April 2022 Community Meeting

Audubon Community Meeting

Hybrid In-person (Audubon Park Rec Center) and Zoom Meeting

4-4-2022

Agenda

Main Topic: Emergency Preparedness and Community Resilience

Rec Center Preparedness, Elise Mohn, Interim Supervisor, Audubon Par Recreation Center

Audubon Neighborhood Crime Update and Emergency Preparedness, Abdirashid Ali, MPD Crime Prevention Specialist

Community Resilience, Elliott Payne, Minneapolis City Council Member

Audubon Spring Festival Update, Deborah Brister, ANA Executive Director

Audubon Farmers Market Update, Michelle Spangler, Market Manager

29th AVenue Task Force Update, Blake Hampton, Task Force Chair

Audubon Grant and Loan Programs, Deborah Brister

Anne Bechtel

Welcome to in-person guests and Zoom participants, introduced Elise Mohn, Interim Audubon Park Rec Center Director.

Elise Mohn

Described Emergency Preparedness at the Rec Center and upcoming events

Abdirashid Ali

Discussed role as a police department to respond to any emergency within our precinct, but to also facilitate that information and that's where I would come in between form the block club leaders of not only just out of band but any of the surrounding neighborhoods.

crime update for Audubon. Within the last 28 days we had approximately nine motor vehicle parts stolen, which usually means catalytic converters and for a specific neighborhood for us to have a catalytic converter. Catalytic Converter stolen all the way up to nine is quite a bit. It's terrifying. It's frustrating, it's expensive. And I know that a lot of people are frustrated with this and as a matter of fact, so are we. Because this date, there is no system that prevents, you know, these companies that take in these catalytic converters, Metro metals, and several others within the Twin Cities. I'll pretend to be the bad guy I can today I can steal a catalytic converter from any one of the cars that are popular and without any questions being asked of me. Sell it to Metro metals for 50 to $75. And no questions asked. Okay. And we looked at this, this is something that has to happen legislatively, where the rules have to be changed a little bit where at least in order to slow down this it's an epidemic at this point. I mean, it's everywhere. In the city to have something in place that makes it uncomfortable for these guys to steal a catalytic converter that's worth $3,500 and sell it back for 75. It's just it's just not feasible for it to continue this way in order for us to combat this with the residents in our city. We've We've encouraged people to buy devices that protect their catalytic converters and typedef devices that lock the catalytic converter into place. There are also alarms just a little bit cheaper that you can put in that is very sensitive to that buzzing soft sound or any movement underneath the car and it will go off and usually really loud but having 20 decibels if you don't want to go through that hassle and I know some people don't don't want that if you do have a garage, we always encourage people to park their car inside the garage. If you have that capability some people might not. But the vehicles that we see more frequently are your Japanese vehicles. Some of the newer models the Honda Accords, the Toyota Priuses the Camrys, especially the hybrids, the Honda Elements, but now they're coming for anything that they can get their hands on and this is very, very quick. It's usually under two minutes. Most of the time it's later in the evening, early morning hours where people are sleeping. And unfortunately most people don't hear it and before they do, it's too late. And this is this is something that you know if we if you asked me to three years ago we had nine teleconverters in northeast just in northeast forget autobahn. We would be freaked out as a preset but right now it's just so common, unfortunately. And it's citywide that this is something that we really need to tackle. And I hope we do soon because because I get a lot of calls a lot of emails from constituents that are very frustrated with with with what's going on. I mean, this could be I guess, good news. We only had two burglaries as opposed to what we see sometimes which, you know, 567 as we get closer to these warmer months, and those two burglaries happened on the 26 2700 block of McKinley Street Northeast and the 30 100 block of Central Avenue Northeast. The catalytic converters are kind of all over the place. There's a dramatic change in how catalytic converters are sold. I would encourage everybody to look out for each other. If you hear any sound of people cutting, using a saw to cut underneath the car, immediately call 911 and let us know. Still reporting even if you have a catalytic converter, cut from your car or stolen from your car, report it because we can look at it on a map. And in where we see on that map we can designate extra patrols for that area in the hopes of catching these guys. And then lastly, some of them were violent crime. We had two robberies a person one with I believe a weapon and then one where they just came up to a person and implied that they had a weapon, installed some some items. And then we had one vehicle thefts where a person is stolen that wouldn't have unfortunately had the keys inside when the vehicle was stolen. So with that, I'll open it to the floor if anyone has any questions and we'll go from there.

But the big picture is I personally believe that this will not stop until we change the mechanisms of how these catalytic converters are resold on the market.

