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The Menlo Park City Council unanimously voted to adopt the city’s first environmental justice element, a section of the city’s general plan which focuses on protecting underserved communities from potential environmental health risks. The council also voted unanimously to update the city’s safety element to comply with new requirements from the state.
The adoption of these elements marks the close of the city’s multiyear general plan update process, which began in 2021 when the city developed its most recent housing element.
Council members, as well as members of the public, expressed their excitement about the addition of an environmental justice element to the city’s general plan. They also applauded the city’s extensive outreach to underserved communities throughout the process.
“I want to express my gratitude to … community partners and leaders, to Mayor Cecilia Taylor and all the council and staff members for building out this really thoughtful process,” said Council member Maria Doerr. “I am so excited and eager to see us implement this.”
In 2022, the city undertook a neighborhood mapping project to identify which sections of the city meet the state’s definition of a “disadvantaged community.” Using these neighborhood profiles as a guide, the city then began hosting neighborhood outreach events to inform the initial draft of the environmental justice element.
In Menlo Park, the communities of Belle Haven and the Bayfront areas north of Highway 101 are defined as “underserved communities,” according to state criteria. Throughout the environmental justice element development process, the city, its nonprofit partners and residents have been highlighting the ways in which Menlo Park’s history of segregation, redlining and other institutionalized inequalities has led to disproportionately worse outcomes in these neighborhoods.
“The city of Menlo Park undertook this effort because of its recognition of the disproportionate burden Belle Haven residents face from climate hazards and pollutants,” said Cade Cannedy, program director at Climate Resilient Communities, an environmental nonprofit that helped Menlo Park lead community workshops during the environmental justice element creation process.
Belle Haven residents are twice as likely to experience weather-related damage to their homes as other Menlo Park residents. They are also more likely to experience mold damage and heat stroke. Certain health afflictions are also more common in Belle Haven. For example, 48% of households in Belle Haven report having a family member with asthma compared to only 17% of households in other areas of Menlo Park.
Throughout the creation of the environmental justice element, Menlo Park held numerous community meetings to engage the people that the environmental justice element is aiming to help.
“Often, community engagement efforts that are shallow, end up only reproducing existing social hierarchies and inequalities,” said Cannedy. “It’s only when engagement is really robustly invested in … that it can subvert and overturn those systems. It’s only when new people begin to engage in the process that you start to see the process change, and I’m really excited that that’s what we’ve been able to do with this process here.”
The environmental justice element is a new requirement from the state, and this is Menlo Park’s first time creating one. The purpose of an environmental justice element is to provide a roadmap for the city to address the unique public health risks, such as sea level rise, unstable housing, pollution, poor air quality, food deserts, heat islands, flooding and more that are present in “underserved communities.” The environmental justice element also aims to bolster civic engagement in these underserved communities.
It identifies three top environmental health priorities for the Belle Haven and Bayfront communities. The programs in the element aim to provide safe, sanitary and stable homes for community members, promote access to high-quality and affordable food, and reduce pollution exposure and improve air quality.
The programs prescribed by the environmental justice element include creating a tenant protection hotline, creating a city anti-displacement program, encouraging the establishment of farmers markets and mobile health food markets in underserved communities, facilitating the development of community gardens in underserved communities, conducting education and outreach about indoor air quality, improving stormwater abatement in areas at risk of flooding, preventing illegal dumping in underserved communities and more.
During the meeting, the City Council opted to add programs to the element to plan for rising groundwater and toxic soil contamination in the areas of the city near the San Francisco Bay.
According to a staff report, the city is already in the midst of developing and implementing some of these programs, such as an anti-displacement strategy, supporting home rehabilitation in underserved communities and developing an urban forest management plan.
In addition to the environmental justice element itself, Menlo Park staff created an “action guide” to manage the city’s efforts to implement the programs prescribed by the environmental justice element. This document was created in response to comments from council members and the public in previous meetings asking for accountability and clarity around the implementation of environmental justice goals and programs.
“Nobody wants a plan that just sits on a shelf and nothing changes,” said Erik Calloway, managing director of ChangeLab Solutions, a nonprofit focused on health equity policy that consulted on the development of the element. “To help ensure that that doesn’t happen on this project, the city went through an extensive process to organize all the community input. … The goal was to pull out that information together in a way that the city can use and realistic ways to make decisions about what to focus on when and why over time.”
Menlo Park has already dedicated some funding to the implementation of environmental justice programs. On June 25, the City Council approved a $1 million transfer from the city’s Bayfront Mitigation Fund to establish a new Environmental Justice Implementation Fund.
According to the staff report, additional funding for the environmental justice element programs could be drawn from a combination of the general fund, special funds and grant money.
Additionally, the city will include the environmental justice programs as part of the city council’s annual goal setting workshop and budgeting process.
The city council also updated the city’s safety element. The safety element is a section of the general plan that identifies risks in the community and potential strategies for mitigation. The safety element update is focused on addressing new requirements from the state, such as climate change adaptation and resilience, sea level rise, wildfire hazards and community evacuation routes. The last time the city updated its safety element was in 2013.
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