On its first anniversary, the Climate Action Forum hammers out a Top 5 list — and a reality check from the city manager

The Climate Action Forum marked one year of existence Wednesday by spending most of its meeting on a single question: how to hand City Council a list of climate priorities that staff can actually act on. The group reviewed a Word document and a companion spreadsheet — identical content, different formats — laying out five priority categories: EV charging, vehicle electrification, building electrification, small equipment electrification, and related actions, with specific steps drawn from the Larkspur Climate Action Plan, the EV Acceleration Roadmap, and the Marin Countywide Building Electrification Roadmap.

“You've got all those new spaces at the library, public property. Got all those EV chargers at Piper Park, public property. That's what we're talking about. You're already doing it.”— David Miller, to City Manager Dan Schwarz

City Manager Dan Schwarz did most of the pushing back, and his objections were less about ambition than about wording. Many of the listed actions, he said, are framed as "promote" or "educate" and don't come with anything a staffer could report on later. He also asked the Forum to separate actions on public property from those on private property, and to split planning responsibilities from public works ones, warning that mixing them "is going to confuse the staff." On EV charging in particular he wanted to know what the Forum was actually asking for — whether the city was being asked to subsidize chargers on private land.

David Miller answered that much of this is already city practice: the new library parking spaces and the chargers at Piper Park are both public property. Schwarz's reply framed the whole disagreement. Miller, for his part, defended the action list as the product of what he estimated at thousands of hours of stakeholder work, and argued the items should stay in.

Schwarz also offered some ground truth on where Larkspur stands. Larkspur and Corte Madera, he said, have the best level-three charging in the county; what's missing is convenient overnight charging, particularly up on Baltimore Hill and Greenbrae Hill. On building electrification, he said his staff's read is that the biggest barrier is old houses with old panels — residents who want a heat pump but can't also afford a panel upgrade. Council liaison Sarah Margules suggested presenting the package as a living document, and the group agreed to take the five priorities to Council on April 15 as a working policy document, asking for a blessing and for staff to review the actions for feasibility and metrics. A special CAF meeting is tentatively planned for May, at the new library, to review what staff comes back with.