The mayor’s office says its boss messed up Saturday when she told the crowd at a Capitol Hill town hall that new development was the number one cause of greenhouse gases in Seattle.

CHS reported on the town hall’s wide ranging conversation that included Mayor Jenny Durkan’s comments on homelessness, transit, and affordability.

The mayor started off alright when it came to the environment:

While the city seems to be struggling to make real changes to its streets to address the concerns, Durkan also said Saturday her city needs to move away from dependency on cars. Speaking to Seattle’s future, Durkan addressed an audience member’s concern over climate change and Seattle’s struggle to reduce greenhouse gasses as the city continues to grow. “We gotta get rid of the single occupancy vehicles and move to electricity, electric busses, cabs, Ubers and Lyfts,” she said. “But we don’t want electric vehicles to become another demarcation of inequity.”

But she stumbled on a surprising pivot looking at Seattle’s Mandatory Housing Affordability upzoning through the prism of its environmental impact:

Durkan may have surprised a few urbanists in the audience when she pivoted the discussion about the environment toward a focus on development. The mayor shifted her focus to public safety and pending results of the environmental impact on neighborhoods greenlit for upzoning. Durkan said new development accounts for the highest rate of greenhouse gas emissions in Seattle with vehicle emissions following second.

We’ve heard from a few CHS readers about the statement and Wednesday we heard back from a spokesperson for the mayor. “She misspoke, it’s the reverse,” the spokesperson told CHS. “GHG emissions caused by vehicles is two-thirds followed by building emissions which make up one-third.” We were told we could view the details in the Seattle Climate Action plan. Durkan’s office hasn’t yet taken us up on the offer to say more about the issue.

Here’s what one CHS reader had to say about the flub:

Vehicle emissions account for 66% of Seattle’s emissions, and buildings in total account for about 27%. (Industry is the remaining 7%) New housing development in the city also *reduces* emissions vs development in the suburbs by about half.

You can, indeed, learn more on seattle.gov.

UPDATE 5/8/2018: The mayor’s office has taken issue with our characterization of Durkan’s comments and clarified its statement that the mayor “misspoke” at the town hall. “The Mayor did not say that new development accounts for greenhouse gas emissions; rather, she said that the two largest contributors are buildings and cars, which is how she has repeatedly noted in context of climate action,” a representative tells CHS.

Here are the words CHS recorded at the event: “There’s two things that contribute most to our greenhouse gases: Number one is building efficiency, number two is cars.”

Durkan’s office maintains that the mayor isn’t blaming development but is focused, instead, on the types of buildings being created.