Guest Ep! Featuring the "City Climate Corner" podcast's recent episode about Crookston, Minn.

The folks at the City Climate Corner podcast have given us permission to repost their latest episode featuring exciting clean energy work in Crookston, Minnesota! If you don't already subscribe to City Climate Corner, learn more here.

Episode Details
Crookston is a 7,000+ 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. Co-hosts of City Climate Corner Abby Finis and Larry Kraft interviewed Crookston 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.

Resources

• Empower Crookston website
• City of Crookston website
• Minnesota information on local climate action grants
• Fresh Energy website

Fresh Energy’s mission is to shape and drive bold policy solutions to achieve equitable carbon-neutral economies. Together we are working toward a vision of a just, prosperous, and resilient future powered by a shared commitment to a carbon-neutral economy. Learn about Fresh Energy's work and our bold "Vision 2030: Fresh Energy's Strategic Framework" at our website fresh-energy.org.


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Transcript

Jo Olson: [00:00:11] Hello and welcome to Decarbonize the Clean Energy Podcast from Fresh Energy. Fresh energy is a Minnesota nonprofit working to speed our state's transition to a clean energy economy. My name is Joe Olson. I'm the lead director of communications and engagement at Fresh Energy. And today, I'm here with you to share a recording from a different podcast. And actually, it's one of my favorite podcasts. It's called City Climate Corner, and it's co-hosted by Abby Finis and Larry Kraft. So if you're not already a subscriber of theirs, head over to your favorite podcasting app and look them up. I'll put a link to their podcast in the episode notes as well. So today, with their permission, we're reposting a recent episode of theirs that delves into some of the really exciting work happening up north in Crookston, Minnesota. And that fresh energy is really excited and proud to be a partner on. And in fact, on their podcast you'll hear from a freshie as well. His name is John Vaughn. All right, before we dive in, I want to thank the band Palm Psalms for providing our theme song. It's called DJ AF. It's off of their album Zero to Haka. You can get the latest from the band at Palm psalm.com. All right, let's jump into the recording.

Abby Finis: [00:01:34] 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 mid-sized cities are tackling climate change and moving toward an equitable and sustainable future. I'm Abby Finis.

Larry Kraft: [00:01:55] And I'm Larry Kraft. We're co-hosts for City Climate Corner. Hey, Abby. Hey, Larry. So, Abby, you texted me a few days ago about something where we're going to be at the same conference. What was that?

Abby Finis: [00:02:11] Yeah. Uh, we a couple colleagues and 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.

Larry Kraft: [00:02:42] Uh, how many guesses do I get?

Abby Finis: [00:02:44] I think you know who it is.

Larry Kraft: [00:02:46] It's me.

Abby Finis: [00:02:47] Yeah. So that's 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 Its regional conference that I guess they've been doing for it. Looks like this will be their 24th year, and I had not been familiar with this conference, but this year the topic is climate change in the small city.

Larry Kraft: [00:03:08] So yeah, well, my way I got connected to it was one of the people involved with organizing. It used to live in Saint Louis Park, and in fact I served with her on the sustainability Commission in Saint Louis Park many years ago. And with the topic, she reached out and said a while ago, would you be do a keynote? And I said, sure. And that's how it came to be.

Abby Finis: [00:03:34] What are you going to talk about?

Larry Kraft: [00:03:35] Maybe small cities and climate change and climate policy.

Abby Finis: [00:03:39] Mhm. Yeah. That sounds that sounds like it would be appropriate. I think it'll work out really well. You know we've done this presentation before on talking through climate action planning strategies. And City Climate Corner has been super helpful because I have 70 plus examples Samples from small cities across the country and of course, in Germany and the Netherlands on what folks are doing and innovative practices. And so it's really cool to apply that to my work and to share that with a broader audience.

Larry Kraft: [00:04:10] Yeah, well, I guess this is on October 25th. So we'll see if you're hearing this before October 25th. If you are. Come visit us in Winona, Minnesota.

Abby Finis: [00:04:20] Yeah. It is, you know, pretty close to the Wisconsin and Iowa borders. So if you're in those areas, definitely register and go out and attend that. It is what, September 23rd now. So Libra season for all of those of us who celebrate. Uh, and yeah.

Larry Kraft: [00:04:39] And so what are we talking about this episode?

Abby Finis: [00:04:42] We are, you know, speaking of small cities, we are interviewing a group of folks from Crookston, Minnesota, which is a pretty small community up in very northern Minnesota. That, you know, they're just doing a ton of grassroots level work to really think about what does their future look like and how can they make it sustainable and green as they improve the infrastructure in their town and reinvent themselves?

Larry Kraft: [00:05:13] Super. Let's do it. Let's do it.

Larry Kraft: [00:05:18] Today, we are speaking with a group of folks who have been working in the Crookston area of Minnesota to ensure rural communities are included in the clean energy transition. So we've got several folks. And so rather than me saying their name to them, having them repeat it, we're just going to go right in. And Tim, why don't you start out. Thank you Larry. Tim Menard.

Tim Menard: [00:05:39] I am a current elected official, councilman at large, council member at large for the City of Crookston. And I also sit as a board member on Crookston's Housing and Economic Development Authority.

Larry Kraft: [00:05:55] Okay. Karie.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:05:58] Yeah. Karie Kirschbaum I'm the community development director in Crookston. I am over the Economic Development Authority and also our HRA, our for our housing authority.

Larry Kraft: [00:06:06] Fantastic. And Shannon.

