Crookston is a 7000+ person community in the northwest corner of Minnesota that has big ambitions to improve the life of its residents by leveraging the clean energy transition. Abby Finis and Larry Kraft from the City Climate Corner Podcast interview City Council Member Tim Lenard, Exec. Director of Crookston Housing Development Karie Kirshbaum, Exec. Director of NW MN Regional Sustainable Development Program Shannon Stassen, and John Vaughn, Fresh Energy’s Managing Director of Community Development to learn about the Empower Crookston effort and how it spawned an I Love Crookston program.
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Links
City Climate Corner episode page
Empower Crookston website
City of Crookston website
Minnesota information on local climate action grants
Fresh Energy website
Transcript
[00:00:00] Ian: Welcome to the Streets.mn Podcast, the show where we highlight how transportation and land use can make our communities better places. Coming to you from beautiful Seward, Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am your host Ian R Buck. Clean energy is a topic that we don’t usually cover directly on our show, but it is a strong area of interest for us.
Fortunately, our friends over at City Climate Corner Podcast, which is produced here in Minnesota, are on the job. They look at ways that small cities across the world are taking on climate change, and they recently interviewed officials in Crookston about their clean energy transition. Let me hand you over to them now.
[00:00:48] Abby: Cities produce more than 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Big cities get a lot of attention, but most household emissions in the US actually come from communities outside urban cores making them critical players in climate mitigation and climate justice. City Climate Corner explores how these small and midsize cities are tackling climate change and moving toward an equitable and sustainable future.
I’m Abby Finis.
[00:01:09] Larry: And I’m Larry Kraft. We’re co-hosts for City Climate Corner.
Hey Abby.
[00:01:17] Abby: Hey Larry.
[00:01:18] Larry: So Abby, you texted me a few days ago about something where we’re gonna be at the same conference. What was that?
[00:01:25] Abby: Yeah, uh, we, a couple colleagues and I. I saw this conference come up in Winona, Minnesota, which is in the southeast portion of the state, right along the Mississippi River Bluff.
Lovely little town, and saw that they were doing a small city climate conference and submitted a proposal to do a panel on a climate action toolbox. And the agenda came out last week. And guess who the keynote is going to be right after our panel that we set this guy up for.
[00:01:56] Larry: Uh, how many guesses do I get?
[00:01:58] Abby: I think you know who it is.
[00:02:00] Larry: It’s me!
[00:02:02] Abby: Yeah. So that was pretty cool. So yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t know that you, I mean, I had actually not even, this is a. You know, a small city conference, regional conference that I guess they’ve been doing
