25C - ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT REPORT CLIMATE ACTION

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AECOM Background + Project Understanding City of Santa Ana Climate Action Plan EIR EXHIBIT A-1 The City of Santa Ana has taken significant steps to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy costs, and is seeking to expand on those initiatives through the development of a GHG Inventory and Climate Action Plan (CAP). ICLEI-USA, AECOM, Global Green, and Fehr & Peers are preparing the CAP for the City, with an anticipated completion date in October 2012. The CAP will include a GHG emissions inventory and forecast for both municipal operations and the community, establish GHG emissions targets for the City, and incorporate an implementation and monitoring strategy to ensure the City meets its goals. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) Guidelines Section 15183.5 allows jurisdictions to analyze and mitigate the significant effects of GHGs at a programmatic level, by adopting a "plan for the reduction of GHG emissions". Later, as individual projects are proposed, project-specific environmental documents may tier from and/or incorporate by reference that existing programmatic review in their cumulative impacts analysis. The City would like to use the CAP as a plan for the reduction of GHG emissions within the meaning established by the CEQA Guidelines. Among other provisions established within this portion of the recommendation to complete environmental review. The City has identified the need to prepare a focused Environmental Impact Report (EIR) to accompany the CAP as the preferred method of meeting this objective. Completing an EIR for the CAP may also affect the structure and content of the CAP itself. For example, mitigation measures that would otherwise be introduced in the EIR to reduce or avoid a significant environmental effect could instead be incorporated in the CAP. This would result in the need for an additional round of adjustments to the CAP between the preliminary draft CAP used to complete the project description for the EIR and the public review draft CAP released with the Draft EIR. ICLEI-USA will work with AECOM to accommodate this additional round of changes to the CAP and to coordinate the public review process for both documents. Scope of Work The following work plan describes the work proposed by task. AECOM anticipates preparation of a Focused EIR that examines only those technical areas that could be potentially significant as a result of implementing the CAP. State CEQA Guidelines, Section 15183.5(b)(1)(f) identifies that The services AECOM proposes to provide include: plans for the reduction of GHG emissions should be adopted in a public process following environmental review. A variety preparation of an EIR; of options are available to satisfy the CEQA Guidelines' 25C-5