Shannon Stassen: [00:06:08] Yeah, I'm Shannon Stassen and I'm the executive director for the Northwest Regional Sustainable Development Partnership, which is part of the University of Minnesota Extension.

Larry Kraft: [00:06:18] And John.

John Vaughn: [00:06:20] Hi. My name is John Vaughn. I'm managing director of community development at Fresh Energy, which is a 30 year old nonprofit based in Saint Paul that does public policy. And I have the great joy of having a job where I get to work with communities like Crookston.

Larry Kraft: [00:06:37] Cool. So I would love to start by hearing more about the Crookston area. So, Tim, maybe could you tell us a bit about Crookston and what it's like to live there?

Tim Menard: [00:06:47] Well, I we had we still have the oldest Continuously running theater in Crookston. The Grand Theater we have a beautiful, beautiful downtown that is in the process of sort of a renaissance, if I may, and we are all about helping to push that Renaissance process forward. We live in a community that has distinct neighborhoods, each of which, when I was growing up, had their own small family markets. But those have all, uh, sort of gone their way. And now we have larger single store chain stores in the community. So that aspect of growing up here has changed. You know, we still have a pool. We have some challenges with it. We have a beautiful river. We're really working on having more access to play on the river and Shannon has been a huge part in making Wednesdays on the water, an event where more and more of our community members get out and enjoy this beautiful riparian life that we have here in Crookston. I graduated back in 1969. I left for college and I didn't come back for 50 years. But now that I'm back, I'm looking forward to this opportunity that I have now to help shape the future of this town. I really think that Crookston time has come. We've been a sleepy little hamlet for a decade or so, and we're really beginning to feel all of the components of success coming together at the right time. So Crookston is a city whose time has come about.

Larry Kraft: [00:08:49] How large is Crookston?

Tim Menard: [00:08:51] We have a population currently of about 7500 souls. And then with the campus here, the University of Minnesota Crookston campus adds an additional 1200 or so individuals to the community. So, you know, ranging between 7500 and 9000 souls, about 2500 family homes in Crookston, I think is what we estimate.

Larry Kraft: [00:09:23] Right. And you're in the you mentioned in kind of the northwest part of Minnesota.

Tim Menard: [00:09:29] Yes. You know, we used to be called the Queen city back in the day when we were a lumber mill and had all kinds of brick, brick and mortar operations here in Crookston, a riverboat going up the river to Fishers Landing. Crookston was a go to place, you know. James Hill, who owned the Northern Pacific Railroad line, he was very instrumental in helping build the early community of Crookston. You know, he helped the Catholic Diocese with the development of the diocesan location here, was a strong donor to the Catholic community here in the early days. We have a vibrant history of Benedictine communities being active in hospital work, education, work, social work, and that's another aspect of the community that we've seen shift over the years. When I was growing up in Crookston, we had over 300 religious women in the Benedictine monastery here in Crookston. And now I believe that the number has become less than 15 dedicated women. So big shifts there. But there's actually no way that we can really put a number on what the impact of those committed individuals were in educating us, bringing us culture, bringing music and theater to the community, which helped make Crookston so vibrant when I was younger. And I'd like to see, you know, more of that cultural input for our community.

Abby Finis: [00:11:23] Yeah. I love hearing the historical backgrounds of different communities, and it sounds like, you know, the history is tied to where the present is going. Right? And bringing some of that vibrancy back. And I think a big part of that, and what we want to talk about today is what does the future look like? And part of that is this Empower Crookston, right. And before we get into the details of that, Carrie, I'm wondering if you could give us like an elevator pitch. About what Empower Crookston is and how it got started.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:11:50] Absolutely. Um, I've known John. He. Our relationship preceded my coming up to Crookston and as well as Shannon, we had worked on different projects in the region together historically through different government or outreach or trails and parks, all sorts of different things. Solar. And so when I came to Crookston, John said, hey, what if we look at this one, Grant? And he came over and we had about three weeks, I think, to to to reach out. And I started working with Shannon. It started with, I think, with our emerging Small Minnesota Communities grant, that we started meeting with a group of people, and slowly through that, we began to create relationships in the community. Shannon at RSVP. Me at the EDA. And then John came in with some projects and from Fresh energy. And then pretty soon we ended up with the RDC and then Ottertail started to join us. We really started to take a look at the energy and the connectivity up in Crookston. And I think the conversation with clean energy started with the weatherization of some of our older areas. We have a lot of housing built before the 40s, so we kind of started looking at the weatherization. We started looking at how are people getting how are they getting around town? We have a lot of, you know, we're we have a justice40 area in our city, and we have a lot of challenges. I think we only have like 1.2 cars per household and we're under 75%. Ami and and how did we get there from being what Tim described.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:13:09] So how do we reverse that course? So I started looking through some of the records and studies, and I found that Shannon Stassen is with us today. He was our city administrator for six years, I believe, and he had a lot of studies that were already in place, and he'd been working on a lot of clean energy projects, and then we were part of a Green Step City. That initiative had started, and we kind of stalemated on that. So we just started to recoup and recap and like, what do we have in place? We don't need to restudy things as they are, what they are. And so just in those conversations, we just started working and coming together. And pretty soon we were researching was there and we got to have such a group. So what are we? And we said, okay, we're going to be in power. Crookston. You're talking about clean energy initially, but as we begin to realize it's a verb, we are here to empower Crookston to become exactly what this city should be and moving forward. And we've seen great headway. We've had a lot of community meetings through our emerging small Minnesota Communities grant, but out of that came more ideas for the clean energy thing. So we have a real strong community cohort happening right now. And then in addition, we have the Empower Crookston group. So just a lot of energy going on in this last year.

