April 08--Mayor Eric Garcetti on Wednesday released a broad-ranging plan that outlines his vision for environmental goals and programs in Los Angeles over the coming decades.
The 105-page booklet -- titled, in a simple play on words, "the pLAn" -- is a grab bag of previously announced and novel environmental initiatives on subjects that include water use and electric cars. It was produced under the direction of Matt Petersen, the chief sustainability officer the mayor appointed shortly after taking office in 2013.
The document sums up in one place for the first time the mayor's vision of what he calls a more "sustainable" city.
"There is no closed-off 'environment department' in my administration," Garcetti states in the introduction to the report, which he was scheduled to formally unveil at a press conference Wednesday morning.
"Instead, we are incorporating sustainability -- and now, this pLAn -- into each of our 35 departments and bureaus, from airports to police to water and power and everything in between."
Key parts of the plan include a higher percentage of electric vehicles in L.A., a cleanup of the polluted San Fernando groundwater basin and better monitoring of air quality in poor neighborhoods.
Specifically, the plan calls for a 25% increase in the city's meager proportion of electric cars by 2035, and states that all city-owned "light-duty" vehicles will be electric by 2035.
Yet some of the plan's central elements are also pre-existing programs -- for example, the mayor's call to reduce per-capita water use by 22.5% by 2025 and halve the city's importation of water from outside sources. At least one initiative -- the phasing out of electricity from coal-fired power plants -- was actually instituted by former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Other goals described in the report appear to be things over which city officials have little or no control, such as lowering the city's temperature difference with surrounding rural areas by 3 degrees over the next two decades. The report calls for a 15% reduction in so-called "rent-burdened households" in L.A. by 2035, but describes few concrete steps to achieve that aim.
In an interview, Petersen said that the report was an important first step toward achieving the far-reaching vision it describes.
"If we don't take the step to set targets, and measure progress to achieve those targets," Petersen said, "how will we send the signals to the private sector, to the universities, that this is important as a community to come together?"
He added, "We won't make progress toward creating the changes we need to see... There are things we can do, but we can't do it alone."
