Enviro Law Group Sues San Diego For Missing Climate Goals In Mira Mesa

By MacKenzie Elmer, the Voice of San Diego

February 21, 2023

Enough with the cars. That’s the message of climate advocates to city officials, regarding a community plan for one of the city’s fastest-growing suburban job centers.

Some of the region’s highest-profile climate advocates say San Diego shouldn’t allow Mira Mesa to continue growing without addressing the huge number of greenhouse-gas producing car commutes it draws.

The Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation, or CERF, notified the city earlier this month of its intent to sue over an update to the Mira Mesa community plan. These plans dictate how neighborhoods are permitted to grow. Most crucially, the plans are supposed to be in line with Mayor Todd Gloria’s renewed commitments to slashing planet-warming gasses known as the Climate Action Plan, approved in the fall of 2021.

Climate advocates at CERF say the Mira Mesa plan, approved by City Council in January, doesn’t get the job done. The plan update fails to include a meaningful attempt to shift commuters out of their cars and into public transit like buses or trolley lines, CERF’s lawsuit alleges.

As one of the city’s northernmost neighborhoods, Mira Mesa draws a huge amount of daily car commuters to its technology job hubs, headquarters and business parks. A presentation on Mira Mesa’s plan from the city Planning Department shows over 90 percent of commuters travel to Mira Mesa by personal automobile. The proposed plan, the department showed, aims to slash that to 71 percent by adding more walkways, bikeways and some public transit.

But CERF says that’s not enough to meet Gloria’s own standards – laid out in his Climate Action Plan.

Gloria’s Climate Action Plan commits the city to shifting 50 percent of car commutes to either walking, cycling or public transit. Mira Mesa’s plan should aim to reach at least the Climate Action Plan’s goals as well, CERF alleges.

“If this commuting pattern continues in Mira Mesa and other job-heavy suburban areas in San Diego County … the (Climate Action Plan) 2035 target of 50 percent non-auto (commute) will be unattainable even if all auto trips are eliminated in downtown San Diego and other core planning areas,” the lawsuit reads.

Gloria’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment last week.

CERF’s lawsuit pointed back to over a dozen other community plan updates the city approved in years past that also failed to meet transit-based climate targets under a softer-handed Climate Action Plan passed in 2015. Then, the city’s goal was to cut half its greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. Fossil fuel-burning transportation was by far the biggest source of emissions in San Diego then, at about 55 percent.

Mira Mesa’s is the first to be approved under Gloria’s renewed Climate Action Plan passed in August, which commits the city to reach net zero emissions by 2035. (Net zero means the city would strike a balance between cutting as many emissions as the city generates and rely on technologies to make up the rest when it can’t.) Transportation still accounts for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions in San Diego.

When asked why CERF didn’t sue the city on any of the previous community plans, attorney Livia Borak Beaudin said the organization chose to wait to see what Gloria’s administration would come up with for their renewed climate commitments.

“If a new plan was coming forward, we were concerned the city would say, ‘don’t worry, we’ll fix this with a new plan,’” Borak Beaudin said. “That’s why it was such a let down when we finally saw this new Climate Action Plan has all these great goals, but there’s no roadmap to get there.”

CERF is involved in another lawsuit against the city – filed jointly with the Climate Action Campaign – over the lack of an adequate roadmap which commits the city to cutting greenhouse gasses on an actual timeline with dedicated money.

The City Attorney’s Office had no comment in response to the lawsuit Thursday.

Another way Mira Mesa’s proposed plan attempts to limit car commuting is adding more housing to the neighborhood than jobs – the idea being if more people lived near these growing job centers, car commutes would at least be shorter or even swapped for greener options like transit. The proposed plan sets a target of 24,000 new homes in Mira Mesa and 5,000 new jobs. Mira Mesa’s older plan called for almost the opposite – 7,200 new homes and 27,000 new jobs.

Still, the total number of homes created would be half the number of jobs, said Norman Marshall, a transportation planning consultant at Smart Mobility hired by CERF to study the Mira Mesa plan in a letter to Borak Beaudin.

“If these workplaces are constructed in the same outdated auto-oriented patterns of the past, this will dig the city into a deeper hole relative to achieving its (transit) goals,” Marshall wrote.

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