Petaluma to consider banning natural gas in new construction

Following last month’s headline-grabbing move to ban new gas stations, Petaluma is moving forward with another climate initiative meant to curb the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure in new construction.

At its next meeting, the Petaluma City Council will consider an all-electric reach code, which would ban natural gas hookups in future residential and non-residential construction.

Petaluma would be the third Sonoma County city to enact such a ban, joining Windsor, which backed down in the wake of a legal challenge from developers, and Santa Rosa, which just this year prevailed in a similar showdown with builders.

The move is part of a slate of recent initiatives meant to ensure Petaluma is in line to reach carbon neutrality by 2030, an accelerated timeline the new city council endorsed this year.

“This is about recognizing that we’re in a hole, and to stop digging. If you’re trying to get to carbon neutral and you’re trying to get off of fossil fuels, then stop hooking up buildings to fossil fuels, stop building new gas stations,” said Vice Mayor Brian Barnacle, who has a background in clean energy and energy efficiency. “These are modest on the greenhouse gas emissions front, but important, so that we’re going in the right direction.”

Barnacle is one of two new members of a council that expressed near-unanimous support for a natural gas ban last year, indicating the measure enjoys broad backing among Petaluma’s current elected leaders.

The City Council will have the opportunity to decide on the all-electric code May 3, a vote that follows resoundingly supportive reviews of the ordinance by the city’s Climate Action Commission and Planning Commission this month. If passed, the ban would require a second vote before going into effect 30 days later, on June 16.

The proposed ordinance hit a few delays since city leaders last spring directed staff to pursue the measure, first pausing as Santa Rosa and Windsor tangled with legal challenges to their own bans, and then further slowed by the coronavirus pandemic’s disruption to city services.

City Attorney Eric Danly said he believes the City Council would have liked to have seen the ordinance sooner, but felt it necessary to both wait to see how the legal challenges played out, and to take extra time to buttress Petaluma’s own proposal to ensure it, too, isn’t ensnared in a protracted court battle.

“It’s certainly been my suggestion that we don’t repeat the same things as the other cities,” Danly said. “Nobody is helped by funding litigation.”

Windsor back-pedaled from its all-electric reach code earlier this year, repealing the first ordinance of its kind in the county after two developers - Bill Gallaher and the Windsor-Jensen Land Co. - sued the city over its natural gas ban.

Gallaher also sued Santa Rosa when the county’s largest city followed Windsor’s lead in late 2019. The city prevailed in that case, according to a preliminary ruling issued Jan. 27, and the natural gas ban remains in effect, said Jesse Oswald, Santa Rosa’s chief building officer.

Danly says he’s confident Petaluma’s reach code won’t face the same legal threat, describing it as a different type of amendment, latching on to the building code instead of the energy code.

The proposed ban, which will not apply to additions or alterations to existing structures, has been in the works since early 2020, but city planning staff have been steadily encouraging developers to consider all-electric hookups for a while.

Planning Manager Heather Hines said she’s seen an uptick in the number of proposed developments in town either voluntarily building all-electric or willing to switch their plans to either entice council approval or get out ahead of new rules before they’re passed.

Several recently approved projects without gas infrastructure include the MidPen affordable housing project on Petaluma Boulevard North, single-family projects on Madison Street and across from Casa Grande High School, a 264-unit apartment complex and two other affordable housing developments.

“It’s definitely been more common for developers to go electric in the past few years,” Hines said.

The move toward all-electric requirements is sweeping through the Bay Area and across the state, with dozens of cities enacting the requirements in recent years in an effort to combat a key source of greenhouse gases contributing to climate change.

Natural gas combustion, distribution, and usage in buildings accounted for 17% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the Bay Area, according to 2015 data from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

In Petaluma, building and construction accounts for 26% of such emissions, according to 2018 data maintained by the Regional Climate Protection Agency. Nearly 74% of emissions came from transportation, the report said, and less than 1% from water and wastewater.

Amy Rider, a Petaluma planning commissioner and the local government and policy lead for the Building Decarbonization Coalition, said her organization is tracking 42 California cities with electrification ordinances.

“Any governing body who says that climate change is important, but doesn’t want to adopt a reach code is gaslighting,” Barnacle said. “That’s the reality of what we’re dealing with here. There’s no way we can take climate change seriously and expand the natural gas system.”

(Contact Kathryn Palmer at kathryn.palmer@arguscourier.com, on Twitter @KathrynPlmr.)