Elliott Payne

So we're talking emergency preparedness and resilience and so I'm gonna be a little bit more maybe philosophical, kind of watch spectrum of philosophical and practical. So Rashid's spoke very practically about watching your surroundings when it comes to you know, when you get in your car, don't have headphones on these are some very practical things you can do. One of the things that I actually worked on before running for council was the city's resilience strategy. If you didn't know we have a chief resilience officer and I worked very closely with them. And that was a very odd experience because we were having these very kind of philosophical theoretical conversations about resilience, preparedness, and then a pandemic happened and then an uprising happened and all of that theory all of a sudden came to practice. And we were left as a city and each one of us as just community members, kind of figuring it out on the fly, right? And so a part of emergency preparedness is having a plan before you are in the moment of crisis. And so even this conversation we're having right now is the first step of American emergency preparedness is having a conversation about it. There are resources like FEMA, which I'm not going to be able to recite off the top of my head all of the kinds of very practical and supplies you should have on hand for emergency preparedness but they have really clear guidance on you know, how many days worth of water you should maybe have in storage, how many days of perishable food you should have in storage. I mean, even right now, today, there is you know, I think the State Department is talking about the risk of Russia doing some sort of cyber attack that may take our thinking in America. And you know, that might be a 48 hour window of chaos before the IT experts figure it out. But that might be, you know, disruptive enough to make it so that the supply chain is not restocking grocery shelves for a week. Right. So, you know, there's some very clear practical things you can do for emergency preparedness and there are resources like FEMA that can give you like a really great step by step guide on what you should have in your kind of practical emergency preparedness package. But on the philosophical end of this or theoretical end of this, a lot of this conversation is usually talked about in terms of shocks and stresses. So we all experienced a shock I don't think I even need to describe that. The murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprising was this, you know, very outlier once in a lifetime event that you can almost never imagine and prepare for. That is a very specific moment in time. Whereas stresses are these things like climate change, increasing risk of wildfire, increasing risk of, you know, supply chain disruptions, if, you know, depending on how Ukraine unfolds and just COVID Since the beginning has had these very strange impacts on the supply chain. Remember the great toilet paper shortage of 2020.

So you can think of emergency preparedness in those kinds of buckets of shocks and stresses. And so I think, you know, for shocks, it's kind of like that's the thing where you can't really anticipate it. Maybe just in case have some non perishable food on hand, maybe have a go bag with some, you know, first aid kit and other kind of lightweight things that if you have to quickly evacuate, you could do that. But for the stresses, one of the biggest things that you can do is participate in your neighborhood association. Sign up to be a blog captain. You know, we actually on council just had a after action review of the uprising of George Floyd and they targeted the 10 days immediately after he was murdered and they did some pretty rigorous analysis of the city's response to that. And one of the things that they found was the city actually had a fairly robust emergency preparedness plan. And actually, in my first month on council, I was briefed in on the FEMA National Incident Management System, it's like this. They gave us this booklet this thick and it like, goes into scruciating detail all the plans on how to respond to an emergency and it's typically used for hurricanes and wildfires. That's kind of the context, the types of scenarios that those emergency preparedness plans are for. But it basically is a framework to respond to anything and the city actually did have a really strong and robust emergency preparedness plan. It just fell apart in the in the chaos after George Floyd was murdered, and so, you know, not as a council member but as just Elliot living on third 30th and A's. I ended up just you know, I have some really good friends that are neighbors on the block. I texted them. We started building out our group chat, all of a sudden we had every single house in the block in a group text, and some of us were doing Nightwatch on either side of the block. And some of us were keeping an eye out in the alley for you know, the rumors of, you know, you know, flammable things stuck to stuff the way in people's backyards. So it's like, we ended up coordinating to be deeply then and it was relatively organic and self organized. I hadn't had some sort of American emergency preparedness plan with my group chat listed, but it kind of happened organically. And I think one of the things from a resilience perspective, particularly when you're thinking about those long term stresses, is having a deeper relationship with your neighbors I mean, I think that's above and beyond the most important thing you can do. Above and beyond having non perishable food and doomsday prepping, having you know, five years worth of like memories in your basement. I think deeper relationships with your neighbors is going to be able to carry with you not just you know when something that completely traumatizing like the murder of George Floyd happens which is like it's sometimes hard to remember that we live through but it serves you well when nothing necessarily emergency related is happening and you may just need to borrow some milk or sugar from a neighbor. And I think deepening those connections with your neighbors and spending those connections. I did it really deeply just on my block. You know, that was the capacity I've had in the 24 hour window when everything was really flaring up. But this is something that I think we need to work on. Almost like an philosophical way just to kind of like restore like the strength of our country.

