The Kirkland City Council is taking the next step towards promoting environment policies on a regional level they have promoted locally for several years.
The council voted to authorize Mayor Amy Walen signing a letter pledging its commitment, with other cities in King County, to support efforts to reduce green-house gas emissions.
The King County-Cities Climate Collaboration Joint Letter of Commitment calls for cities to focus on “practical, near-term, collaborative opportunities” with King County to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which the coalition believes is causing a rise in temperatures.
The targets are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020, 50 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050, using 2007 as a baseline, the same targets the King County Growth Management Council voted in favor of.
The city committed to similar greenhouse gas emission reduction goals in 2008 after receiving recommendations by the staff, with reductions of 20 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.
Much of what is intended regionally it has already done in Kirkland, according to Director of Human Resources James Lopez, who is also the director of the Performance Management Green Team Staff.
“A lot of what’s in the letter, the city has already been doing a good part of it,” he said. “I think it’s very much about how are we going to regionally make some of these things happen.”
Among Kirkland’s projects is its Green Building Program, in which homes built using the Built Green Certification are 20 percent more energy-efficient than the energy standards mandated under the Washington State Energy Code.
Kirkland has also pushed for recycling, having been the number one city in King County for single family residential recycling, at 67.95 percent, for six of the last seven years.
The combined 2013 recycling rate was 44.6 percent.
Another environmental effort on the part of the city has been the Totem Lake Green Trip (TGT) program, a personal travel management site that encourages commuters to use alternative means of transportation such as buses, carpools and vanpools.
The program aims to reduce 680 annual trips by the end of 2015 within the Totem Lake Urban Center.
The city first got involved in the issue of climate change in 2005, when it signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Change Protection Agreement, committing to reversing climate change – which at the time they referred to as global warming – by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
In 2009, the council adopted the Climate Change Protection Action Plan proposed by staff.
Among the city’s goals is to reduce the number of single-occupied vehicles on the road, as well as the miles traveled. Right now, the drive-alone rate is 75.7 percent, with 67.9 percent desired.
Additionally, the city also committed to considering supporting policies in the Comprehensive Plan for a future Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) program, which allows property owners in designated rural areas to transfer their development rights to properties designated as urban.
The council voted 6-1 authorizing the most recent resolution, with Toby Nixon the lone dissenting council member.
During the council discussion, Nixon said he opposed the letter, claiming it designated CO2 as a pollutant.
He also objected to the letter calling climate change the “paramount challenge of our generation.”
“Climate change has always occurred and always will,” he said. “We should not make major decisions that have the potential to impact negatively on quality of life based on inconsistent data.”
The city was a founder of the KCCC Pledge, which was signed in 2011 by Mayor Joan McBride with the intention of reducing “global and local sources of climate pollution.”
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNSA) recently published a report that examined temperatures in the Northeast Pacific coastal region from 1990-2012. The report concluded that the rise in temperature in the area was due to natural causes and not humans.
