Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Bend

The city of Bend is exploring how it could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70% by 2050. The goals are outlined in the city’s Community Climate Action Plan, which it’s working on updating.

Officials are examining what strategies to prioritize and how future policies could affect Bend’s businesses, affordable housing goals and economy.

Recently, the city has considered how it could construct new buildings that have electric appliances rather than fossil-fuel power sources like gas. While some climate activists applaud the efforts, others wonder how new regulations could affect the city financially and leave it vulnerable to costly lawsuits.

Cyrus Mooney is a business advocate for the city of Bend. Cassie Lacy is a senior management analyst for the city. They join us with details of the city’s plans.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The city of Bend is exploring how it can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70% by 2050. The goal is part of the city’s Community Climate Action Plan. Officials are examining what strategies to prioritize and how those policies could affect Bend’s businesses, affordable housing goals and its overall economy.

Cassie Lacy is a senior management analyst for Bend. Cyrus Mooney is the city’s business advocate. They both work in the City Manager’s Office. They’ve both been taking part in meetings about Bend’s emissions reductions policies, and they both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Cassie Lacy: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Cyrus Mooney: Happy to be here.

Miller: Cassie, first – what did the city commit to in its Community Climate Action Plan, which it adopted five years ago?

Lacy: It committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030 and by 70% by 2050. Those are for community-wide greenhouse gas emissions. So those are emissions that come from all of people’s homes, people driving around town, things that we don’t have a lot of direct control over. And then, in the same resolution, we also committed to achieving those same reduction goals in the city’s own facilities and operations as well.

Miller: How far along is the city and the broader community in actually meeting those goals?

Lacy: It’s a good question. In Bend, we have a big challenge with emissions reductions because our population is growing. So the more people that are here, emissions tend to just go up naturally since it’s that many more people living here, driving around and things like that …

Miller: Just to be clear, that reduction is not a per-capita reduction. It’s an overall one. So with new homes, new people, new cars, it all adds to the total?

Lacy: Yes, that’s correct. And that’s sort of the tricky part about it. We have seen modest per-capita reductions. But they have been too modest to see an overall reduction in the whole because we really are fighting a really uphill battle with population growth. So our emissions have, unfortunately, gone up over the period that we’ve been tracking those, by 10% to 20% or so. So we have a lot of work to do to try to turn that around to meet those goals by 2050.

Miller: Cyrus Mooney, I mentioned that you are the business advocate for the city of Bend, working in the City Manager’s Office. What does it mean to be a business advocate?

Mooney: My role is really intended to be a third party or liaison between the broader business community we have here in Bend and the city as an organization. So any interaction that a business has with the city, whether it be through permitting, licensing or a variety of other services the city offers, I’m intended to be there to help point people in the right direction, be a resource and connect the dots to make businesses thrive to the best of their ability.

Miller: Broadly, what do you hear from the business community about climate change and the city’s emissions reductions goals?

Mooney: It’s a really good question. I think there’s a little variance, depending on the business that you’re talking to or the business association that you’re working with. Broadly speaking, there’s a lot of synergy for these goals in which actions can take place. And part of this discussion I think of why we’re here today is that Cassie and I are both the staff liaisons for different advisory bodies within the city. So the advisory body that I’m the staff liaison for is the Bend Economic Development Advisory Board.

And on behalf of BEDAB (the acronym for that board), in the policy options related to this electrification policy study, there are a lot of options included that BEDAB would like to support and get behind. There are others that have more concern around potentially being conflicting with other goals that the city has around housing production, housing affordability and how expedited those processes can be.

Miller: Well, Cassie, let’s turn to some of the policies. Because, as I mentioned, a lot of this has to do with potential policies regarding electrification. Can you give us a range for the policies that various committees have been talking about in Bend in recent months?

Lacy: In recent months, we’ve been really focused on how we can encourage electrification of buildings, specifically. There’s a bigger discussion about the other ways that we’re also trying to drive emissions reduction. But our focus, a big piece of that, is electrification of buildings, specifically residential and commercial buildings, right now. So we’ve been doing some policy research to figure out what the different levers are, that we have to try to drive the transition to electrified buildings.

We have been looking at six different buckets, including state-level advocacy, education and support programs, different incentive programs, local regulations – which would be the more stringent, trying to eliminate natural gas – different fees, and then options through the building code. We have about 20 or so different specific policies or programmatic areas that have been under discussion over the last couple of months.

Miller: What has come to the fore in terms of recommendations that have the most buy-in?

Cyrus, let me give that one to you and then we can get to the more divisive parts of it. Where is there agreement?

Mooney: Part of this was encouraging meetings with various stakeholder groups, from utility providers to some of the business associations that I had previously mentioned. But a lot of the consensus is around support for the education and outreach programs and then potentially looking at incentives. The business community, broadly speaking from what we heard, had a lot of support for that being a really good incremental step forward as the city approaches this work, and something that could be a really tangible strategy and how we make some progress related to these goals.

Miller: Cassie, how much belief is there in education and outreach, as a policy that would yield meaningful emissions reductions?

Lacy: It, of course, depends who you ask. I think we, as city staff, do see a big potential for the education and outreach programs. I think one of the important things is sort of meeting people where they’re at. And we know that the vast majority of people in the community just aren’t familiar with the options they have to improve the efficiency of their home through electrification. Even if they are familiar, it’s really, really hard to understand and navigate all of the different information out there, finding contractors, getting projects. It’s just a very confusing process. So we feel like there is a lot of good work to be done in that area.

We do have a very active environmental advocacy community. And their message around the education outreach programs has been that they are, of course, supportive of it. But their concern is that it’s not going to be effective at driving emissions reductions fast enough because you’re still dependent on people, that education leading to behavior change. Lots of history has shown that education alone doesn’t drive behavior change very quickly and to a very large scale.

