For the first time, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has ordered the city's departments to declare how much they plan to spend on air travel, the SFEaminer.com reports.
Newsom also wants department heads to pay 13 percent of their air-travel costs towards a carbon-offset fund, which will be overseen by the Department of the Environment. The fund will be used to pay for local emission reduction projects.
It is unknown how much money the 13 percent fee could generate. In the past city departments paid for air-travel costs from a general “travel” budget item, which included cost of hotels among others.
Last October, Newsom challenged the city's largest 1,500 businesses to go solar by October 2009.
