美国国家公共电台 NPR For One City Manager, Climate Becomes A Matter Of Conscience

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City planners can play a role in the effort to slow down climate change. How? Well, for one thing, they can create neighborhoods and transit 1 systems that let people live without cars. For one city manager here in California, though, this mission led to a conflict with his voters and also a personal crossroads. NPR's Dan Charles has this story.

DAN CHARLES, BYLINE 2: Steven Falk laid eyes on the city of Lafayette for the first time 28 years ago, driving there to interview for a job as an assistant to the city manager.

STEVEN FALK: I loved it from the very first minute I got here.

CHARLES: He saw emerald-green hills with neighborhoods filling the valleys in between. You're close to nature in Lafayette, but there's also a commuter 3 train that puts you in San Francisco in half an hour.

FALK: It seemed like I had reached some kind of paradise.

CHARLES: The people in Lafayette are mostly wealthy, educated, environmentalists. They voted 3-1 for Hillary Clinton. And Steven Falk became their city manager, the town's CEO. He looks the part - dark suit, red tie, managed everything from police to potholes 4. Then in 2005, he read a series of articles by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker about global warming.

FALK: And they scared the daylights out of me.

CHARLES: He started noticing evidence of climate change himself. He remembers sliding down glaciers 5 in the Sierra Nevada Mountains as a 9-year-old kid backpacking with his dad.

FALK: When I became a parent, I began taking my own kids to the mountains, and we did the same trip. And the glaciers are gone.

CHARLES: The more he learned, the more it kept him up at night, this growing threat.

FALK: The analogy I've used is, I say, the house is on fire and our children and our grandchildren are trapped in the attic 6. And so what are we going to do about it?

CHARLES: Now, there are things a city manager can do about it, but they can be controversial. Steven Falk ended up in the middle of a battle over what gets built on some land right near the heart of his city.

FALK: Well, I brought you to this place in particular because what we're looking at here is a surface parking lot that sits immediately adjacent to the Lafayette BART station.

CHARLES: BART is Bay Area Rapid Transit, that train to San Francisco. This is also close to shopping. So here is one way to fight global warming - build lots of housing right here where people can live without driving cars and burning gasoline.

FALK: It just makes all the sense in the world that this parcel should have a multi-family housing development on it.

CHARLES: But development is a really sensitive topic in Lafayette. There's a whole citizens group, called, Save Lafayette, that's been fighting it. Here's one resident of the city, Martin Stryker, at a city council meeting last June.

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MARTIN STRYKER: People have chosen to live in Lafayette for the quality of life here away from the city. Don't destroy our rural communities.

CHARLES: Now, Lafayette has approved hundreds of new housing units in the central downtown area in recent years, but Falk wanted to move faster. Tensions came to a head this past summer over a new California law that lets BART go ahead and build housing on land that it owns near its stations, like that parking lot. Falk liked the idea. Lafayette City Council members, though, considered it a power grab by the state. They asked Falk to go to the state capitol and take a public stand against it.

FALK: I drove to Sacramento not feeling good about it, and I went into the Senate hearing room. And I saw this line of speakers, and I realized that I had to get up and speak against this bill. And that was the moment I knew I had to resign.

CHARLES: Which he did. Yesterday was Steven Falk's last day on the job. At his final city council meeting, there were speeches celebrating his accomplishments 7. Nobody mentioned climate change. Dan Charles, NPR News.