My office has been working with community partners and business organizations to bring the first-ever Open Streets event to Saint Paul, and specifically University Avenue, on September 15, from 11am-6pm between Hamline Ave and Marion.

Minnehaha Avenue Open Streets event in Minneapolis. Photo credit Mike Beck.

Open Streets is an event where people-powered transportation -pedestrians, rollerbladers, bicyclists, tricyclists, skateboarders - take over the street where cars and trucks normally use the space. These events are growing in popularity across the state of Minnesota and across the world. It will be a great opportunity to get out and get active with family, friends and neighbors, as well as to visit University Avenue now that light rail construction is nearly complete. Visit businesses that are old favorites and find some new favorites, too.

Please mark your calendar, spread the word to friends, and even consider volunteering for part of the time.   

In 1991, the City of St. Paul developed one of the most comprehensive municipal recycling programs in the nation. Since that time, the City has gradually improved certain aspects of the program working with our vendor Eureka Recycling. But in recent years recycling rates in the City have plateaued and other communities have far surpassed St. Paul in the breadth of materials collected and rates of recycling.

In order to help remedy this situation, last year the City commissioned a survey conducted by Wilder Research to ask St. Paulites what they like and don't like about the current recycling and waste collection systems. We also wanted to know whether residents would like additional services and be willing to pay more for them. The survey revealed that St. Paul residents would like to see an expansion of recycling services, including more plastics and clean organics (compost), and single-sort (all in one bin) recycling, and that they are willing to pay more for it. (Find survey results here.)

As a result, the Mayor's 2014 Budget proposes to move the City toward single-stream recycling, add plastics (all #1's and #2's, and #4, 5, and 7), create clean organics (compost) drop-off sites around the City, and increase recycling education and outreach. The Mayor also mentioned in his recent Budget Address that he was setting a goal of diverting 60% of all discarded materials away from landfills and incinerators and into recycling, composting, or re-use by 2030.

Mayor Coleman laid out a plan to purchase new wheeled carts for the single-sort recycling collection in 2015, and proposes to begin transferring the pick-up location to alleys instead of streets where this is feasible. In 2016, when Eureka's current contract expires, the City will bid out a combination of recycling and curbside organics collection, with organics collection proposed to begin in earnest in 2017.

I have been working with the Mayor to develop this plan and timeline for improving the City's recycling and solid waste systems. These improvements are long overdue, and I wish we could move faster toward a more comprehensive approach. I also think we should be much more aggressive than a 60% diversion rate by 2030. San Francisco is at 80% diversion, and that city saw huge improvements in their diversion rate after a series of service improvements and policy changes in 2009.

One of the keys to significantly improving our diversion rate will be a renewed commitment to education by the City and Eureka Recycling. The environmental benefits of sending less material to landfills and incinerators are enormous. In addition to recycled materials requiring the use of significantly less energy and water to manufacture than "virgin" materials, organics sent to landfills create large volumes of methane gas, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. Composting that organic material can instead return most of the carbon to the soil.

I hope you are as excited as I am to see these improvements to our current services, and look forward to hearing your comments and ideas as the City moves towards implementing changes.   

Every two years, the City of St. Paul has a Long-Range Capital Improvement Budget (CIB) process to determine what city capital improvements will be completed over the next two years. Anyone from a City department to an individual resident can propose capital improvement projects. Once the proposed projects are reviewed for consistency with the City's Comprehensive Plan, a group of appointed St. Paulites who serve on the City's Capital Improvement Budget Committee reviews, ranks, and recommends a set of projects for consideration. The Mayor includes CIB projects in his annual budget (proposed each August), and then the City Council adopts a set of CIB projects as part of the overall City budget in December of each year.

The CIB committee has a difficult job, but they approach it by reviewing and rating projects in three categories - streets and utilities, community facilities, and residential and economic development. Projects range from new or expanded fire or police stations, to playgrounds and play areas, street improvements, and commercial or residential grant/loan programs operated by community development corporations. Often, a project will have to go through several rounds of CIB applications before being funded, meaning many valuable projects take 4, 6, or even 8 or 10 years from concept to completion. One Ward 4 example of this is improvements at Hampden Park, which neighbors have advocated for through several CIB cycles. Funding has finally been recommended for 2014. 

All long-range capital needs in the City are weighed against one another in this process for the same limited funds. In some cases, projects rise to the top because they are high priority projects that have been awarded federal or other non-City funds that require a local match. Occasionally, the Mayor and Council might decide to fund a larger set of projects than normal because interest rates are unusually low, but this usually also means a smaller slate of projects in the following year.   A prime example was the advancing of the new Como Pool project a few years ago at a time when interest rates were at historic lows and the Federal Government had provided additional incentives for jobs-creating construction projects. This year, the Mayor has proposed, and I support, advancing two Raymond Avenue improvement projects in 2014 that have Federal funding attached.

CIB funds are also awarded each year to citywide ongoing programs, such as Sidewalk Reconstruction, Tree-Planting, Bridge Enhancement, and the Bicycle, Pedestrian, and Traffic Safety program. Ward 4 CIB projects approved in the 2013 budget included a new play area at the Griggs Recreation Center and a small project to improve safety for children at Desnoyer Park.

One of the big projects recommended by the CIB Committee this year is an expansion of Fire Station 19 in Highland Park. While this project is not located in Ward 4, the expansion would allow the placement of an additional rig at Station 19, which will improve fire and medical response coverage in Ward 4, as rigs from Station 14 on Snelling and Station 20 on University would not have to respond to calls in Highland Park as often, making them more available for service calls in the neighborhoods in which they are located.

Some types of long-range capital improvements in the City are funded in different ways. For example, the maintenance and replacement of storm and sanitary sewers is paid for via the annual sewer assessment that you receive in the mail each year. Similarly, the reconstruction of residential streets is funded via bonds sold specifically for that purpose each year in what's known as the Residential Street Vitality Program.

As we move into the season in which the City Council will be deliberating about the 2014 budget, the CIB program is one big component to be aware of and is a primary way in which improvements called for by citizens can sometimes be accomplished.