Steps Toward Environmental Justice: Community-Driven GI In Minneapolis

In 2022, Allison Bell from the City of Minneapolis presented on the City's efforts to implement a new Green Infrastructure program into the public works team at WEFTEC. This presentation serves as a follow up on some of the progress that the City's program has achieved by featuring a success story from one of the city's most environmentally underserved communities. Several proposed street improvement projects entering the design and community outreach phase of planning has spurred the City of Minneapolis to leverage the opportunity to incorporate and optimize green infrastructure (GI) in conjunction within these projects. These projects were also all located within the Minneapolis South Side Green Zone (SSGZ). Minneapolis Green Zones are communities that have been identified as historically affected by environmental pollution, structural racism, and other forms of marginalization, that the City is prioritizing future efforts to achieve environmental justice. The SSGZ community has identified boosting GI, tree canopy, and green jobs as major elements that would contribute to the work to improve the conditions they experience. In 2022, the City partnered with HR Green to work with the SSGZ Council, community members, and the City's transportation design teams to understand, prioritize, and maximize the impacts the future transportation projects could have in the area. This effort focused on two of the upcoming projects ahead of a much larger study of the entire zone. Minneapolis and HR Green chose to take a different approach than in the past: to navigate working with an over-burdened community in such a way that does not increase the burden and allows for effective input. Sometimes this meant acknowledging historic racism in the development of the roads in the area, and sometimes this meant translating how city and engineering priorities aligned with community feedback. The community and the city worked together to develop goals and priorities for GI in this area. The project team made recommendations to incorporate GI within the road projects that aligned with the goals and priorities. They analyzed feasibility, impact, and costs, and laid out a plan for implementation and funding. In this presentation, we will walk through how we learned to work with the community, how to best listen and incorporate needs, and how to communicate and inform community members. We will also discuss the GI optimization work and how we translated community-driven priorities and city water quality priorities into project recommendations. Following the completion of this phase of GI prioritization, the City continued its partnership with the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization to fund the implementation of green infrastructure practices identified and prioritized in this study. Future expansions of this study into additional Green Zone locations are expected to take place during 2024.