental justice conversation in the CAP will not qualify us for anything.”
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org.
