Finding a Green Way to Govern

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 ...

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.

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.

The 2008 Census data on commuting has been released, and Minneapolis has retained our second-place slot in terms of bicycle mode share. We increased our ridership by about 12%, going from a 3.8% mode share in 2007 to a 4.3% mode share in 2008. However, our chief rival for the title of "bike friendliest major US city," Portland, increased even more rapidly, from 3.9% to a full 6%. That's a pretty staggering one-year increase of more than 50%. To put Portland's achievement in perspective, it helps to look at our proposed new sustainability indicator for bike mode share, which calls for us to reach a mode share of 6% by 2014 , with a milestone of 5% in 2011. If we keep that goal, we'll catch up with Portland's 2008 achievement five years later. Perhaps this means that our goal isn't high enough. My staff has looked at the trend line over the last few years, and it's pretty clear that the increase we've seen is actually faster than our goal - if we ke...

A date has been set for the conversion of Hennepin and First avenues into two-way streets: the weekend of October 10-11, weather permitting. This change will take some getting used to for all road users - drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Drivers going through downtown from north to south will be able to stay on Hennepin for their whole trip. Cyclists will have options. The old bike lanes in the middle of the road on Hennepin will go away, having been replaced by two, significantly more attractive, bike facilities. For certain riders, a shared bus/bike lane both northbound and southbound on Hennepin, right on the curb, will work just fine. For less experienced riders, the City is installing a truly innovative set of bike lanes on First, that I'm pretty excited to see in action. They will run along the curb, which in my opinion is the ideal place for bike lanes. During peak hours, they'll have a traffic lane to their left. But during off-peak hours, that next lane will be for p...