Voters in Berkeley, California, soundly rejected a proposal that would have required owners of certain larger buildings to pay a fee in order to use natural gas.
Measure GG would have required owners of multi-family or commercial buildings larger than 15,000 square feet to pay up in order to use natural gas. It failed with 68.25% of voters moving to reject the measure, according to Alameda County election data.
Environmentalists and labor unions advocated for “Measure GG” on the grounds that reducing emissions from buildings is imperative to fight climate change, while opponents derided it in part because they view the proposal as a new and costly tax that will chase away restaurants and small businesses, according to Bloomberg News.
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Measure GG would have directly affected about 600 buildings in Berkeley, according to The Daily Californian. Vice President Kamala Harris, who suffered a crushing defeat to President-Elect Donald Trump on Tuesday, originally hails from Berkeley, according to The New York Times.
Berkeley banned natural gas hookups in newly-constructed buildings in 2019, a policy that liberal cities like Los Angeles and New York subsequently mimicked, according to Bloomberg News. The California Restaurant Association challenged the Berkeley ban in court, and a federal appellate court overturned the policy in April 2023.
Officials from the Biden Justice Department and Department of Energy filed a June 2023 amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit asking the court to reverse its decision nixing Berkeley’s 2019 gas ban, but the court ruled in January that it would not be revisiting that decision.
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