Abby Finis: [00:14:16] I love that there's a number of positive connotations I think that can come with the word empower. And Tim, it sounds like the city has been really supportive of this effort kind of from the get go. Can you tell us what motivates the city to start thinking about clean energy and that transformation that's happening in the community?

Tim Menard: [00:14:33] Well, we really are driven by a concept of becoming much more sustainable community. We as you know, agriculture is our primary industry here. And then there are industries that are related to the producers, the American Crystal sugar plant. We have a new operation coming online here soon. Very exciting. North Star Lime, they're going to be taking a byproduct of the sugar beet processing, the lime that's created from that. And they're going to be pelletizing it so that it'll be able to ship potentially all over the world to help producers who need that additive to help with greater fertility in their lands. So those are exciting things. We have an industrial park that really has so much potential. We're going forward with getting a rail spur put in down there so that our producers, our small grain producers and producers of other products native to us will be able to ship their products Directly from our community to the Great Lakes, which will take them off into the great world. So, you know, a notion that we don't have to necessarily be landlocked here in this little northwest corner. And I think that, you know, my vision and the City Council's vision is we've got a lot of homework to do to bring our infrastructure up to date. There's no question that there has been some neglect. Some cans kicked down the road, and now we have to really seriously address that.

Tim Menard: [00:16:19] And some of this fresh energy, some of these sustainable energy ideas are things that are going to to help empower and literally bring power to help us. And, you know, if we can bring the cost of energy down for our constituents, that's just going to be more money that can come back into the community that will, you know, replenish the tax funds that will give us more money so that we can continue this forward movement of strengthening our infrastructure, developing new businesses, giving existing businesses lifts up so that they can maybe expand the work that they're doing. So the City Council is committed, at least from my point of view, to doing what we have to do to bring this beautiful, vibrant community into the 21st century and beyond, with energy, with new business, with affordable housing, workforce, housing, for the new jobs that we're going to create with some of this energy that's coming in for business. So to me, it's very exciting. I think I envision Crookston being an anchor city in the northwest corner where we're we're gladly proclaiming that we are open for business, and we are taking the steps that we need to take to make sure that the world knows, hey, you want to do something? Crookston's a place to do it.

Abby Finis: [00:18:02] Awesome.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:18:03] I want to add real quick when he's talking about Northstar line and taking the the line out of the byproduct of creating the sugar that enabled us not to have another landfill. It literally has alleviated the need for additional landfills, and it's emptying the current landfill that we have. Also, on the rail cars they were looking at, four truckloads can go into one rail car 3 to 4, but estimated around four. So that cuts down on our carbon footprint pretty significantly. And it really helps our farmers get their product out. So I just kind of interesting facts as to as Tim was talking on that. Mhm.

Abby Finis: [00:18:35] Nice. Well it sounds like you have a number of institutions, organizations, the city on board. It's also important to engage residents, right. What are some of the engagement efforts looking like in Crookston, Carrie.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:18:50] Well, we started with the emerging small Minnesota communities. We started a jolt and jive. We have Thursday morning coffees at The Cove. It's a youth center downtown, and it started with a few of us. And then pretty soon it was six of us. And now it's between 10 and 15 of us. And then we started having events and getting out within the community to hear what's going on. Like we have our Wednesdays on the water. We just randomly put together a kayak event, and I'll credit Shannon on that. And I think we had over 70 kayakers showed up to go kayaking. So we're getting a lot of community feedback and input on what they like and what they want to see happen in our community. And a lot of the conversation when, you know, they don't always realize how much of this has to do with clean energy or carbon footprint when we're talking about, well, we want our trail extended. We had a big meeting one night. It was really fun. We had food, ice cream, floats, and we talked about the trails in Crookston and it was a huge turnout. I was shocked and they all had. They didn't realize that really, if we have our if we have our walkability and our ride ability and bike ability, that these are things that are part of the clean energy initiative, right? The green steps. And so, you know, coming from come up in a region that's very red, you know, it's very conservative politically. And so to come with the clean energy initiative into a community that, you know, it could be suspect all of a sudden common sense is winning out. Right. And the message is, and yes, we definitely have to drive our diesel pickups, but we can also weatherize our homes. We can also create trails. We can also. So we're having a really a lot of success in that. And I just have to say hats off to the council for that. Hats off to our community for that. The college, it's just been a lot of fun to see the effort that everybody has put into it.

Larry Kraft: [00:20:27] I love that. Included in this project is a very comprehensive focus on energy and energy transition. It sounds like there's a clean energy component that includes a hybrid renewable energy project. John, maybe can you tell us about what that entails and what it's expected to deliver?

John Vaughn: [00:20:47] We last fall empower Crookston said a number of pretty concrete project goals, and one of them is auditing and weatherizing 720 homes. And so we're working on how to figure that out. We will probably get about ten of them done this fall next week. Empower Crookston and the University of Minnesota Crookston basketball team. We're going to be canvassing the entire city, promoting electrification, promoting, you know, the new rebates and tax credits that are available to folks, and also basically establishing a pipeline of interest for people to get their homes audited and weatherized. Another opportunity we we have is that Tim alluded to that. You know, there's some infrastructure updates that are fairly compelling that need to be done. But in infrastructure challenge, there is opportunity, and that is to potentially do a fairly large geothermal, closed loop, horizontal geothermal. We have the heat producers in the industrial park. And I was wondering, Shannon, this is something that you've been involved in for a while, and I was wondering if you wanted to say a few words about the potential for geothermal, both in Crookston and at the University of Minnesota Crookston.

