Five climate priorities head to Council — after the city manager spent an evening asking "how would we report that?"

The Climate Action Forum hit its one-year mark Wednesday and spent nearly the whole meeting on one problem: how to hand City Council a climate wish list that staff can actually do something with. Members reviewed a Word document and a matching spreadsheet — same content, two formats — organizing everything into five priority categories: EV charging, vehicle electrification, building electrification, small equipment electrification, and related actions, with specific steps pulled 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, and his objection was about verbs, not ambition. Too many actions, he said, are written as "promote" or "educate" — language with no status you can assign and nothing a staffer can report out a year later. He asked the Forum to separate actions on public property from those on private property, and to split planning duties from public works duties, warning that mixing them "is going to confuse the staff." On EV charging he wanted the ask stated plainly: is the city being asked to subsidize chargers on private land?

David Miller's answer became the evening's cleanest line — the city is already doing this, on ground it owns. Miller also defended the action list as the product of what he estimated at thousands of hours of stakeholder work and argued the items should stay. Forum member Katie framed the counterweight to Schwarz's operational caution: "I don't want to always bias toward the easiest possible operational path if there's a better opportunity to do something that's going to have a better climate impact at the end of the day."

Schwarz offered some useful ground truth along the way. Larkspur and Corte Madera have the best level-three charging in the county, he said; what's missing is convenient overnight charging, with a real dearth up on Baltimore Hill and Greenbrae Hill. On building electrification, his staff's read is that the biggest barrier is old houses with old electrical panels — residents who want a heat pump but can't also swing a panel upgrade. Council liaison Sarah Margules suggested pitching the package as a living document, and the group settled on taking the five priorities to Council on April 15 as a working policy document, asking for a blessing and for staff to test the actions for feasibility and metrics. A special Forum meeting is tentatively set for May, at the new library, to see what staff brings back.