By RT Rybak
Mayor the City of Minneapolis

Small businesses are — when you add them all together — Minneapolis’ largest employer. They’re not only generating more jobs than other parts of the economy, they’re also building wealth and long-term prosperity for families and communities in our city, especially along our vibrant commercial corridors. Last week, I was excited to help highlight some of what we’re doing in Minneapolis to support homegrown small business. 

On Thursday, I joined Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner at a forum about how we’re moving our region to the forefront of the emerging clean-energy economy. For the last three years, Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and I have been working in close partnership with the Blue Green Alliance — a national organization based in Minneapolis that brings together environmental advocates and labor unions — to build capacity and demand for good, family-supporting jobs in green manufacturing.

Below are some of the results of our work in Minneapolis that I shared with Secretary Geithner: 

We’re installing a solar array — the largest in the Upper Midwest — on the Minneapolis Convention Center, and a local firm called Best Power will use local, union electrical workers to do the work. So we’re supporting a local business, employing local workers with good wages and benefits, reducing emissions on the Convention Center, expanding our region’s capacity to compete in the clean-energy economy and building prosperity right here in Minneapolis. 

We’re helping other small, emerging businesses locate and grow in Minneapolis, such as ReGo, a start-up that converts gas vehicles to electric — and we’re exploring having them convert some of the City’s fleet of cars.
We’re training the workforce of the future. Minneapolis and Saint Paul recently received a federal grant called “Pathways out of Poverty” that will allow us to train unemployed, disadvantaged and previously hard-to-employ workers in green manufacturing and clean-energy jobs — which will help them get out of poverty, build wealth for their families and enter the middle class.
At that event, I also told Secretary Geithner how urgent it is for the federal government to help us take this work to the next level by funding a $37-million grant that Minneapolis and Saint Paul have applied for to reduce energy consumption in 50% of all buildings in both cities over the next 10 years. That money will help us create 1,300 clean-energy jobs, cut 225,000 metric tons of carbon-dioxide emissions in just the first three years, and grow our local green-economy capacity even more. 

Because green jobs are growing six times faster than jobs in the economy overall, I’m very excited about the potential of the work that we’re doing to promote greater economic and our environmental sustainability in Minneapolis.
And on Wednesday last week, I was part of a truly inspirational event, held at the new home of the African Development Center in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. Over 60 people came together to celebrate the success of the City's Great Streets program, which provides a variety of tools — including gap financing, marketing and business tools, façade improvements and low-interest loans — to small businesses, many of them owned by new Americans or entrepreneurs of color, on Minneapolis’ main commercial corridors. 

Through the Great Streets program, we have:
Made over $1.5 million in commercial real-estate-development loans for transformative redevelopment projects — projects which will be worth $85 million when complete.
Helped create almost 400 new, permanent jobs, retain 125 existing jobs and create tens of thousands of construction hours.
Provided technical or marketing assistance for 270 small businesses.
Helped 85 small businesses with façade-improvement grants — which have leveraged over three times more in private investment.
Great Streets has helped make possible or enhanced projects ranging from the Seward Coop and Welna Hardware on Franklin, the Citizen Café on Chicago, Our Kitchen on Bryant and 1200 West Broadway, all of which are adding to the vitality of the commercial corridors in their neighborhoods.
At this fiscally challenging time, I’m particularly grateful to the City Council for their foresightedness in keeping the funding for the critically important Great Streets program intact. It’s a sound investment that’s already paying off, and it will continue to create broad-based prosperity for working and middle-class families in Minneapolis well into the future. 

Some will say that an economic crisis is no time to think big, no time to plan for the future — but in Minneapolis we believe the opposite. We’ve seized the opportunity to build long-term prosperity by supporting the engines of job creation that are small businesses, and in the process we’re making our city a city of opportunity for everyone.

Sincerely,
Mayor R.T. Rybak, Minneapolis