The symbolic weight of an all-electric ambulance driving through the streets of St. Paul is not lost on Russ Stark, the city’s Chief Resistance Officer. For municipal leaders with this title, the climate crisis is just that – a crisis – and he has been tasked with serving as St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter’s lead advisor on how to respond and adapt.
Yet cities are constantly making room for great – and expensive – innovations, and not all innovations will deliver the intended benefit for the best price. Stark had the opportunity to see an all-electric ambulance, the first of its kind, in action Thursday when the MacQueen Equipment Group, a private distributor based in St. Paul, held a demonstration at the St. Paul Fire Department training facility. Paul on Energy Park Drive, the second stop of the Demers eFX ambulance on its national tour.
If the capital were to deploy these ambulances, which is still a big “if,” St. Paul could be the first city in the country to do so. Whether Stark will recommend a purchase to the mayor remains to be seen.
“We have no immediate plans to purchase one,” said Stark, who in recent months has focused more on expanding the network of “EV Spot” electric vehicle car-sharing stations to the city’s East Side and beyond.
Just weeks after first taking office in 2018, the mayor tapped Stark, then chairman of the city council, for a new role in his emerging cabinet. The move was both extensive and familiar.
Significant because it can feel existential to navigate the challenge of a rapidly changing climate and the city’s potential response. Well-known in the sense that Stark, the former executive director of St. Paul Smart Trips and former environmental justice coordinator at the Clean Air Council of Philadelphia, has worked in related fields throughout his career.
And familiar because his new office was on the same floor of the city hall as his old one.
“I literally packed my boxes and walked down the hall,” he said.
The Inflation Reduction Act
In April alone, Stark sent requests from the city, or participated in supporting requests through city partners, for approximately $200 million in federal grant funding tied to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s $5 billion Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program. These subsidies have increased dramatically thanks to the federal Inflation Reduction Act, which focuses heavily on the environment. The chances of the city landing them all are slim, Stark acknowledged.
Still, Stark hopes that with federal grants, heat from river effluent — the treated water circulating through the Metropolitan Council’s wastewater treatment plant at Pig’s Eye Lake — can be captured and redirected to the downtown energy system, which heats and cools a building. majority of buildings in downtown St. Paul’s.
“If we could get rid of fossil fuels, you are essentially decarbonizing a large part of the inner city,” says Stark. “We will continue to pursue this even if we don’t get (the federal grant). It will just be on a slower track.”
He is also hopeful that the electric vehicle charging network he built with the city of Minneapolis and HourCar will continue to expand. Five new EV Spot charging stations are planned along the upcoming Gold Line rapid transit corridor, and five more stations will be located on the east side of the city, based in part on community input. With federal help, he would like to see the St. Paul and Minneapolis network reach deeper through the city and into the suburbs.
Also on the horizon are geothermal heating and cooling projects at the future North End Community Center, the Como Park Zoo and in a planned new district energy system in the Heights, the future housing and business development planned on the former Hillcrest Country Club site. .
Mitigation, resilience
Stark sees his role as advancing the city’s climate and sustainability goals along two key paths. The first is to promote mitigation, such as reducing existing greenhouse gas emissions in the city, and the second is to promote resilience, or “How do we adapt to the ways in which the climate is already changing ?”
To support these goals, a staff of about 20 employees from various city departments meets monthly as the “Resilient St. Paul” team, exploring how to align city practices with the spirit of the city’s Climate Action Plan, which adopted by the city. city council in December 2019.
The plan notes that fossil fuel energy sources are the main sources of carbon emissions in cities.
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“We know that the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions in St. Paul come from two sectors: the energy we use in buildings and the energy we use in transportation,” Stark said.
To that end, the new North End Community Center could add solar panels on the roof in addition to geothermal heating. If that happens, the project would qualify as carbon-free or nearly carbon-free, in the sense that carbon offsets would likely exceed carbon production. The future Fire Station 7 on the city’s east side has also been approved for geothermal heating and cooling and rooftop solar.
Stark also serves as the mayor’s eyes and ears on major transportation projects planned by Ramsey County, the Metropolitan Council and other partners, such as the future Riverview Corridor from downtown St. Paul to the Mall of America in Bloomington, the future Purple Line from downtown St. Paul to White Bear Lake, and the state’s Rethinking I-94 initiative.
Geothermal rebates – and critics
Stark’s role has not been without critics.
“Can’t the mayor and city council do that work?” said Jason George, business manager of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 49, which represents heavy construction equipment operators in St. Paul Public Works, St. Paul Regional Water Services and private industry in Minnesota and the Dakotas.
“Can’t you just convert the city fleet to fully electric?” George said. “Geothermal (heating) is great – we’ve had geothermal at our training center in Hinckley for 15 years – but do we really need a city sustainability officer to do that?”
Stark points out that it often takes years of policy work, partnerships and advocacy to make complex projects like the EV Spot Network a reality, let alone expand them beyond city limits, which will be key to their appeal users.
Across the river, the city of Minneapolis has had a Chief Resilience Officer for several years, but has shifted gears and divided the work among twelve new full-time employees this year as part of the city’s Climate Legacy Initiative. The employees are concerned with climate and sustainability from five city services, ranging from Public Health to Public Works.
‘You cannot renovate all buildings at once’
It’s not just new buildings and transportation options that Stark has his sights on. A federal grant awarded about a year ago will support geothermal installations at the Como Zoo in the primate and polar bear buildings. He would like to secure federal funding for even more geothermal projects there.
“That campus in Como is on an old steam boiler system that serves the majority of the buildings,” Stark said. “It’s quite energy inefficient. It’s a big system. You can’t renovate all the buildings at once.”
Government buildings do not pay property taxes, which has historically made them ineligible for environmental benefits based on federal tax credits. The Inflation Reduction Act, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022, provides local governments with a similar incentive through rebate checks from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, allowing municipalities to recoup 30% of the cost of a geothermal plant.
“We expect to get that at Como and Fire Station 7,” Stark explained. “But if it’s done on a former brownfield, which the Heights is, you increase that to 40%. If you use American-made materials for the wells and heat pumps, that increases to 50%. So we expect that these tax credits could pay for half of the geothermal energy (on the Heights).”
Clean energy transition
The state’s new “Green Bank” – the Minnesota Climate Innovation Finance Authority – has provided a loan to bridge the time from when the equipment must be purchased to the time the nonprofit company is expected to receive its rebate check, which could be three or four. year.
“One of the reasons it’s been difficult to get these district-wide systems in place is that someone has to build out the system, and then it takes a while for your utility customers to pay,” Stark said.
Increasingly, conversations in his circles are about how we can best ensure that the city’s low-income residents and communities of color benefit from environmentally conscious innovations that sometimes favor those who can best pay. For example, electric cars are still on average more expensive to purchase than petrol cars, although the two have come closer to parity in recent years.
“We’re really thinking a lot about how, as we make this transition to clean energy, the benefits of that transition really lead to good job opportunities and lower energy bills for our lowest-income residents,” Stark said.
Along those lines, the city is working with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency on a statewide program aimed at what Stark called “equitable residential decarbonization,” or helping everyday residents reduce fossil fuel consumption in their homes. For example, tax credits and rebates can bring improved home electric panels and chargers for electric vehicles within reach of a larger share of the population.
All in all, it is an exciting time in his field.
“By far, there are more opportunities to do things now than ever before,” Stark said.