Larry Kraft: [00:22:11] We are taking a quick break to say, if you like what you're hearing, please support us via a tax deductible contribution at the Support Us link on our web page. City climate.com. You can also become a monthly supporter and get a cool gift by going to the Patreon link, which is the P in the social media menu in the top right of that web page. Thanks.

Abby Finis: [00:22:37] I do have that as the next question that details that. John, if you wanted to focus on the hybrid renewable. Okay. We can cover that here.

John Vaughn: [00:22:46] Yeah.

John Vaughn: [00:22:47] So we're not too ambitious 720 homes audited and weatherized about a little less than a third of the entire housing stock, mostly in a, you know, federally defined environmental justice neighborhood. The other big project that we're working, there's a local company up there called Hybrids Renewables, that have created a 4.8MW wind solar battery system, and they've installed it and it's serving the city of Red Lake Falls, which is about 20, 30 miles away from Crookston. But if you think about it, if we can cite one of these projects in Crookston, we can provide reliable power for for the future, for critical infrastructure. So we're thinking about, you know, how we're going to get one of those built that will power EMS, fire, police, a 66 unit low income multifamily apartment building, public housing building, and also a 49 bed hospital that's nearby. One of the critical things for rural communities is keeping their health care resources. So we have these three kind of huge pots of projects that we're working towards accomplishing in the next couple of years.

Larry Kraft: [00:24:06] So with this, you talked about reliability and sustainability. Would this the idea here is that this, uh, what is it, 4.85MW project would provide energy as well as storage so it could be providing power during critical services, during outages kind of thing.

John Vaughn: [00:24:24] Yes and yes.

Larry Kraft: [00:24:25] Okay. Great. And who is the utility there? Are you running into any barriers? I mean, you often hear about is their capacity. And, you know, connecting large amounts of renewables at different places. Sometimes there can be barriers. What are you seeing? What are you running into?

Tim Menard: [00:24:40] Yeah. Well, Otter Tail.

Tim Menard: [00:24:41] Power has been from from fairly early on been a part of empower Crookston is a regular to our weekly meetings. So they've been in the loop the entire way. Now we haven't got into all the details because we're still looking at siting right now and where that would be most appropriate. There's a lot of other steps that come first, but Otter Tail Power has been an excellent partner, and I would assume they would be going forward as well.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:25:06] Yeah, they've been very interactive with us and we've been utilizing their, you know, their rebates as well. And they've been very positive. They have their own initiatives or clean initiatives and they have, you know, their boxes. They need to check too. And they're pretty committed to it. And they're really good guys to work with.

Larry Kraft: [00:25:20] So and, uh, so I think it could be pretty compelling if you have renewable energy there and people can point to, hey, we're getting our energy from that thing, right? Or it's powering this part of our community. Is that part of the thought process here?

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:25:36] Yeah, we're kind of still working through those details. That is the thought process. Here's what we're doing. We're preparing for our future. We're preparing for sustainability, for safety issues obviously. So that absolutely is part of the narrative is what is this doing for the community? And back to Tim's point, as we can drive down the power costs into our community, then we can help our people to, you know, raise the water level of their own finances and get back on track with their own lives.

Larry Kraft: [00:26:01] So I always find these kind of things really cool and exciting because, you know, in Minnesota, historically, our energy has come from out of the state. So these kind of projects are things where all the investment that happens, our investment that would have happened by pulling in fuels from out of state. So I love this idea of being able to add lower cost, add resiliency. And then you can see, hey, here's, you know, we're investing in our community. That's where our hospital gets its electricity from.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:26:31] You know, as John was talking about geothermal and looking at the hybrid with the solar and the wind. Then looking at other solar projects that we could do for some of our public housing, that Ottertail has initiatives out there. There's just a lot of things that we can do, and I think we can just make it to be a normal, common sense thing to do, you know, to have those hybrid options and to just keep moving that forward. And as we look at we've got about, I think, 80 acres left on our industrial park right now, once we get the railroad spur in and thinking about what can we do out there to promote clean energy, what can we do out there to create, like I always tell, did I tell Chad over? Did I say, let's create something so cool and so clean in the energy thing that people will come to see what we did to make it work? You know, so it's kind of fun.

Tim Menard: [00:27:13] I think also, if we can remind the community that we used to be totally sustained by our own power company here. We never had to buy power from somewhere else because we had hydroelectric dams here. And, you know, the early days of Crookston, I remember fishing at the old dam, but but yeah, we used to sell our energy to other places. So I think reminding our constituents that, hey, we used to be sustainable. We used to we used to own our own energy and sell it off. So what is so radically different about this new technology approach to creating energy for our community?

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:28:04] You know, we were the undersecretary of the USDA, came and visited Northstar Line about two weeks ago, and there was a pretty good group of us there with him and the crew that was there. And one of the things that I was really thinking about is how many of our farmers are our farmers are the inventors in our region, like, you know, Brian Bull that has Northstar Line. He's a large farmer around here and has a trucking thing, but he invented this because he wanted to keep things out of the landfill and keep his kids there. And then we have other farmers that have come up with a different hydrogen fuels. And there's so many inventors in our in our area that the undersecretary, he said. So this is called farmer nearing, right. Like engineering and farming. You know, he kind of coined his own phrase during the meeting. Just a great and but you see it over and over and over. So for me from economic development is grabbing all these great inventions and helping them get the right grants and get connected. I mean, they obviously do a great job themselves, but making sure that we as a city are doing what we can to support these green energy initiatives coming from our ag community.

