Finding a Green Way to Govern

For months, we have had a public conversation about the type of bicycle facility that should be installed on Minnehaha Avenue.  This is part of a broader community conversation about how public agencies can change our streets to make them safer and more welcoming for bicyclists and pedestrians.  In turn, this is part of a much broader set of discussions about how we can increase public health, reduce our impact on climate change, and reinvigorate our commercial corridors. Unfortunately, Hennepin County has decided to reject a physically protected cycletrack option for Minnehaha Avenue and to instead pursue a more traditional on-street painted bike lane option. Few people I have spoken to supported the cycletrack layout that Hennepin County presented to the public, because it had several major problems: It required the loss of approximately fifty additional trees It required the loss of approximately fifty additional parking spaces It did not include any of the ...

A new poll, conducted by Public Policy Polling, purports to show that the people of Minneapolis love pesticides and want the City and Park Board to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars injecting said pesticides into ash trees, rather than removing and replacing them. Guess who paid for the poll?   Arborjet , the manufacturers of one of the pesticides in question. If that's not reason enough to take these results with a shaker full of salt, here are some of the not-at-all loaded questions respondents were asked: "Do you believe the city should remove 40,000 otherwise healthy ash trees before Emerald Ash Borer kills them, or do you think an environmentally-sound ash-protection option should be pursued?" "If you knew residential and city ash trees could be confidently protected with a small amount of insecticide sealed inside the tree using trunk injection, would you support or oppose that option?" "Would you expect city leaders to adopt an environ...

This is good news: Congress is poised to close the Saint Anthony lock.  This will effectively stop the spread of invasive carp species to the rest of the Mississippi and related watersheds north of Minneapolis.  It will also save taxpayer money, because this lock now sees much less use than comparable facilities. I realize that there will be some impact on industry, and some of that impact will be in Minneapolis.  But the job and other economic losses from the lock closure - 72 jobs, according to one report - are nothing compared to the economic impacts of the invasive carp taking over the waterways north of our city.  And this closure may also aid the efforts of North and Northeast Minneapolis to redevelop the riverfront, which will create different kinds of jobs and housing opportunities. A note on the risks posed to waterways in northern Minnesota: they're not "exaggerated," no matter what the Army Corps of Engineers says.  While there are dams north of M...

The Star Tribune is out with a blog post that asserts that Minneapolis elections officials "project 75 percent voter turnout." I am concerned that there may have been some miscommunication because I don't think that's not quite right.  As the Council's Elections chair, I have been in many conversations with our Elections staff about this fall, and I can say with certainty that the Elections department has not made a prediction for voter turnout.  Rather, staff have set the staffing levels for precincts based on a 75% turnout, because it's far better to have too many election judges on election day than too few.  They based that decision on the factors cited by Elections Director Wachlarowicz in the article: the open mayor's race, past trends, etc.  But this is intended to be a conservative, high-water-mark estimate that will ensure that we don't create problems for voters this November. My concern is that this misleading headline - "Minneapo...