On Saturday, we celebrated the 5-year anniversary of the start of Silicon Valley Clean Energy’s operations. It was a great event, and it was terrific to see so many people who were involved in the formation and ongoing efforts to bring clean energy to our cities – people like Rod Sinks from Cupertino, John McAlister from Mountain View, Rob Rennie from Los Gatos, Liz Gibbons from Cupertino, and Howard Miller from Saratoga. At the event, I shared with SVCE’s CEO, Girish Balachandran, how Cupertino almost didn’t participate. He enjoyed the story, and since he hadn’t heard it before, he asked me to tell it to the whole audience, which I did. So I’ll tell it here, as it’s one of my more amusing experiences on Council.

SVCE started as a study conducted by the City of Sunnyvale as part of its Climate Action Plan. In developing our plan, our Sustainability Commission made sure to add “formation of a CCE”, and staff quickly discovered that a working CCE would result in greater GHG reduction than all other proposed actions in the CAP – combined. So our staff initiated a feasibility study for forming a CCE. When staff in Mountain View and Cupertino learned of our efforts, they asked to split the cost for us if the study could be expanded to include them, which Sunnyvale quickly agreed to. And unsurprisingly, the feasibility study’s findings were overwhelmingly positive.

After the study was concluded, the three cities formed a committee to plan out next steps and get it off the ground. That committee consisted of the cities’ mayors – myself, John McAlister, and Rod Sinks, plus Melody Tovar from Sunnyvale’s Environmental Services as staff lead, and additional staff from the three cities. We spent months meeting in a closet in Sunnyvale’s Finance Department, planning out the technical steps needed to get started, and considering the best political approach to gaining the support of other cities in the county. The first major hurdle was to get our three cities to contribute seed funding – a couple million dollars to hire initial SVCE staff and rent office space. We agreed to initially do a 3-way split, since that seed money would be paid back within three years if SVCE took off. In discussing it, we were of the opinion that Sunnyvale and Mountain View would easily approve it, but that it might have a hard time getting three votes on Cupertino’s City Council.

Sure enough, Sunnyvale and MV approved the funding pretty easily (I think Sunnyvale even approved it on consent). And Cupertino held its vote. Two days after that vote, I saw Rod Sinks at our monthly Cities Association meeting. Afterwards, Rod told me that he’d tried, but he’d been unable to get three votes for the seed money. He explained that one of his colleagues was absent, another was opposed, and a third decided to abstain for his own reasons. I told him I was sorry to hear Cupertino wouldn’t participate, but we’d get it started, and maybe Cupertino would join later. Then I paused, and thought it through. The conversation that followed went something like this:

Me: Wait a minute. So the vote was 2 yes, 1 no, and 1 abstention?
Rod: Yeah, sorry.
Me: That’s a successful vote!
Rod: No, 4 votes needs a 3-vote majority.
Me: Yes, but three votes + an abstention only needs a 2-vote majority!
Rod: Are you sure?
Me: Pretty sure. Abstentions count towards quorum, but not towards majority. Your City Clerk got it wrong!

So Rod goes back to his City Clerk. And next thing I know, Rod forwards me an email from his City Clerk, stating that the announced vote results in the previous meeting were incorrect, she was correcting the records of the meeting, and staff was moving forward with the issue.

And that’s the story of how Cupertino almost didn’t participate in SVCE.