Abby Finis: [00:29:06] I love that, I love that. Yeah, empower does just keep popping up as the theme here, right? Whether it's, you know, harnessing your power or coming up with innovative solutions to other problems. I want to dig a little bit more into the network geothermal system. I think that's when I first heard what was going on in Crookston, that that's a project that I was hearing about. Shannon, if you could tell us a little bit about what's going on there and give us maybe a little bit of a glimpse into what the current kind of heating system is like up in Crookston?

Shannon Stassen: [00:29:37] Sure.

Shannon Stassen: [00:29:37] Well, it's very aspirational at this point. Of course, the geothermal vision. And when I would be about ten years ago when I started with the city of Crookston, there was some documents that were probably five years old at that time that I pulled out of the desk, that the previous person had left there and started reading about some work that had been done, looking at our industrial park and all the waste heat and what could be done there to, you know, to capture that and use that. And we have an aluminum foundry that creates a tremendous amount of heat, and they have to take great measures to get it out of there. In the summer especially, it's very hot. But then all of the other industries in town as well create a tremendous amount of waste heat. So the the idea in the brief notes that I read was to, you know, to pump that in the ground and store that as geothermal heat and then be able to access that, that stored heat in the colder months, which we have plenty of those in our neck of the woods. So that's where that started. Now. Since then, the University of Minnesota Crookston, along with Otter Tail Power, has done a geothermal feasibility study on their own that wouldn't be connected to the industrial park.

Shannon Stassen: [00:30:42] Of course, it's they're not in close proximity, but but looking at a system to convert from coal, which they're committed to moving away from as quickly as they can to geothermal. So that feasibility study has been completed. Otter Tail Power funded that and that's ready to go. And which when we started talking with John and bringing up this history of geothermal being talked about in the city, we thought, well, let's get aggressive with this. There's environmental justice, 40 tracks. That would be very, I think, fundable, right? I mean, there's a great case to be made for those areas of our community to be first and look at perhaps a geothermal system that service them. And it just so happens they're in pretty close proximity to that industrial park and all that waste heat. So there might be some great synergies there, both financially for those industries of course, and to reduce heating costs for our most vulnerable residents. So that's the snapshot of it. And we we did, you know, submit and ask for that. We weren't successful on the first go around, but we're pretty committed to keeping the pressure on that.

Abby Finis: [00:31:51] Um, I guess I didn't quite realize, you know, you're sort of looking at a mix or a few different sources for getting the heat, whether it's exchange with the Earth where there isn't a heat source or tapping into some of the industrial uses in the waste heat there. Have you done like a community map of what exists and what might be applied to different areas of the community?

Shannon Stassen: [00:32:18] I think some of that advanced work is exactly what we need to do to be successful on any grant application. So, you know, I'm not aware of any of that detail mapping right now. John could speak to that a lot more.

John Vaughn: [00:32:30] The big barrier to figuring out a geothermal system for basically Crookston proper is completing a feasibility study, and that's about 100,000 to 150,000. So that became our barrier last fall. So fresh energy. We went into the legislature, worked with leadership and were able to help get passed a geothermal pre-development 1.5 million geothermal pre-development fund that small and medium sized cities like Crookston can access. Because, you know, for, you know, folks that have done development, whether it's, you know, renewable development or housing development, often getting the pre-development funds to bring your project to a point where it's fundable or financeable is almost more difficult than getting the millions of dollars once you get it financed. And so we encountered that challenge, and we're hopefully we're going to be moving past that pretty, pretty quick and have a current full feasibility study in place.

Abby Finis: [00:33:38] Yeah, I think that would be super beneficial. And for a lot of rural communities that are like yours, that have, you know, everybody has geothermal, right? We all have, uh, ground heat to, to exchange there. But a lot of smaller communities also have that, that waste heat. What is the current kind of primary fuel for heating homes and businesses?

Shannon Stassen: [00:33:58] I'd say natural gas is okay.

Abby Finis: [00:34:00] It's natural gas.

Shannon Stassen: [00:34:01] Natural gas is the majority of our. There's getting to be more air source heat pump installations throughout the community. And that's part of our goal as well, is to make sure that that technology is highlighted and shared. But I'd say natural gas is by far the leading. There was still some fuel oil even, and that's probably ten years ago, but there was still some.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:34:24] It's like 3% of our city right now.

Shannon Stassen: [00:34:26] Older neighborhoods that were still fuel oil with the big tank in the basement that leaks. It's really, really terrible, terrible stuff.

Abby Finis: [00:34:34] Yikes.

John Vaughn: [00:34:34] Last time I was up there, Dan and Carrie, Tim, I was driving around and I listened to Am radio a lot, and there were advertisements for air source heat pumps on Am radio, which I thought, yay!

