Are you a community leader and New York City resident? If you are leading an organization or working with your fellow members to advocate for climate - you are a leader! If you are a parent, teacher, team captain, coach or someone who teaches or mentors others, you are a leader! If you are a labor leader, carpenter, electrician, business leader, architect, or working to build a climate safe future, you are a leader! If you are a member or spiritual leader of your church, synagogue, temple, or masjid, you are a leader! If you are a doctor, nurse, or social worker, you are a leader!
We want to show Mayor Adams that we aren't just a bunch of activists and environmentalists fighting climate change, but that we also are leaders within our own communities across New York City. Our communities and who we represent are diverse. We don't just care about climate, but also have a real stake in what happens to our city and that means fully enacting and enforcing the city's most important climate law!
Once we have a wide range of leaders and organizations from across the city signed on, we will deliver the letter and send you a copy of the final letter.
LETTER BEGINS HERE:
Dear New York City Mayor Eric Adams,
We, the undersigned community leaders, urge you to fully implement and enforce Local Law 97, the most important local climate and jobs law in the world.
Local Law 97 is currently on track to create tens of thousands of jobs in design, renovation, and construction this decade. Many new jobs are already being created as building owners begin to upgrade buildings to high energy efficiency and thereby to cut their pollution. It will help reduce utility bills and operating costs through energy efficiency.
Local Law 97 is the largest building block in New York City’s nation-leading effort to solve the climate crisis. It addresses the city’s top source of climate-heating pollution: large, polluting buildings’ fossil fuel use.
As you know, Local Law 97’s passage was bitterly opposed by the real estate lobby and its allies. Now, they want to convince you to weaken the law, including by opening loopholes for landlords to buy out of the law's requirements to cut pollution or by lowering or eliminating the penalties that enforce the law or gaming the system.
Billionaire real estate developers want a toothless law that they can ignore. They want to evade their responsibility to reduce the air pollution generated by their large properties. We urge you to ignore their self-serving lies about Local Law 97.
Local Law 97’s massive job creation and cuts to air pollution will especially benefit New York City’s low- and low-middle income communities of color, unless the real estate lobby is successful in its attempts to weaken the law. In that case, New York City will go backwards.
We urge you to continue our city’s nation-leading forward progress on this issue area by fully enforcing and implementing Local Law 97. The people, not the powerful special interests, need your leadership to reduce the threat of climate change, maximize good jobs, cut air pollution and ensure fairness and justice for all New Yorkers. Thank you.
