| Metro Organizer January 20, 2010 |
Event I HIRE Minnesota Legislative Preview 6 - 6:30 pm Registration and dinner Join the Alliance at HIRE Minnesota's upcoming legislative preview as we prepare for what promises to be an exciting spring. You'll learn about HIRE Minnesota's 2010 legislative and campaign season strategies, and how you can get involved and speak up to support better outcomes for low-income communities and communities of color. Event I Governor Candidate Forum on Land Use, Transportation and Environment 5:30 pm: Music, registration and voting on candidate questions It's now 2010, and in less than a year Minnesota will elect a new governor! This January, the Alliance for Metropolitan Stability and partner organizations will host the first-ever candidate forum on transportation, land use and the environment. We want to make sure that whoever is elected as Minnesota's new governor knows how important these issues are for the health and well being of our state. All major party candidates have been invited, and six are confirmed so far. With your help, we can demonstrate to these candidates that Minnesota voters care about transportation, land use and environmental issues. Please join us! Register online now so we know to expect you. Event I Organizer Roundtable: Leadership Development for Sustainable Organizing Noon - 1:30 pm At the heart of organizing is developing leadership that can guide and influence a community or organization toward accomplishing its goals. Enhancing current leadership capacity and ensuring a pipeline of future leaders is crucial to ensuring long-term organizational success. Organizer Roundtables are free but registration is required. Light snacks will be provided. Feel free to bring your lunch! Resource I TransportationStimulus in Minnesota: Increasing Equity or Exacerbating Disparities? When passed in February 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was a beacon of hope for many low-income communities and communities of color. An important guiding principle for ARRA states that funds should be used to assist those most impacted by the recession. Communities of color, which have historically borne the greatest unemployment burden, saw the stimulus bill as an opportunity to challenge the status quo in how public investments are allocated to communities around our nation. So how have we done so far? With nearly a year of implementation behind us, people are raising questions about how much of the stimulus funding actually reached communities of color. There has been a particular interest in how stimulus funds were spent on infrastructure projects – rebuilding our nation’s roads, bridges and transit systems. This is because a significant portion of the stimulus funding went to those projects, but also because infrastructure projects are relatively high paying and accessible to low-income people and people of color. In this paper released by the Alliance this week (PDF), we examine how stimulus funds were spent on transportation infrastructure investments in Minnesota. Did people of color receive their fair share of transportation stimulus funding? Or did our state fall short in meeting the recovery act’s goal to benefit the people most impacted by the recession? Resource I Evaluating Our Transportation Future: How Federal Spending Influences Local Transportation Planning and What Communities Can Do About It Right now is a critical moment for local communities to understand how federal transit project evaluation criteria affect decisions that will happen right in our own backyards. The Federal Transit Administration recently announced that it will now take livability criteria into consideration when evaluating projects for federal funding. They will also “initiate a separate rulemaking process, inviting public comment on ways to appropriately measure all the benefits that result from such (transit) investments.” Furthermore, by 2011, Congress is expected to pass the next six-year federal surface transportation bill to guide our nation’s transportation spending. This bill will have tremendous implications for how new transitways and roads are designed and constructed in the Twin Cities and around the country. With so many communities in Minnesota affected by these decisions, it is critical for people to understand our existing system and speak up for changes that will provide more equitable transportation spending in years to come. Read more in this paper released this week (PDF) by the Alliance for Metropolitan Stability. Article I Big News for Central Corridor LRT A lot has happened in the past two weeks on the Central Corridor. First, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) announced that a problematic rule called the cost-effectiveness index (CEI) would be eliminated as a pass-fail measure in evaluating federal matching funding for transit projects, in favor of a more balanced approach that takes community livability into consideration. This is great news, as the change may allow for the full build-out of three community-desired Central Corridor stops at Hamline, Western and Victoria. This prompted a number of responses:
Meanwhile, a coalition of community groups filed a law suit alleging that government planners have failed to fully address the impact of the Central Corridor on businesses and residents in the Rondo neighborhood. And small business owners along the line have been fighting a city plan to raise taxes before the line is operational. Stay tuned to find out what happens next! Job Opportunity I Environment Program Director - McKnight Foundation The goal of the McKnight Foundation's Environment Program is to restore the water quality and resilience of the Mississippi River, and to mitigate global climate change by supporting policies and practices that promote low-carbon prosperity. Like the Metro Organizer? Donate to the Alliance. Get this from a friend? Subscribe to the Metro Organizer. Alliance for Metropolitan Stability I 2525 Franklin Ave E, Suite 200 I Minneapolis, MN 55406 I 612-332-4471 | |
