Irvine Mayor Delivers Environmentalist Message During Stump in S.D. County

Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, whose slow-growth and environmental policies have won statewide attention but sometimes caused him political troubles in his Orange County home, on Wednesday exhorted officials from throughout San Diego County to brave the potential fallout and follow Irvine’s lead.

“We’ve got an environmental reclamation task before us that is unprecedented in the history of the world,” Agran said during a press conference sponsored by the San Diego chapter of the Sierra Club. “It is worthy of our fear, and it is worthy of our talents.”

Agran, who said he “absolutely” encourages San Diego and other cities to enact local restrictions on chemical emissions as Irvine has, was hailed throughout the San Diego area by environmentalists who sponsored a day of speeches and meetings with the mayor.

Irvine’s model offers municipalities a way of influencing national policy and strengthening environmental protection, the activists said.

“Mayor Larry Agran inspires us,” said Ruth Duemler, a Sierra Club air quality expert. “We thank you for the inspiration.”

In particular, Duemler and her colleagues praised Irvine’s ground-breaking ordinance to sharply restrict emissions of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, pollutants that scientists say are contributing to the deterioration of the earth’s ozone layer.

Irvine’s ordinance was passed last year and takes effect this summer.

Irvine’s CFC ban, the toughest enacted by any local jurisdiction in the country, paves the way for other cities to act, Agran and other environmentalists said. If other cities follow suit, proponents of the ban envision such a far-reaching patchwork of local ordinances that industry would welcome national restrictions, if only to standardize emission regulations.

During his press conference Wednesday, Agran also proposed a dramatic reduction in national defense spending--cuts of as much as $200 billion. He said cities should lobby for those cuts, and at least a portion of the savings should be reinvested in local programs that benefit education, housing, the hungry, and efforts to preserve open spaces within communities.

“It is our money. We want it back,” Agran said. “The Cold War is over.”