Three Leading Minneapolis Mayoral Candidates Discuss Their Climate Records and Plans

Forum moderated by Michael Roehr, AIA | October 14, 2021

Mayor Jacob Frey, Kate Knuth, and Sheila Nezhad.

SPOTLIGHT

At the virtual AIA Minneapolis Mayoral Forum on September 23, AIA Minneapolis president Michael Roehr, AIA, posed the following question to Mayor Jacob Frey, Kate Knuth, and Sheila Nezhad:

How will you work with architects and the city to prepare Minneapolis for the impacts of climate change? How will you incentivize approaches to design, construction, and operations to move these goals forward?

The following are excerpts from the candidates’ responses.

Jacob Frey

We are doing nation-leading work right now in the area of resiliency, whether that’s pushing for sustainable design through passive energy use, or energy benchmarking, where we want to make sure that all of the numbers associated with the carbon output from any individual building are exposed.

We have helped secure funds from the McKnight Foundation and the City to provide a first-in-the-Midwest project that can provide a template for decarbonizing buildings. This is over at the Towerside Innovation District, [and the funds will be used] to finance an aquifer thermal-energy-storage system. [The new district energy system] would allow the new Towerside District to generate its own sustainable source of power through the local aquifer, allowing buildings to be heated and cooled without onsite natural gas consumption. This could be a model for future projects.

Additionally, the level of the social cost of carbon savings over the 30-year cycle is around $21 million [for the project]. This is a huge step in the right direction.

And that’s in addition to other work we’re doing. We’ve pushed forward on a Green Cost Share program. It should get to 900 businesses by the end of this year, allowing those businesses, those buildings, to make sustainable upgrades to their infrastructure without impacting their bottom line. As businesses rebuild following this last year-and-a-half of COVID-19 and everything else that we’ve been through, we want to make sure that they’re doing so in a sustainable way.

Kate Knuth

One of the six sections of my Minneapolis New Green Deal plan is taking on natural gas and becoming the leading northern city in addressing natural gas. Right now, there are a lot of programs through our utilities, through incentives, but we put a lot of the burden on individual property owners and homeowners. I think we need to flip that in order to scale up what we actually need to do on climate change. So, I will use the office of the mayor, and our amazing clean energy partnership, to organize, mobilize, and resource the insulation, the weatherization, the green building techniques that we have, and electrification to reduce natural gas emissions. Forty-one percent of our city’s emissions—the largest source—are natural gas emissions.

The other part [of my plan that’s] very much of interest to architects and designers is resilience. As the city’s first chief resilience officer, I identified several years ago that our city does not yet have a climate resilience strategy. We still don’t. St. Paul released theirs in 2019. Earlier this year as part of my business, I released a white paper reviewing climate adaptation and resilience policy across the state, and I put forward policy recommendations to the legislature, including getting to work with the Center for Sustainable Building Research, and adding resilience to the B3 guidelines as a way to focus not only on the impact buildings have [on climate change] but on how buildings are impacted by climate change.

Sheila Nezhad

I experienced the benefits of green building when I was working for Headwaters Foundation for Justice, which was housed in what was first known as the Phillips Eco-Enterprise Center and is now known as the Greenway Building. It used to be the site of manufacturing pesticides, and there was a 12-year battle against the site becoming a garbage transfer station. At the end of the day, Headwaters helped seed funding and built a building with a solar roof with prairie grasses and bees, and geothermal heating and cooling, and included clean-up of the arsenic that was in the soil. They built the lobby using recycled wood and recycled-content steel. They salvaged bricks from a warehouse in Chicago, which eliminated the need for Sheetrock. 

And it was a space that was not only good for the climate in its construction and in its continued cost of operations and carbon emissions; it was a lovely place to work. It made me interested in learning more about green building techniques.

As mayor, I will work with architects that specialize in resiliency to revisit what we need to change in our building codes and in incentives to build greener and reduce our carbon emissions. I will also fight to expand the Rebuild Resilient program, [which offered] one-time funding last year for businesses damaged during the uprising to be able to rebuild with energy efficiency, solar, and prioritization of BIPOC neighborhoods. They get around $2 million in requests. The current budget proposal proposes funding the program at just half-a-million dollars. As mayor, I will invest in BIPOC businesses, helping them build in greener ways and meeting the level of the need.