Faulconer’s Advertising His Old Climate Policies to Voters. They Don’t Match His Current Position.

In an appeal to liberal voters, the Republican candidate who could flip the San Diego County Board of Supervisors to the GOP keeps touting his old climate policies as a mayor. 

The problem is, they don’t match his current position.  

When Kevin Faulconer was mayor of San Diego, he signed a Climate Action Plan requiring the city build densely in urban areas to reduce driving and planet-warming emissions. The county recently passed its own Climate Action Plan modeled after former Mayor Faulconer’s. But as a supervisor, he’s proposing to open the county to development anywhere which defies a major component of climate policies: Concentrate development so people drive less. 

Gustavo Portela, a spokesperson for Faulconer’s campaign, argued Faulconer hasn’t changed his stance, adding that he always supported building “where it makes the most sense and where communities want density.”  

“Packing everything into the coast isn’t going to work and it’s not what communities want,” Faulconer said. “There are other areas of the county that want and allow for more density and (former) Mayor Faulconer would support (that) as a supervisor.”  

But the implication of his statements as a candidate for supervisor don’t jibe with the intention of the policies he supported as mayor.  

Faulconer’s campaign advertised his mayoral milestone in recent political mailers to constituents in the largely liberal and coastal District 3 as the Republican candidate for San Diego County Supervisor. Separately, one mailer from the Building Industry Association – a trade group traditionally dead set against policies they think stymie development in the name of climate change – proclaimed how Faulconer “led the region’s FIRST Climate Action Plan.” 

Under Democratic leadership, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors starkly limited where development should occur in the county through policies that prioritized building in areas with transit and pursued large fees on developers building in the backcountry, which creates lots of driving and planet-warming gases. 

That’s a policy Faulconer said he would reverse as supervisor in an interview with Voice of San Diego. His position appeals to building and business interest groups which blamed those rules for choking off development. Faulconer blames the Democrats on the board for creating an effective moratorium on housing in the county with its fee-per-mile driving policy. Faulconer’s position now is: Limiting housing anywhere in the county hurts San Diego (and the climate) because people will move farther – to Riverside, for instance – and choose an even longer commute to their San Diego-based jobs.  

Voice discovered some evidence of that back in 2022 when an estimated 50,000 people lived in Riverside but worked in San Diego. The question is: What about all the emissions San Diego County might generate within its own borders if every corner of the county is open to building?  

Former Mayor Faulconer made San Diego first in the county to legally-bind itself to dense, transit-oriented building under a Climate Action Plan in 2016. He got a lot of press from national media, marveling at a Republican who not only admitted global warming was a real thing but decided to change the course of development in his town to do something about it.  

But the city struggled to carry out transit-oriented building in its major neighborhoods. Environmentalists sued the city in February of 2023 for allegedly allowing one of its fastest-growing suburbs to grow without meaningfully addressing all the greenhouse gas-producing commutes it draws. Gas-powered transportation produces 55 percent of the city’s total planet-warming emissions. In the unincorporated county, driving accounts for 45 percent of planet-warming emissions generated within its boundaries.