Local Food in City Hall

As we're working on increasing the City's support for local foods through the Homegrown Minneapolis Implementation Task Force, it's great to be able to communicate an important and symbolic success: local food is coming to City Hall.



The old food vendor in City Hall (the Clock Tower Cafe) has chosen not to renew its contract. This created an opening to get both healthier options and more local food into that space. Along with my colleague Betsy Hodges and staff from the Department of Health and Family Support, I strongly advocated to the Metropolitan Building Commission (or MBC, the City/County organization that actually controls City Hall) that they write support for healthy, local foods into their Request for Proposals.



They did so, and my office helped connect them to the folks in the local food community who participated in Homegrown Phase I. Then we crossed our fingers and hoped that some local food entrepreneur would send in a good proposal.



Earlier this month, we received some good news from MBC staff: they have chosen to contract with a business called Local D'Lish, that focuses on local, healthy foods. I consider this a great step forward, and a fitting symbol of the City's commitment to the local food economy as we move forward on implementing the Homegrown recommendations.

The Minnesota Daily has an informative article on NRP and future funding for neighborhoods that people might find helpful.

I does a good job of explaining and presenting different sides about a rather complex issue.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Affirmative Action Plan up for approval

I wanted to call people's attention to a report coming up at the Executive Committee this Wednesday. Unlike years passed this committee now meets in the chambers and the meetings are televised and saved for web viewing.

The only agenda item is our Affirmative Action Plan and it is full of good information about well and how poorly we are doing in terms of diversifying our own City of Minneapolis work force and plans to improve.

There are some interesting charts showing how each department and job classification does in comparison to the Relevant Labor Market (qualified folks who live around here). We seem to be doing worst in terms of the lack of females in a number of job categories (this is shown most clearly in some of the charts around page 40 and then clearly outlined in the next 5 to 10 pages.)

I will also be looking into how this compares to the make up of the City's population.