SALT LAKE CITY — With a little more than a month to go until the general election for Salt Lake City’s new mayor, candidate Sen. Luz Escamilla unveiled Tuesday her stances on several environmental policies regarding water use and air quality.
She pledged to push to move up the city’s goal to transition to 100% renewable energy by 2030 to 2023, cut tailpipe emissions by 25% by focusing on improving transit ridership and working with the Utah Transit Authority to upgrade buses and trains to run on 100% electricity, continue the legal fight against the Utah Inland Port Authority, and encourage water use conservancy by kick-starting a process to rethink water bills that are currently wrapped into property taxes.
For Tuesday’s announcement, Escamilla was joined by a former mayoral candidate who has since thrown his support behind her after faltering in the primary.
David Garbett, who was an attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and former executive director of the Pioneer Park Coalition, became the first primary candidate to endorse one of his former opponents, saying Escamilla is his clear choice because she’s “prepared to be that leader” to implement a “vision” to help move the needle on air quality and climate change issues.
“She has that experience to accomplish these bold and aggressive policy plans,” Garbett said, standing alongside Escamilla at the news conference held in the Jordan Park Tuesday.
Garbett said he chose to endorse Escamilla and not her opponent, Salt Lake City Councilwoman Erin Mendenhall, because he said Escamilla has the institutional experience as a Zions Bank executive and state senator to work across jurisdictions and convene a team to tackle big issues like air quality.
Air quality has been a centerpiece of Mendenhall’s campaign. The councilwoman entered politics through air quality advocacy as co-founder of Breathe Utah, and she currently serves as chairwoman of the Utah State Air Quality Board.
Mendenhall has previously outlined several environmental policies, including promises to expand city bus routes and transition to an all-electric bus fleet, raise environmental standards for new construction the city invests and incentivize solar panels and other green technology, use city incentives for green retrofits for the “dirtiest” buildings, plant 4,000 new trees on the city’s west side during her first term as mayor, and create a city-led lawnmower and snowblower exchange program.
Mendenhall has also previously pledged to negotiate with Rocky Mountain Power to accelerate the city’s transition to carbon-neutral and renewable energy sources — a promise Escamilla also made Tuesday.
Escamilla’s announcement comes when environmental issues are on the minds of people across the nation, days after the United Nations’ summit on climate change that made headlines after 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s biting speech berating world leaders for inaction on climate change.
Escamilla, as a mother of a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old, told the Deseret News that Thunberg and other youth are an “inspiration” and that “they should be angry” because of inaction. She pledged to ensure Salt Lake City is part of that conversation to change the way cities grow for future generations.
“Many communities suffer from bad air days that impact their quality of life,” Escamilla said, noting she’s a resident of west-side Salt Lake City. “Living in Rose Park, where some of that air quality really impacts every single day and our children are there, I know we have to make very big, bold changes.”
Escamilla outlined her environmental campaign promises, becoming the next candidate to pledge to offset the city’s power with 100% clean energy by 2023, which Escamilla said would be “feasible and possible” to “exert leverage” with Rocky Mountain Power.
“We know that clean energy is more cost-effective than fossil fuels and it’s also cleaner,” she said. “So with careful implementation, we can avoid excessive increase in cost and the city will also push against any false premiums for clean energy and be a leader that stands strong on this process.”
Escamilla said she’d also focus on transit and building policy to help decrease emissions, pledging to improve and electrify the city’s transit system in partnership with UTA, push for net zero new construction, require incentives to ensure builders move away from natural gas, seek to fast-track net zero construction by exploring alternative permitting, and incentivize with a new program to offer finance assistance to help homeowners retrofit for cleaner energy.
Escamilla also promised to push for “structural changes” to water rates, which are currently wrapped into property taxes. She called the current system “unfair,” noting that many of the biggest water users are exempt from property taxes.
Asked if that could mean fee increases, Escamilla told the Deseret News she doesn’t know what that structural change would look like, and she’d look to a multistakeholder process to determine what that change should be to ensure fairness for residential and commercial water users. She also said she’d ensure appointees to the Metropolitan Water District board are those who support ending property tax assessment for water.
As for the Utah Inland Port, Escamilla threw her support behind a health impact assessment on the port — which port opponents recently demanded in a letter to state leaders.
Escamilla noted she successfully passed legislation this year to establish baseline environmental monitoring in the port authority’s jurisdiction.
“But we need more than that,” she said, pledging to push for the health impact assessment to provide a “real, data-driven process” to evaluate the impact of a Utah port.
“The city needs to be in the front lines making sure that that takes place, and if the state is not interested in making it happen as soon as possible, the city should take the lead in making sure that takes place,” she said.
Mendenhall’s campaign, in reaction to Escamilla’s press event, referred to a news release announcing that Mendenhall had been endorsed by the teacher union American Federation of Teachers - Utah.