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:34:48] So we're really.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:34:49] Staying on top of the home and the heater grants coming out. You know, the rebates that are coming out and also the electric panel we've been in since the ground zero. You know, with that being part of the discussion groups online. And we've got a staff that came to me, Taylor. And her background is clean energy sustainability. She was an AmeriCorps person who worked for Shannon for a year. And then when her tenure came up, her contract was up that I hired into my department just to kind of keep the, the, the knowledge that she has intact in our locally here in the in the building where we're all working together on these projects. And I think that we'll see a lot of our people will definitely go for the mini splits and they'll be able to get their appliances. And so that's part of our survey. And just being out with our community, like they'll be boots on the ground next week with doing the survey John and the basketball team and and those guys. But staying in front of our community and really getting the word out by mouth to mouth. Because not everybody here is from, you know, there's so many different sources of information anymore that we're finding that it's back to relationships, talking to your communities, meeting your neighbors, eating a hot dog together, having some coffee. We've been known to have a beer. So, you know, up in northwest Minnesota.

Abby Finis: [00:36:01] No, I love, I love I've just been noting kind of that small communities lend themselves to that kind of natural or organic engagement that can happen through community events and just talking. And we had an episode a while back in Maine on Heat pumps and a lot of the heat pump success that they've been having. There is word of mouth. And so I think that's really awesome and fun to see in those communities. I'm curious about, I think you've been touching a little bit on the different pathways for funding or finding financing for these different projects. And I know, John, that you've been really focused on thinking through how do we stack all of these and deliver? Can you talk a little bit about how you're navigating that and how it fits into these different components?

John Vaughn: [00:36:49] That is the big challenge, the building, the local capacity to do the fundraising. And we do not have a good record at this point. I think we're zero for four on federal and state grants, but we're undeterred. We know what we want. It's just a matter. We've been kind of, you know, throwing together a group from different, you know, because nobody has like, you know, dedicated staff positions that can work on Empower Crookston. And we early on did an estimate that, you know, we want to have Empower Crookston, but also grow it into kind of a regional energy partnership that it would require about seven FTEs, of which we have not been able to generate that yet, but we've only been around for less than a year. So we're anticipating that that grant and financing opportunities will escalate the coming next few years between the state and federal government and the new Minnesota Climate Innovation Finance Authority. And so we're going to be ready when it is. But the fund raising capacity, I think, is the biggest challenge. I don't know, would you agree with that, Shannon? Karie.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:38:04] Absolutely.

Shannon Stassen: [00:38:05] Yeah, I would and it's not insurmountable. But it's it's certainly a challenge. And you hit on it. Hit it on the head. All of us have our main gigs right. And then we're doing this because it's really important and we're happy to contribute that time. But there's there's other, you know, urgent things that come up that that eat up our time. So somebody's having more folks that are dedicated specifically to this would really accelerate some of these things. I think that's every community, right? Every small town. The clerk, administrator, whomever EDA person is wearing multiple hats, they're not doing just one job. And so they're used to it. That's the good side. Good point of it. They're used to taking on one more thing, but ultimately these things need attention on a regular basis. And we're working. We have good capacity because we have a good team, and people are willing to roll up their sleeves and do the work. At this point.

Larry Kraft: [00:39:02] I tell you, I'm feeling two hats of mine being prompted in this conversation. Certainly the podcast host co-host, but also the state legislator in Minnesota wanting to know how we can help with this. So we'll have a follow up on that. But I want to turn to this maybe related campaign. But there's something called the I Love Crookston campaign. And just understand how that intersects with Empower Crookston and these kind of decarbonization, renewable energy efforts.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:39:34] Well, it's kind of funny. We realized a lot of the people that wanted to empower Crookston also love Crookston. So it started with the group of we had some meetings for the I Love Crookston. We had a big open house and stuff, but that came out of the Empower Crookston group. We had been meeting and through meeting we began to realize that we had a really strong collaboration. I've done a lot of work in Northwest Minnesota as well, and each one of these folks that were working regionally now I'm working for Crookston, and we were looking at Crookston, and we began to realize that Crookston has people love this community, and they've had a decade of tumultuous waters and Covid and all the things that everybody's been through. And to Tim's point to recapture Crookston. And we even have. I can't show you my koozie right now, but we did a whole. We had some lady come up with some ideas for Crookston for kind of a sticker or a logo or whatever. She came up with love Crookston. And it's a big heart thing and all the kids voted on it. We had 2000 people at our nite to unite. They love. They want to say we love Crookston, so we have Koozies going. But it came out of a couple of years ago they started an event called I Love Crookston. Shannon. You can probably share the history of it and then also the emergency. Yeah yeah yeah.

Shannon Stassen: [00:40:44] So yeah, Empower Crookston definitely came first. And then around that time the University of Minnesota, which I work for, received state funding to work with small communities. And they were looking for a a pilot community and Empowering Small Minnesota Communities group decided to choose Crookston. And I said, well, that's interesting. We already named ourselves empower. But so we were, you know, that got rolled into us. We've been working with the Minnesota Design Center since early last winter, and they've provided support for the Empower Crookston piece. And the energy piece is what they always call it, but also pretty comprehensive and deep reaching community engagement. We've had multiple events. We had a kickoff event with over 100 people, but since then we've formed the Jolt and Drive coffee meetings. Every Thursday at 8 a.m. we meet at the local youth center. We also every Monday we meet as an empowered group and we have kind of two sets, two parts of the agenda. We talk about our energy piece, and then we get into the kind of love Crookston part, which is really turned into all about connection, connection of people, connection of with the past, connection with our vision for the future, connection physically through trails and the river and organizations. Our major institutions like the University of Minnesota, Crookston, like the school district, like the hospital, all of those major institutions. What do we all have in common? We want Crookston to be the very best it can be. And so through those meetings, we have Wednesday on the water events, we've had other types of engagement.

