Minnesota’s GreenStep Cities Program Quietly Changes the State, One City at a Time
The voluntary climate-action program has drawn participation from 147 communities across the state
By Justin R. Wolf | November 17, 2022
Illustration by @drawnwell.
FEATURE
In the town Hutchinson, a 400-kilowatt, 975-panel solar array is mounted on ballasts above a 1970s-era city dump—the largest landfill solar project in Minnesota. In St. Cloud, the city’s wastewater treatment plant is close to 100-percent powered by renewable energy sources. In Duluth, city leaders are developing a replicable framework for resilient energy planning that could be adopted in other communities. These green energy projects are far from isolated examples in Minnesota. In fact, Minnesotans’ appetite for these types of initiatives is at an all-time high, and there is one statewide program to thank for that.
GreenStep Cities was established in 2010 amid a growing tide of public support for clean energy projects across the state. The nonregulatory, voluntary, and free program is essentially a base of operations for cities and tribal nations to adopt a set of sustainability measures and, in time, customize them to their communities’ needs through a series of five recognition steps. Call it climate action à la carte.
Today, the 147 combined cities and tribal nations participating in the program account for more than half of the state’s population. “The program is built for small and medium-sized cities,” says Kristin Mroz, GreenStep Cities coordinator at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA). That’s because nearly 500 of the 854 cities in Minnesota have populations of less than 1,000. “Sustainability efforts are still largely seen as above and beyond the day-to-day operations of a city,” she adds. “We’re trying to move the needle on that, to make sustainability more of the norm and integrate it into everyday city operations.”
The catalyst for GreenStep was the Next Generation Energy Act of 2007, a far-reaching piece of state legislation that aimed to expand community-based energy development projects and set a series of progressive emissions-reduction goals through 2050, topping out at 80 percent. A key provision of the act directed the MPCA, the Department of Commerce, and public-private consortiums known as Clean Energy Resource Teams (CERTs) to submit a plan to the chairs of the state’s energy and transportation committees outlining recommendations for meeting those goals. In response, these teams held community meetings throughout the state and worked to develop a framework designed to empower, rather than guilt, cities to act. All carrot, no stick. The result was GreenStep Cities.
What began as “a climate program morphed into a broad sustainability program,” says Lola Schoenrich, vice president of the Great Plains Institute and one of the original steering committee members who coauthored the program. “No city wants the MPCA to have additional regulatory authority over them. This allows cities to start from wherever they are and choose from a broad menu of actions.”
Veterans Memorial Park in downtown Marshall. The southwest Minnesota city completed Step 5 of the GreenStep Cities program this past June. “GreenStep Cities dovetails perfectly with our commitment to creating the highest quality of life for all our residents,” says longtime Mayor Bob Byrnes. Photo by Chad Holder.
GreenStep Cities outlines 29 best practices spread across five areas of concern: Buildings and Lighting, Land Use, Transportation, Environmental Management, and Resilient Economic and Community Development. Once a city expresses interest and adopts a council resolution (Step 1), it can get to work on implementing any number of approximately 180 actions that comprise the best practices. Many of those practices touch on “city operations and what cities can do to perform more efficiently,” says Mroz. “Many cities are already taking actions toward achieving these goals, whether they label them sustainability initiatives or otherwise.”
Schoenrich embraces the democratic nature of GreenStep. “The website is there, the actions are all up there, and anyone is free to use it,” she says. “We want sustainability to be the norm in Minnesota.”
Participating cities of all sizes and economic scales—from St. Paul (population 307,193) to Hewitt (254)—have made great strides in the last 12 years. Roseville (35,874) joined the program in 2014. “We’re still in the early stages of our sustainability journey,” says Noelle Bakken, the city’s sustainability intern. The first-ring Twin Cities suburb has recorded 62 actions and completed Step 5 of the program (“Show improvement in community performance metrics”), and it’s currently tracking the performance of a dozen city buildings as part of the Minnesota B3 Guidelines and the SB 2030 Energy Standard. A geothermal system supplies cooling for the city’s indoor ice rink, with waste heat diverted to the fire station. Next spring, the city will participate in No Mow May in support of the Bee City USA conservation initiative.
“Sustainability efforts are still largely seen as above and beyond the day-to-day operations of a city. We’re trying to move the needle on that, to make sustainability more of the norm and integrate it into everyday city operations.”
Roseville is reportedly updating its zoning codes to encourage more sustainable land use and the building of more multifamily housing. Bakken notes the potential for the city to create a climate action framework to “help us engage with the community more and hear from residents and business owners on what’s important and where they’d like to see action, rather than relying on city staff to decide on what’s important.”
One city Roseville may look to for learnings is Northfield, which already has such a framework in place: the Northfield Climate Action Plan, adopted in November 2019. In fact, as far back as 2001, local clean-energy specialist Bruce Anderson was operating a consultancy called RENew Northfield and actively “pushing the notion” that “the city could and should get 100 percent of its electricity from renewables within something like 10 years,” says Anderson, who today sits on Northfield’s Environmental Quality Commission. “There was a lot of [local] support, but city leaders weren’t where the community was.”
The groundwork laid by Anderson and others eventually paid off. The mayor and city council members got on board, and the arrival of GreenStep in 2010—Northfield signed on that same year—helped codify at the policy level much of what the city was starting to accomplish. The community of more than 20,000 now has a full-time sustainability coordinator who is charged with overseeing the Climate Action Plan. In the last two years, the city implemented a franchise fee through its contract with Xcel Energy so that utility customers now pay a monthly fee that goes toward infrastructure improvements, as opposed to paying high assessment fees whenever street work is needed. A percentage of the fee is reserved for the city’s carbon reduction fund, which can be used for implementing a clean-energy transition plan, providing residential and commercial customers with rebates for energy-efficiency improvements, and more.
“In everything we’ve done, we’ve stressed that it’s important to act at the individual, the household, and the small business level,” says Anderson. “It’s equally important to support policies at the community, the state, and the federal level that encourage the entire community, the entire state, and the entire country to move in the right direction.”
Many community leaders in Minnesota believe, as Anderson does, that robust mandates are needed to make real and measurable progress. Others argue that individual communities should be allowed to pursue their own goals, with residents and business owners exercising their will based on local conditions. GreenStep Cities strives to have it both ways.
“Some cities join [GreenStep] because of a single community member who stepped up and appointed themselves that champion,” says Mroz. Gaining momentum in the program, on the other hand, requires organization and buy-in from a range of stakeholders, as well as a holistic understanding of sustainability. Duluth, St. Louis Park, Elk River, and dozens of other cities have demonstrated their commitment to success, as have the MPCA and the GreenStep organizers. “We are a continuous improvement program,” says Mroz.
Meanwhile, the GreenStep footprint continues to grow. GreenStep Cities is now aided by the MPCA’s GreenCorps program, which places AmeriCorps members with host site organizations around the state. GreenStep Schools is in pilot phase, finalizing best practices. As the web of stakeholders grows, the driving force behind these efforts remains the communities themselves. From the beginning, GreenStep Cities has taken a hyperlocal approach, and it will continue on this path. As Schoenrich puts it, “You can’t solve climate problems without considering the specifics of a place.”
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