The city of Berkeley, Calif., just won’t give up on its fixation about natural gas in its jurisdiction and its desire to be greener than green when it comes to greenhouse gases.
At a special meeting July 30 to determine what items will appear on the city’s November election ballot, the city council unanimously approved a measure that would attempt to revive, in a different form, a local gas ban struck down by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in April 2023.
The ballot measure would impose a confiscatory tax on buildings larger than 15,000 square feet that burn gas. A simple majority of the voters could approve the tax. It is one of 12 measures on the Nov. 8 ballot.
Severin Borenstein of the Energy Institute at Haas describes the proposed tax as “massive.” He writes, “I don’t use ‘massive’ as a pejorative or hyperbole, just description. The tax of $2.96 per therm (about 100 cubic feet of gas), starting in January, would be larger than the retail price that gas consumers in Berkeley currently pay, about $2.33/therm. And the tax would go up by inflation plus 6% every year, doubling in real terms by 2037.”
According to an analysis by the city, “the tax would generate approximately $26.7 million in its first year….The estimated first year tax collection is larger than Berkeley’s total annual sales tax revenue, and is about a third of Berkeley’s annual secured property taxes.”
Berkeley, located in the Bay area and home to the University of California, Berkeley and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has a 2020 population of 124,321. The city government consists of a mayor, the city council, and a city manager. The eight council members are elected from single-member districts.
The city is heavily Democratic, with about 75% of registered voters identified as Democrats.
In 2019, the city council enacted an outright ban on all new buildings with natural gas hookups, including homes with gas stoves. The Ninth Circuit killed the ban in April 2023 following a legal challenge against the policy brought by California Restaurant Association. A three-judge panel ruled that the ban violated the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which gives DOE authority to set appliance efficiency standards and preempts state and local governments from setting standards for that equipment.
Unlike the failed prior ban, which would have had a broad impact by targeting gas stoves, the new approach aims at the big gas users. The measure is titled the “Large Buildings Fossil Fuel Emissions Tax.” According to the proponents of the measure, that means it would apply to about 609 buildings in the city.
That doesn’t mean it hasn’t generated opposition, including some unexpected opponents. The David Brower Center, a 44,000-square foot building that houses three floors of office space, a gallery focused on environmental and social action art, a 178-seat theater, and a restaurant, raised concerns about the ballot measure. The center is named for the late environmental movement icon and Berkeley native David Brower (1912-2000), who led the Sierra Club into national prominence and later founded Friends of the Earth, the Earth Island Institute, and the League of Conservation Voters.
The Brower Center wrote to the city council that the ballot measure would impose “significant expense for the building, particularly considering that since the beginning of the pandemic, (it has) been running breakeven or at a loss.”
The non-profit Berkeley Repertory Theater also weighed in with concerns about the measure. “While we support electrification, this well-intentioned ballot measure with its immediate implementation would be very harmful to our struggling organization,” Berkeley Rep said in a statement.
Energy Institute’s Borenstein said, a bit tongue in cheek, “Despite the fact that Berkeley is a grain of sand in the expansive beach of global GHG emissions, the city continues to look for new ways to lead the world towards lower carbon emissions.”
–Kennedy Maize