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Board weighs priorities for climate‑policy scoring tool; resilience and equity emerge as top concerns
Summary
Staff proposed a multi‑criteria prioritization analysis to rank about 70 policy ideas; board members generally favored high weight for resilience and overburden‑community prioritization and recommended separating co‑benefits from logistics and clarifying feasibility criteria.
City staff and consultants presented a draft multi‑criteria prioritization analysis (MCPA) intended to score and rank roughly 70 climate policy ideas on relevance and five scoring themes: resilience, greenhouse‑gas reduction, overburdened‑community prioritization (equity), logistics (cost and feasibility), and degree of certainty.
“Step 1 is a relevance filter to make sure the city has a clear role,” said Lisa, the staff presenter, explaining the approach. She described a three‑step process: screen policies for city role; score retained policies under defined themes; and carry out a holistic review to remove redundancies and ensure coverage of hazards and community needs.
Board members debated how to weight the themes. Several members argued resilience and overburdened‑community prioritization should receive the most weight, with greenhouse‑gas reductions closely connected to resilience in some members’ view. Multiple members recommended treating co‑benefits as its own scoring theme rather than bundling it under logistics and suggested separating administrative feasibility from pure cost estimates.
Members also raised concerns about applying equity scoring to policies in early drafting stages, noting that implementation details often determine whether a policy meaningfully benefits overburdened communities. Staff said an environmental justice review and later implementation planning will follow the MCPA and that the tool will be dynamic, with weights adjustable during future sessions.
Next steps: staff will incorporate feedback — including a potential separate co‑benefits theme and clearer feasibility definitions — and bring a refined MCPA and weighting options back to the board in January so members can test weights live during the meeting.