Shannon Stassen: [00:42:28] We did had a booth at the, uh, night to night event. We're going to have a meet the candidates event here soon. So just a lot of things that have brought people together from all throughout the community that want to work on energy efficiency. They want to work on trails in the river. They want to work on accessibility for those that, um, you know, have accessibility issues, whether it's because of age or, you know, they're in a wheelchair or what have you, or, um, other challenges like that, all of those things get discussed on a regular basis. And now we have a group that's the champion for those type of things and including the downtown. So you name it, we've probably or we definitely have talked about it and come up with some strategies. And, you know, part of it is to make sure our council members know this is a priority. This is important. We have it's not just one person saying, hey, we think it'd be really cool if no, we have a whole group of people that say, we really need this. This is important. And that's how you that's how you change hearts and hearts and minds. That's how you get votes. That's how you come up with matching funds for for big grants. Is that collaboration and connection. And so that's how Love Crookston has kind of become. The tagline for Empower Crookston. Empower Crookston is the Big Umbrella. Love Crookston is kind of our motto. Um, and then all the things we do underneath for activities fall under that.

Larry Kraft: [00:43:52] I think it's great. Really fascinating how that those two have woven together. Sorry. Did I interrupt you?

Tim Menard: [00:43:57] Well, I just have an anecdote that I think is sort of one of the fruits of all of the labors of these engagement groups that have Just sort of organically come together. We have a committed group of champions who are privately fundraising for a beautiful, all accessible playground for our children. And I mean another idea whose time has come and the people are stepping up and they're opening their pockets to make some of these visions come true. Now, some of the visions that we have are going to need deeper pockets. Hint, hint, Mr. Legislator. But that's another conversation. But, uh, but we're open to to taking money from everybody.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:44:59] We have no.

Speaker7: [00:44:59] Shame. No shame.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:45:03] It's like tending bar back in college. You don't care who's tipping you. You'll take their money.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:45:07] Yeah, yeah.

Tim Menard: [00:45:08] We had. Another example is we had a beautiful evening, cultural evening where we celebrated the Latino community Fiesta de la Crookston. We had the downtown packed with people. We had food trucks, we had events for children, we had dancing, we had live music. We even had a special licence to serve adult beverages. Woo hoo!

Speaker7: [00:45:35] Yeah, they ran out of food.

Shannon Stassen: [00:45:37] The vendors. It was so many hundreds of people.

Tim Menard: [00:45:40] That they ran.

Shannon Stassen: [00:45:40] Yeah, yeah, it was incredible.

Tim Menard: [00:45:42] Yeah. So we are really bringing more people from all walks of life in our community together in various ways to celebrate this whole notion of being an integral, loving, vibrant community.

Larry Kraft: [00:46:01] That's great.

Larry Kraft: [00:46:02] Well, to close, do you all have some advice for other communities like Crookston, around Minnesota and around the country that might be listening.

Shannon Stassen: [00:46:14] I'll just make my pitch for collaboration and for relationships. Carrie started with that. It is about relationships. We've known each other and John, that trust and knowing that you've got folks beside you that are going to be in it for the long haul, and every community has those folks. Right. So that's the strength we all have. And you're not always going to be 100% on the same page. And that's totally okay. We all have our pet projects and our things that we think are really a little bit more important than the others, and that's okay. But as long as we're willing to work for each other and with each other, we can go a long ways. And that's my biggest takeaway. Crookston has that going for us. That social capital is really strong in our community. And again, we don't always agree 100% on how it's going to be done. But most of us Let's agree on the things that we'd like to see happen and we're going to get there. We're definitely going to get there.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:47:11] Yeah. And I think my recommendation is remember your community champions. Who brought you this far? Those folks that have been in the trenches, they probably don't know how to text, but they sure did work to get you to here. And so making sure that you give them a paper documentation because they're not going to text you back if you do. But but really getting those historical people that are still pushing with you and having respect for how far they have come, but yet engaging in the younger generation and connecting the two without offending one or another. You know, it's not. We always in our meetings, we always say it's a and it's not either or. It's and yes, that was fantastic. And we can do this, you know, so so keeping it moving forward and really engaging the younger community, hearing from them, you know, sometimes you just have to do your meetings later because they can't wake up in the morning. But that's fine with Shannon. We have the youth centers there. And one meeting we had, all the youth were there for the event talking about trails, and they had great input, so it was fun to see the generations coming together. And I think that's very unique in our rural areas, is we are generational communities and we all hang out together, you know, and it's just it's just fun to see that.

Tim Menard: [00:48:16] And to cap it off, I would say pay attention to who isn't at the table. There are members of our community that may not be tapped into, you know, the direct line of communication for things. So pay attention to who's not there and extend that invitation one on one. If you know there's somebody who has a gift that the community needs, you know, bring them to the table.

Karie Kirschbaum: [00:48:52] Yeah. And I would add on to that too, with agreeing with Tim, is that as we look, you know, from economic development, as we look at how are we going to grow our workforce and how are we going to establish that? And it comes down I know you hear it all the time in the Senate or in the House, but is building a welcoming community where people come in from different places that they can be established, that they know they can get a home. They're welcome in our schools that we will continue to to reach out to those, your new Americans or your people coming from wherever. And so that's been another subject that we've been really paying attention to, especially in the EDA component of it. How do we help people come in? How do we work with the different visa holders? How do we help them to stay and stay here? You know, once they've been here for a few years, we'll stay in Crookston or working with our international students over at the college and are working with any of our students over there. How do we create a community where they want to stay in, in Crookston? And so that it's been fun to talk about it. It's been fun to see some of the success we have had, but I think we're all looking for more. Great.