Miller: So, to that end, what kind of local regulations or building code changes are at least on the table or are possible?

Lacy: That’s a good question. The regulations that have been discussed … I think it’s important to caveat that with any type of regulation, unless there is a model of someone else having done it before us, there is a significant risk that any regulation can be challenged in court. So when we say something’s possible, that means it’s something that a city can possibly do, but that doesn’t mean that it will definitely have the intended outcome. Any regulation likely could be challenged by any number of different stakeholders in the community. And then it would be up to the courts to determine whether that regulation can stay in place or not.

So the ones that have come up through our policy research in the regulatory arena include restricting natural gas in the right-of-way for cities, because cities have authority over their rights-of-way. The other one is to create regulations around nitrous oxide emissions, which would be an air quality standard. Appliances that emit N2O emissions are also appliances that are fossil-fuel based. Those types of air quality standards exist in other parts of the country, primarily through air quality districts. In California, they have these in place. No cities in Oregon have that type of regulation in place. To transfer that type of regulation to a city in Oregon is not a direct one-to-one, the way it would work. So there’s a little bit of work to figure out how that would work at a local government level.

Then the third one in the regulatory arena is to enact a building performance standard. And there is a statewide building performance standard that recently was passed into law. It is not in effect yet, but that state law gave cities the ability to go above and beyond the state law, and create a more stringent building performance standard. So you could use that pathway to create a standard that would effectively heavily favor electrification.

Miller: And am I right that each of these three different potential regulatory regimes [or] mechanisms are different enough – so goes your thinking – from what the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said “no” to in Berkeley, California, that if there were a legal challenge, it would be a different challenge than what that Ninth Circuit has already said “no” to. Is that a fair way to put it?

Lacy: Well, I think it’s a little bit more ambiguous than that because I think it’s an open question. There is an argument to be made that these are different enough that the Ninth Circuit’s case doesn’t directly apply here. But there may also be a case to be made that it does and that it’s not different. So I think that’s the biggest open question: If these were to go to the courts, will the courts determine that it is similar enough to the case that the Ninth Circuit ruled on that the end result would be the same? Or are they different enough? And then, even if they are different enough, based on what was that question in the Ninth Circuit case, there may be other reasons why they’re challenged. So other types of issues could come up.

So it would all come down to the lawsuit and if there were a lawsuit, what the grounds are for that lawsuit, what angle they want to take, and then how the courts determine that.

Miller: Cyrus, to go back to you, how are you thinking about the intersection of two statewide priorities at this point: greenhouse gas reductions – which we’ve already been talking about – but also the desire, the need all over the state to create a lot of new housing and a lot of new affordable housing? How do you think about those two policy objectives together?

Mooney: It’s a really tough question. I think on the spectrum, there’s extreme paths of thought on each side that we, as city staff, see on a day-to-day basis and are trying to find that common ground of a happy medium for how we can move forward. But I think a lot of it is bringing voices to the table and trying to have a robust, well-rounded discussion to move forward in a path that both parties can find reasonable.

[It’s] not an easy thing to do. But I think it’s something that we’re trying to demonstrate and reflect the importance of throughout this process, strictly talking about the electrification policy options in having an environment group, an economic development group, a housing group and our city council all come together to try to determine what that path may look like. Not to say that at the end of that conversation we will have a clearly defined path. But having that conversation is certainly, we feel, a really strong foundation and starting point to make progress.

Miller: Cassie, one of the things that stands out to me in this conversation is just the process here. Understandably, these various committees are all made up of different stakeholders that have very different interests, sometimes overlapping, sometimes competing, making their recommendations to elected leaders who can then make policy decisions.

But what’s the timeline here? Because the clock is ticking in so many ways in terms of greenhouse gas emission increases as opposed to decreases – as you outlined in the beginning, the need for more housing. None of these challenges is going away and they just get more urgent with every passing day. So when are decisions actually going to be made?

Lacy: I think it’s such a hard thing because we’re often in the situation where you sometimes have to go slow to go fast. And in a situation like this, if we were to say we were to do something that was gonna sound quick and fast, like creating regulation that’s applied to all buildings, that’s one of the pathways that people feel like is the fastest way to reduce emissions. However, if you rush that process and you don’t get the buy-in and you don’t make sure that you’re coming up with a solution that really is gonna work for everyone, then if those regulations are then held up in litigation, you actually end up hampering the progress you could have been making during that time.

I think that’s the delicate balance – making sure we’re doing enough process to get the solution right and to make sure we have the most buy-in, so that whatever we do is going to be effective and we can move it forward with the support of our community. So we’re still trying to move as quickly as we can and we still need direction from the council. But our next step is to engage a couple of committees: the committee that Cyrus oversees, BEDAB, Affordable Housing Advisory Committee, and then the committee that I oversee, the Environment and Climate Committee. We’re gonna get them together in a room to hash some of these things out in February.

Then depending on the direction we go from there, we’re hoping to step right into whatever the agreed upon policy solution is. So whether that’s creating a new incentive program, we would hope to launch that right away. But even that will probably take a six to eight month process of getting stakeholder input to define that incentive or if it’s a regulatory pathway. But we can only see so far ahead. The hardest part with these things is, we can take the next couple steps, launch a program, but what comes after that is unknown. And that’s why you have to make sure to be doing it thoughtfully, so that you can sort of mitigate future risks of whatever policy you create.

Miller: Cassie and Cyrus, thanks very much.

Lacy: Thank you.

Mooney: Thank you.

Miller: Cassie Lacy is a senior management analyst for the city of Bend. Cyrus Mooney is the city’s business advocate.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.