A Vision for Change

Not everyone in the Bay Area “gets the dignity of shade from a big, beautiful tree on a hot summer day.” Just as not everyone experiences the basic right to breathe clean air.

For nearly seventy years, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District has led the way toward cleaner air in the Bay Area. We have adopted groundbreaking regulations on businesses and industry, funded cleaner cars and trucks, and partnered with local governments to create a healthier environment. These efforts have transformed smog-filled skies into those that are mostly clean. Unfortunately, not everyone has shared equally in these improvements.

Since 1955, our efforts have focused on regional solutions to what many experience as local problems. Communities located near freeways, busy roadways, distribution centers, and large industrial facilities are exposed to relatively higher levels of air pollution than most everyone else in the Bay Area. These communities are also most often lower-income communities of color.

That communities of color continue to experience higher levels of air pollution is not accidental. Communities such as West and East Oakland, Richmond, North Richmond, San Pablo, and Bayview Hunters Point have endured decades of exclusionary and discriminatory government policies, resulting in longstanding environmental injustices. Such injustices have resulted in communities that experience higher than average levels of air pollution, poorer health outcomes, and associated lower life expectancy.

So, while our efforts over the last seven decades have improved overall air quality at the regional level, we must do more for communities continuing to experience local air pollution and environmental injustices. We have decades of damage to undo. We must rebuild trust with communities who have been ignored by government agencies for generations. We must focus our efforts on ensuring that communities who have been harmed by pollution can be meaningfully heard and experience the clean air and better health that most people in the region often take for granted.

Doing this work successfully will require organizational change. We need to become better equipped and committed to achieving more meaningful and measurable improvements to local air quality and to be able to do so in partnership with communities. We need to be more cohesive and inclusive, One Air District united in common purpose, with clear direction and properly aligned resources. We must be more efficient, effective, and transparent, with the ability to respond to the needs of the Bay Area and its communities.

Strategic Plan Scope

The Air District is responsible for regulating stationary sources of air pollution in the San Francisco Bay Area. We pass and enforce a wide variety of regulations on industries, businesses, and activities, from wood burning in fireplaces to refining fossil fuels, to ensure air pollution is minimized. We also distribute over $150 million in state and federal incentive funding every year to reduce air pollution from mobile sources, such as cars, trucks, school buses, port and construction equipment, lawn and garden equipment, and wood-burning stoves and fireplaces.

This core work of the Air District is foundational to our efforts to reduce air pollution, protect people’s health and mitigate climate change. The 2024-2029 Strategic Plan is about how we will transform this work to address air quality issues more effectively, with a focus on communities most overburdened by air pollution. It is also about how we will transform our organization to align more closely with our core values of environmental justice, equity, integrity, partnership, transparency, and trust.

An Inspired Transformation in Focus

The 2024-2029 Strategic Plan is a significant step in the Air District’s environmental justice journey. While the Air District has engaged in several community-based environmental justice efforts over the last few decades, it has not been enough. It is our commitment to transform the organization from one that solves air quality problems at the regional level to one that works in partnership with communities to reduce air pollution at the local level. It is our commitment to proactively advance environmental justice in and through our work. This commitment is inspired by our partnerships with communities over the last five years to develop plans to reduce inequitable exposure to local air pollution and the recently appointed Community Advisory Council.

State Law Inspires Community Partnership

In September 2017, a new state law, Assembly Bill 617, fundamentally changed how local air districts approach air quality planning. The law requires local air districts to partner with communities to develop plans for monitoring and reducing pollution in their neighborhoods. Communities selected for partnership are those that have relatively higher levels of air pollution than the rest of the Bay Area, along with health vulnerabilities, such as higher asthma rates, cardiovascular disease, and cancer risk. These are the same communities that have been subjected to discriminatory federal, state, and local policies including redlining, urban renewal, highway construction, and local zoning codes that allow polluting industries to locate in or alongside residential neighborhoods. These communities have also experienced disinvestment, limited access to health services and healthy food, low quality education, and few local parks and open spaces. They are most often low-income communities of color.

Since the law passed, two emission reduction plans and a monitoring plan have been adopted in the Bay Area. Owning Our Air was co-developed with the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project and a Community Steering Committee. The plan includes 84 strategies for reducing air pollution and exposure to air pollution in West Oakland. A community monitoring plan and the Path to Clean Air emission reduction plan was developed with the Richmond- North Richmond-San Pablo community. Path to Clean Air has 31 strategies and 140 actions for reducing air pollution. We are now working with East Oakland and Bayview Hunters Point-Southeast San Francisco to develop similar plans.

Council Lifts Community Voice in Decision-Making

The Air District’s Community Advisory Council, composed of 17 community leaders and experts who live or work in communities overburdened by local air pollution, was formed in 2021. The council makes recommendations to the Air District on equity and environmental justice matters to improve air quality in all communities, prioritizing communities most impacted by air pollution.

Since they began meeting in January 2022, the Community Advisory Council has been discussing environmental justice concepts and possible actions with Air District leadership and employees across the organization. The council developed a set of Environmental Justice Priorities to serve as a foundational guide as the Air District began developing its strategic plan (see pages 20-23). Conversations with the council about the fundamental work of the Air District and how it could shift to incorporate the core value of environmental justice have informed and improved the strategies in the 2024-2029 Strategic Plan.

Through these community partnerships and the Community Advisory Council, we have continued our learning about environmental injustice. We have come to value community voice and knowledge, and our relationships with them. We now know community, environmental justice, and equity must be central to our work in the coming years and decades.

Planning for Change, Together

The 2024-2029 Strategic Plan was developed through a collaborative process with community leaders, Air District employees, the Board of Directors and Community Advisory Council members, representatives from regulated industries, and our government and non-government partners. We surveyed more than 60 individuals with whom we regularly work. We gave public updates about the plan’s progress at public meetings of our Board of Directors and our Community Advisory Council from January through July 2024.

As part of this outreach, we discussed what needs to change, what we are doing well, and where we can do better. We talked about the Air District’s internal strengths and weaknesses, and external opportunities and threats. We held visioning exercises to learn about what we aspire to be over the long term and hope to achieve in the short term. We collaborated on goals and strategies and the actions needed to achieve real change.

What we learned is that people value the Air District’s renewed focus on environmental justice and community engagement. They appreciate our knowledge and technical expertise, and our emphasis on science. We heard about our internal challenges, like poor internal communication and bureaucratic processes that disincentivize change, innovation, and collaboration. We heard that there continues to be a lack of trust in the Air District, particularly in communities overburdened by pollution. There is also a sense of opportunity. Permitting and enforcement of our regulations on industries, gas stations, generators and other stationary sources could be more transparent, efficient, and a mechanism for advancing environmental justice. People also see an opportunity to embrace new technology and funding sources to achieve our air quality goals.

Notably, communities, Board members, and employees all share the belief that the Air District is an air quality leader, in California and nationally. Being a leader, however, means we need to continue to be bold and visionary to ensure that all communities have equitable access to clean air.

When the draft plan was ready for distribution, we notified more than 6,000 individuals and groups about the plan’s availability on our website. We provided a 30-day public comment period, during which we offered both online and in-person workshops. We added online meetings, presentations and webinars as requested. The feedback we received led to many changes that made our strategic plan clearer, stronger, and more responsive to those we serve.