Larry Kraft: [00:49:55] Thank you all so much. All right. Abby, what did you think? What were your takeaways?

Abby Finis: [00:50:02] I think the biggest one, and I said it in the interview as well, is just when you get down to the pretty small city level, the neighborhood level, I think there's a lot of advantages in those kinds of communities where people know each other and gathering together, organizing those kinds of things can come a little bit more naturally. And so the more you know your neighbors, you know, other residents in town and kind of get to talking and sharing ideas, seems like a lot of really cool things can happen.

Larry Kraft: [00:50:35] Yeah. It reminds me a bit of the Morris, Minnesota one too, where, you know, the core of what's happening is a bunch of people that know each other and care a lot about the community getting together and talking about where they're going. I especially was impressed how this Empower Crookston has become. I love Crookston and how the the sustainability empowering is tied in with love of town.

Abby Finis: [00:50:58] Mhm.

Abby Finis: [00:50:59] Yeah. And I think you know it's it's a smart approach to sort of think about their long range vision and tie it to all of this work that's happening around residential decarb and, you know, adding more renewables in town, tapping into different sources of geoenergy. So it's pretty cool. And it seems like they're taking a really good, comprehensive approach to that.

Larry Kraft: [00:51:22] Yeah, I like how I think there really is something to when if you're putting renewables in that, you can point to it and say, that's providing power for us or for this in the community. It tends to, you know, a lot of times you hear backlash about some of these big solar farms in in communities where it's not for them. But I really like this where, hey, that's where we get our power.

Abby Finis: [00:51:47] Yeah. And, you know, I think that increasingly, regardless of, you know, your politics or whatever, it's coming to those they called it, the common sense is winning in Crookston. It doesn't matter. Your politics. You start seeing how these things pencil out, that you start seeing how they benefit your own home, how they benefit your community at large. And when common sense wins out, that's a nice thing. And you can you can move forward together. And that also reinforces that community aspect.

Larry Kraft: [00:52:17] Yeah. And yet we have this funding conundrum, don't we, for these kinds of projects.

Abby Finis: [00:52:23] Oh boy do we. Yes we do. I think, uh, you know, probably a lot of folks out there, if you're working for or with a city and have been trying as desperately as folks here have been trying to apply for, um, some of these federal grants, it's it's been a lot of work without a lot of return, you know. And so, at least not in terms of getting grant dollars because everything is, is oversubscribed. You know, CG the Climate pollution Reduction grant was the big one that, folks were really hoping to tap into. There was only about 4.5 billion available in funding and over 33 billion in grant applications. Right. And so that's a huge, huge gap in, you know, the demand for funding for these projects that are poised in a lot of cases to substantially and pretty immediately reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And, you know, the funding that's available to help do that. And so I think that that's sort of the next step is to figure out we have this huge list of projects in Crookston, in Saint Paul, in Lincoln, Nebraska, you know, that are ready to be funded. Where do we find that funding and how do we get it to folks?

Larry Kraft: [00:53:49] Yeah.

Larry Kraft: [00:53:49] And I'll also throw out that it certainly is greenhouse gas emissions. But in probably most every one of these cases, the other benefits are reduced energy costs and healthier environment, healthier air. So I think the challenge is if you look at the net benefits to society, it's positive, probably way positive. But the challenge is this upfront piece to get over the hump.

Abby Finis: [00:54:16] Mhm.

Abby Finis: [00:54:17] Yeah. And there you know I think that there's a number of financing structures that are being developed for these kinds of projects, you know, that are, that are not going to be traditional energy financing projects because they might not have a payback, but they have these huge societal benefits. Right. And so how do we make those long term investments and take advantage of the tax credits, which in some cases need to be tweaked to capture the different sources of thermal energy that are available? And and combine that with what does financing look like and how can we make the financing make sense.

Larry Kraft: [00:54:55] So some good challenges for some maybe enterprising legislators, huh?

Abby Finis: [00:55:00] Yes. Our state and federal legislators cough up that that money. We hope you enjoyed this episode of City Climate Corner. If you like what you're hearing, make sure to subscribe and give us a review if you're able. Become a monthly supporter through Patreon. As always, you can find more information on this topic and resources from each episode's guests on our web page. City Climate corner.com. If you have an idea for the show, send us an email at City Climate Corner at gmail.com or find us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Larry Kraft: [00:55:34] City Climate Corner is produced by Abby Finis and me, Larry Kraft, edited by our content coordinator, Isaiah Eagles.

Abby Finis: [00:55:43] Music by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

Larry Kraft: [00:55:46] Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.

Jo Olson: [00:56:01] On behalf of Fresh Energy. Thank you to the folks at City Climate Corner for letting us repost that episode of their podcast. This has been Fresh Energy's Decarbonize the Clean Energy podcast, and we'll have a new episode for you soon. I'm thinking maybe we'll dive into Fresh Energy's new strategic framework. I think that would be pretty fun. Uh, in the meantime, you can stay up to date on Fresh Energy's work at Fresh Energy. Org or follow us on social media. And now our new closing theme music. Credit to Palm Psalms. Thanks for tuning in.