Finding a Green Way to Govern

For the past couple months I have been involved (and Robin has been very very involved) in working on one of the most interesting and exciting (and potentially controversial) initiatives happening in City Hall. It's called Homegrown Minneapolis and the group working on it will be going public with some its recommendations in May. The basic concept is to find more ways to get fresh, locally grown food sold, distributed and eaten in Minneapolis. For the past few months a group staff, residents and others have been working on ways we can do a better job getting good, fresh, locally produced food to the people who live and eat in Minneapolis. Food grown locally is good for your health and promotes a stronger local economy and protection of our environment. Homegrown Minneapolis recommendations are expected to include: Using public and private land for community gardens and food production, Increasing access to farmers’ markets or mobile food delivery services, Encouraging restaurants, ...

The Council took another great action this morning. This one allows more low and medium-speed “neighborhood electric vehicles” such as the ZENN to be sold in more locations in the City. Before today, we treated these vehicles the same way we treat used cars. After this morning, they will be able to be sold in more and less-dense commercial zones. I made a slight change to today’s action, which may have an important impact in terms of preventing confusion down the road. The original ordinance defined neighborhood electric vehicles as having a top speed of 20-25mph. However, the State Legislature, led by Representative Jim Davnie, has recently pushed the top speed up to 35mph. My change makes our definition of neighborhood electric vehicle consistent with the State’s, so that they can grow and evolve together. I hope that people will take advantage of this Council action to start offering these innovative, zero-emission vehicles in more locations around town.

Bees in the City This morning, the Council ended a decades-long prohibition on keeping bees in our city. I strongly supported this ordinance change, for a few main reasons. We are in the middle of the Homegrown Minneapolis initiative, which is pushing the City to look at how we can be more supportive of growing food in the City. Local honey produced by local honeybees and consumed by Minneapolis residents is a great start. Bees are also prolific pollinators, and can help to dramatically increase the yields of vegetable gardens. The one issue I’ve been hearing about from prospective beekeepers – who are mostly very excited about this new direction from the City – is that the staff recommendation included a requirement that all permitted beekeepers indemnify the City for any lawsuit that might occur. I agreed with them that this was unnecessary, an example of the City trying to minimize our risk in a way that undermines our stated policy goals – in this case, allowing and even encou...

My office, and specifically my extremely capable intern Annie Welch, is in the beginning stages of an important new initiative: a diversity audit of all official City Boards and Commissions. This includes advisory groups like the Citizen's Environmental Advisory Committee, various appeals boards, special service district boards and other groups. The idea is to do a survey of all members of these boards and commissions to find out how well we're doing at appointing people who match Minneapolis. We're including lots of different demographic data: race, gender, age, geography, disability status, sexual orientation, etc. The hope is that this information, once we've compiled it all, will give us a 'baseline' against which to measure future efforts to increase the diversity of our boards and commissions. This will fit into the broader, ongoing work of the Coordinator's Office to improve the appointments process to these important facets of the City's communit...

One of the issues the Council took up at the last Council meeting was a controversial legislative support item regarding a Trader Joe's store on Lyndale. Representative Karen Clark has sponsored a bill at the State Legislature exempting this specific proposed store from a rule that limits how close a new liquor store can be to another existing liquor store. Current City ordinance states that a new liquor store must be at least 2,000 feet away from an existing store. At this location, Hum's Liquor is just down the block. It seems that Trader Joe's business formula requires that they have a beer/wine component to their stores. For them to open a store at this location, the Legislature will have to pass Rep Clark's bill exempting them from our rules. I did not support signing onto this bill, for a variety of reasons. First, I do not believe this is a good way to make policy. There are at least sixteen places in Minneapolis that are at least 2,000 feet from an existing liqu...