As many know, one of the most contentious contests in this election cycle is between incumbent County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer and former Republican mayor Kevin Faulconer. They’re both running in District 3, which includes much of the coast and has much of a liberal bent.
Faulconer knows this, so he’s currently appealing to those liberal voters, touting his old climate policies when he was mayor.
However, many see this contradiction. His “old climate polices” don’t match his current policies. The Voice of San Diego shows this attempt at being a liberal is really just a campaign lie. The Voice:
When Kevin Faulconer was mayor of San Diego, he signed a Climate Action Plan requiring the city build densely in urban areas to reduce driving and planet-warming emissions. The county recently passed its own Climate Action Plan modeled after former Mayor Faulconer’s. But as a supervisor, he’s proposing to open the county to development anywhere which defies a major component of climate policies: Concentrate development so people drive less.
The Voice reports that with Faulconer, “the implication of his statements as a candidate for supervisor don’t jive with the intention of the policies he supported as mayor.”
Faulconer’s campaign advertised his mayoral milestone in recent political mailers to constituents in the largely liberal and coastal District 3 as the Republican candidate for San Diego County Supervisor. Separately, one mailer from the Building Industry Association – a trade group traditionally dead set against policies they think stymie development in the name of climate change – proclaimed how Faulconer “led the region’s FIRST Climate Action Plan.”
The Voice outlines that under the current Board of Supervisors leadership, the Board has “starkly limited where development should occur in the county through policies that prioritized building in areas with transit and pursued large fees on developers building in the backcountry, which creates lots of driving and planet-warming gases.”
That’s a policy Faulconer said he would reverse as supervisor in an interview with Voice of San Diego. His position appeals to building and business interest groups which blamed those rules for choking off development. Faulconer blames the Democrats on the board for creating an effective moratorium on housing in the county with its fee-per-mile driving policy. Faulconer’s position now is: Limiting housing anywhere in the county hurts San Diego (and the climate) because people will move farther – to Riverside, for instance – and choose an even longer commute to their San Diego-based jobs.
Yet, these goals didn’t really pan out.
Environmentalists sued the city in February of 2023 for allegedly allowing one of its fastest-growing suburbs to grow without meaningfully addressing all the greenhouse gas-producing commutes it draws. Gas-powered transportation produces 55 percent of the city’s total planet-warming emissions. In the unincorporated county, driving accounts for 45 percent of planet-warming emissions generated within its boundaries.
Voters in District 3 need to see through this deception by the guy who sought Trump’s endorsement, ran against Newsom in the failed recall effort — coming in third, and who is trying to flip the Board of Supervisors back to the past, when conservatives ran the County government.
I want to refresh some memories of a very specific about face Faulconer did some years ago when a company planned to truck liquified gas from the Point Loma Wastewater plant, at night through the neighborhood, in big cylindrical gas tanks on semis. What follows is my story from 2020 that shows what kind of person Faulconer is:
Some years ago, a company proposed to capture gas that is a by-product of the sewage treatment plant at the end of Point Loma. The plan was to truck the gas through Point Loma in the middle of the night in long, high pressure tanker trucks. When this came before the city council, Faulconer enthusiastically endorsed it despite very vocal protest in the community. Because he was the council member for the district where this would happen, all the others voted for it. I watched this session personally.
But, in this case, the community was not finished. There was an alternate proposal to simply capture the gas and export it in the already existing San Diego Gas and Electric pipeline at the plant. This was clearly a far safer method than running high pressure tanker trucks through a sleeping Point Loma neighborhood. Eventually, activists gathered a very large number of signatures against the trucking plan. These signatures came from people in upper Point Loma, including the wooded area. This got Faulconer’s attention.
Fast forward to the Peninsula Community Planning Board meeting where Faulconer “announced” a change in plan and that “he” had been successful in getting SDG&E to take the gas into their pipelines. Faulconer actually stood before the crowd and said there was no way he was ever going to allow anyone to endanger Point Loma by trucking gas through the neighborhood. By god! It was like watching Mel Brooks as the governor in Blazing Saddles. Harrumph, harrumph! Faluconer had to have practiced that the little speech at home so he could deliver it with a straight face and not break up laughing.
Had Faulconer stood up and said something like, “I was in favor of the original proposal because I honestly thought that recycling the gas was an ecological winner and that it would be safe. But, the people of this community caused me to look at this alternate idea much more closely and after doing so, I changed my mind. It is the better idea. The pipeline idea removes the danger factor, so thank you Point Loma.” But, instead, the dumb shit took credit for the change.
Hell, I would have had more respect for him if he had just stuck to his original guns. But, he floated with the wind like gossamer. Hopefully now, he will blow away completely and go off to collect his actual rewards from the benefactors he benefited.
This was from the Voice of San Diego.