By Rich Larson, News Director
Tomorrow, Carleton College will celebrate a major milestone when the school’s heating plant shuts off the steam powered heating system for the final
time and switches over to geothermal energy.
In 2010, the school laid out a Climate Action Plan that included ambitious emissions mitigation goals. The switch to geothermal marks the final step in that plan.
The school will celebrate the occasion with several events. Every night this week, the school has presented a light show on the heating plant smokestack. The show will be presented through May 28.
At 12:30 on Friday the speaker at the school’s daily convocation will be co-creator and co-host of the How to Save the Planet podcast, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who will speak about the diverse voices of the women who are leading on Climate in America. At 2:15 the school will hold a ceremony for the switchover and a Smokestack show. Also, every hour on the hour, the school will blow the steam whistles around campus.
As the Carleton Campus is closed to visitors due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the convocation and Steam Ceremony will be broadcast live via Zoom. Registration for the events can be found by clicking here.
Carleton College has been served by steam powered energy for 111 years.
Healthfinders expands coverage into Steele County
Earlier this month, Health Finders Collaborative, the organization that provides a wide variety of health care services to marginalized families and those in need in Rice County, announced that it would merge with The Free Clinic of Steele County. Healthfinders Executive Director Charlie Mandile said the merger is an opportunity to build the resources, deepen key partnerships and offer an even wider array of services to what is now a two-county area.
Healthfinders has, as Mandile put it, a deep history with and commitment to Rice County. From their modest beginnings as a free clinic in a church basement, the organization has grown to be a cornerstone of the Rice County health care community. While offering primary care services and medication assistance, they have expanded substantially over the years. Mandile said their dental program has become part of the core of what they do. Their mental health service has been indispensable to countless people during the pandemic. The organization has received praise from Rice County Sheriff Troy Dunn for their work with the Mobile Opiate Support Team, and he has singled out their Opiate Addiction Medicated Assistance Program as a vital piece of the county’s work in fighting opiate addictions.
Mandile said the organization has now sharpened their focus on assisting with the Rice and Steele County vaccination programs. He said while they have been pleasantly surprised by how many of the people they serve want to be vaccinated, he said often times they need quite a bit of help to actually receive the vaccine.
“With everybody, we found barriers. Whether it’s the time of day, transportation, or just systemic barriers of what it’s like to walk in the door of a large major health system for a lot of our patients that are often marginalized. All of those barriers are very much at play, so we still see a large segment of the population that, although they’re interested in getting vaccinated, are still having trouble connecting those dots.”
Mandile said the merger with the Steele County Free Clinic is not finished but is underway. Both boards have approved things. It’s now just a matter of working together to find the best of both organizations. He said he is excited to now be able to serve three communities and two counties with such passion for helping each other.
City strategic plan nears completion
And on Tuesday night the Northfield City Council was presented with a rough draft of the city’s new Strategic Plan that is due to be ratified in the
coming weeks.
The council and city staff have worked with planning consultant Craig Rapp over several work sessions and meetings to develop the new plan. As he presented the draft, he reminded the council that a strategic plan is a guidance document, or a framework. It should not be taken as a work plan, because it is intended to set several different work plans in motion.
The plan identifies six priority areas: Economic Viability, Housing Availability, Quality Facilities, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Service Excellence and Climate Action. Within those priorities, the plan identifies the things the city wants to accomplish and identifies Key Outcome Indicators that will be used to actually measure the progress of each item.
There are twenty-five action initiatives in the plan, and each of those is meant to spawn the action plans needed to accomplish the city’s goals.
Mayor Rhonda Pownell is happy with the way the plan is laid out. Her concerns with earlier strategic plans were a lack of a call to action. The plan was a set of goals, but it did not demand pursuit of those goals. The new strategic plan does.
“All of the initiatives… our city staff will be going back and determining separate action plans for each one of those strategic initiatives. It’s really about implementing and being action oriented.”
The mayor said the plan is also in place for the public to see and will be easily accessed on the city website. It is her hope that this plan will inspire more participation from the public as individuals are able to identify areas that they think are important.
The council is set to ratify the plan at the next regular meeting on June 1.
