GreenStep City Best Practices: Resilient Economic and Community Development
Climate Adaptation and Community Resilience No. 29
Plan and prepare for extreme weather, adapt to changing climatic conditions, and foster stronger community connectedness and social and economic vitality.
Encourage private sector action and incentivize investment in preventive approaches that reduce risk and minimize impacts of extreme weather and the changing climate for human health and the built environment.
Cities can encourage/incentivize investment that uses a standard: (1) Fortified Commercial, a national standard for resilient construction from The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety; (2) RELi Resilience Standard, combining design criteria with an integrative design process for neighborhoods, buildings, homes and infrastructure, developed in MN and being synchronized with LEED.
Developing Urban Resilience is a repository for all of the Urban Land Institute’s resilience research that highlights innovative real estate projects across the country. [Applicable to 1, 2 and 3 Star implementation.]
How New Homes Can Stand Up to Disaster provides state-of-the-art techniques to keep homes standing when floods, winds, and fires strike. [Applicable to 1 Star implementation.]
Incentives for Green Infrastructure Implementation on Private Property: Lessons Learned from the Water Resources Foundation provides information and guidance for how municipalities and utilities can create incentives to promote broader, better targeted, and more effective implementation of GI within their stormwater programs and service areas. [Applicable to 3 Star implementation.]
The Clean Energy States Alliance website has many informational resources on clean energy storage and scaling up solar for under-resourced communities.
Develop public education materials/a campaign that encourages private building owners to take basic actions that will prevent damage from extreme weather (such as elevating equipment, installing appropriate devices/retrofits, flood-proofing basements, and protecting well-heads); work with utilities and community funding partners to offer no/low-cost purchase and installation options to low-income residents and small businesses to provide equitable community resilience.
Provide educational materials to encourage private owners, market-rate developers, and affordable housing developers to install islanding capability with storage so their new or existing grid-connected renewable energy systems can provide backup power during grid outages; work with utilities and federal/state/community funding partners to offer incentives and funding options to provide equitable community resilience.
Develop an incentive program (reduced development fees, financing, regulatory flexibility) based upon resiliency standards for private building owners to increase resilience; report successful private installations (cool/green roofs, cool pavements, planting resilient tree species, water capture/reuse, a natural wastewater treatment system). Report PACE promotion for commercial energy efficiency/renewable energy under BPA 26.3.
Who's doing it
Fridley - 1 star
Date action report first entered:
Date of last report update:
Year action initially completed: 2016
Implementation details:
The City of Fridley held a first-time, themed, community engagement event in Commons Park, centrally located in Fridley, on April 29th for Arbor Day 2016. This Best Practice 29 Sponsored Event informed residents about the integral role that green infrastructure plays in the health and resiliency of a city, while teaching skills in the selection, siting, planting, and pruning of trees to reduce energy use, intercept stormwater, avoid extreme weather damage, and resist pests. The event featured community tree planting of resilient species in the park, and homeowner purchase of low-cost bare-root trees.
Outcome measures/metrics/money saved:
Approximately 40-50 people, including many students, participated all morning while homeowners came and went throughout the event. Ten trees were sold to homeowners. A resident from the city’s immigrant community agreed to participate on the Tree Board. The City created “Tree Trek” to demonstrate types of trees beyond ash and maple for residents to plant. Several additional tree species were added to Commons Park.
The City of Hutchinson held a Kickoff Event, supported in part with a Best Practice 29 Event Sponsorship, on April 21, 2016 to promote resilience to the changing climate/energy landscape for multi-family and commercial buildings through free benchmarking assistance from the MN ENERGY STAR Challenge. Participants learned about Hutchinson’s resilience efforts including burying power lines, buying up and relocating/demolishing properties located within the 100-year flood areas, tracking and reducing the city’s energy consumption, offering PACE financing, providing energy efficiency rebates through the local utility, and partnering on the MN ENERGY STAR Challenge.
Outcome measures/metrics/money saved:
Approximately 20 people attended on short notice during a busy Earth Week. The event was covered by the local news station, HCVN Channel 10. Two businesses signed up at the event for the Challenge to ENERGY STAR certify their buildings, and five more signed up within the next few weeks.
Six trained volunteers spent four hours replacing 100 fluorescent T8 and T12 bulbs with LED bulbs, and four traditional thermostats with programmable thermostats in the City office, shop and warming house, as part of a Best Practice 29 Sponsored Event. This effort was followed by a community-wide event in Ryan Park on June 23, 2016 (in conjunction with the farmers’ market and a youth baseball game) to promote the City’s biking/walking trails, farmers’ market, energy retrofit cost savings and environmental impact, Firewise tips, extreme weather resilience and mitigation information, community solar gardens, and GreenStep call to action for next steps with GreenStep committee to make Best Practice 29 ideas for climate adaptation and community resilience a reality.
Outcome measures/metrics/money saved:
The city retrofit will save 85,000 Kwh over the life of the bulbs, which is the same as GHG emissions from 12.6 passenger vehicles driven for one year or 6,722 gallons of gasoline consumed. At least 100 people attended the event and engaged on these topics. Support was fostered leading up to the event and momentum for more action was created moving forward.
"Ready and Resilient: A Guide to Extreme Weather" was prepared by the City using the Macalester College brochure as a model. Print copies were distributed during a community-wide workshop in August 2015 and mailed to city residents. City staff tabulated results of an on-line/printed survey. The August public event included presentations by Dr. Mark Seeley and Patrick Hamilton on the current state of Minnesota's climate and changes that have been observed and are expected in the future.
Outcome measures/metrics/money saved:
12 questions were asked in both the paper and online surveys. Each question had a risk factor based on the answer provided. Questions ranged from a health focus to current conditions in the home as well as preparedness status. City staff plans to use information from the survey to target more specific messaging and education on resiliency and preparedness.
