City Council Meeting Date: December 3, 2019
To: Mayor and City Council
From: Ben Martig, City Administrator
Beth Kallestad, Program Coordinator
Title
Consider motion to approve grant application to the McKnight Foundation to support staff capacity for Climate Action Plan implementation.
Body
Action Requested:
The Northfield City Council is asked to consider a Motion to approve staff submitting a grant application to the McKnight Foundation for $50,000.
Summary Report:
The City of Northfield has been invited to submit an application to the McKnight Foundation's Midwest Climate program to assist in building the City's capacity to carry out our Climate Action Plan. Staff have had several conversations with the Program Officer from McKnight. Based on these conversations, McKnight is not interested in funding projects such as solar panels or electric vehicles. Rather, they are interested in helping us build our staff capacity and achieve one of the items in the Climate Action Plan - SP1.1 - Hire a full-time City staff position to focus on coordination and implementation of the plan.
Staff will be seeking other grants that could fund project activities as we move forward with the Action Plan implementation. For example, a small grant application ($3,000) was submitted in October to the Clean Energy Resource Teams (CERTs) for a solar assessment and we just received notice this week that we were awarded for this grant.
An initial inquiry form (see attached) was submitted on November 1st and the City was notified on November 18th that we are invited to submit a full-proposal which is due on December 4th. The McKnight Foundation has funded Sustainability Coordinator positions in other communities, such as Grand Marais and Rochester, in recent years (see hyperlink to website for more information). This request is for the timeframe of February 2020 - August 2021. We may be invited to apply for continuation of funds but that is not a guarantee.
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