Second Ward Green Businesses in the Headlines

In just the last few days, a couple of Second Ward businesses have been in the press for their forward-thinking environmental business practices.




First up, the location where Mayor Rybak and I celebrated Earth Day this year: the Southeast Como business Murphy Warehouse. It's great to see a business owner like Richard Murphy prove to his fellow businesspeople that there's a bottom-line reason to make green investments. I'm also deeply satisfied with the role that the City has played in helping create a financial motivation for greening his operations through the stormwater fee. Rather than continuing to dump raw sewage into the Mississippi every time we get a heavy rain, or increasing everyone's taxes equally to pay for the improvements we need to make to prevent these overflow events, the City decided to charge people for the stormwater their property generates. This means that enterprising, environmentally-minded entrepreneurs like Richard can make smart investments that both help their balance sheets and the City's work to protect water quality.




Second, the Seward Coop is adding a new service to their green portfolio, along with locally-grown and sustainable food: they'll be the city's newest HourCar car-sharing hub. This fits right in with the Coop's mission and the Seward neighborhood's focus on sustainability.




It's great to see this attention being paid to the good work our homegrown businesses are doing for the environment.