We’ve all found ourselves in these social media bubbles where it's easier to dunk on people who have an opinion that's slightly, you know, nuanced, different than yours than it is to you know, when we're in a room together, you don't, you know, dunk on each other for, you know, whatever they said 10 years ago in relation to the invasion of Iraq you you talk about much more practical human things, and I think building up those practical human relationships, all of a sudden, you can build on just the nature of those relationships to go okay, who knows how to fix cars, who's a good baker who got into sourdoughs when locked down first happened, you know, who's gardening who's got the preserves in their cupboard, and then all of a sudden, just by having those relationships and again, the communication plan across those relationships. That's how you can be really resilient and responsive because I think that trying to imagine the worst case scenario of every possible scenario for emergency management, first of all, kind of puts you into a kind of real dark headspace. And then second of all, who could have guessed that a global pandemic would be followed by the greatest, you know, racial reckoning in our country, in our backyard. You just, that's not a scenario that you can imagine.

So you kind of have to start building in resilience until you're just every way day of life. And I think in the context of like this group, being in the neighborhood association, getting to know each other by name, where everybody lives and then kind of building off of that of like skill sets, inventory resources, you know, that I think is how you like, really make resilience and emergency preparedness, a part of your everyday way of life in a way that's like kind of joyful rather than like super like doomsday. prepper fear based. So that's me going from practical to kind of theoretical and philosophical on emergency preparedness.

I feel like one of my lessons learned from living through what we learned through is like, we need to be actually very intentional about rebuilding these institutions. And the neighborhood association is the institution for building that. And then generational shifts happened, there's what is that book, Bowling Alone or something like that, that talks about this kind of big, historical shift from people used to be on bowling leagues, and they used to be in the Rotary Club, or they used to be masons, and they used to do for age, they used to have all these kinds of civic type of activities that would have you in relationship with your neighbors and that much more civically oriented way and a lot of those institutions have fallen to the wayside and kind of been filled in with things like next door and Facebook and we have seen the not so healthy aspects of those types of platforms, kind of replacing the civic institutions. So I think we're actually at a moment, particularly in many in the Minneapolis context, but I think, in our country, frankly, where we actually need to be very intentional about rebuilding these institutions and doing it in a way where you've all showed up tonight, and then it kind of, I would say, put in the back of your head. How can we build on tonight's conversation about emergency preparedness, which is a very, like practical conversation into some of these bigger, more aspirational conversations about our kind of like role as citizens.

Deborah Brister

Discussion of upcoming Neighborhood Board Elections on May 14, 2022 which is promoted by the City Neighborhood and Community Relations Department .

Discussion on encouraging new Block leaders.

Michelle Spangler

Description of communication and gatherings within her block

Elliot Payne

29th Avenue, bad news. Is going it is getting downgraded from a redesign to a resurface. Yeah. So I just got that update on Thursday last week. From the capital improvement plan. It got bumped. And I think the reason I got bumped was over by in the cobblestone street. I remember getting the name of that street. Quincy. Quincy ended up bumping it. It's quite easy in very rough shape. And it needs quite a substantial amount of work. And when they were doing their refactoring of, you know, estimation of the amount of money that they have and how they're going to prioritize 29th Avenue got downgraded to a resurface rather than a redesign when I think 2024 But I will have to fact check that for the trucks. I'm actually working with with public works on getting more signs up to to mark that trucks should not be coming down on 29th. I've actually had a conversation with Canadian Pacific about that directly. And the thing that they shared with me that was at least helped me understand it a little bit more. They're very clear guidelines about not driving on 29 I think one of the things that's been very helpful is actually being a new council member. It kind of resets the relationship. So whatever past baggage was there, kind of is set aside and we were able to kind of start on a new flood because I was able to get debriefed by the city attorney about like, the long sordid history of the rail yard and litigation. And so it seems like we have historically had a very aggressive footing with the rail yard and it's kind of ended up at kind of this place where there's like a understanding of what the realities of it is and the like willingness to be as collaborative as possible.

Blake Hampton

That's disappointing news Especially since we have information from one of the members Dan, I on Task Force and there is a kind of a public input meeting coming up at the end of this month. And I'll shoot an email to everybody on that on that list. But we have been having conversations with your office, Mr. Payne and Liam, just let us know about some of that info, but not that bad news, I'm afraid. So I'm hopeful that we can with enough of I don't know verbal and turnout apprising that we can change the mind of that recommendation. Because I've got some pictures right outside my house where the next good torrential downpour. It's going to strip away oh, I don't know good. 150 200 square feet of asphalt off the road with the present condition as it is. So that I'm sorry, I'm going to try and gather my thoughts. Here. Canada threw me for a loop there. So we have I got in touch with a lot of different people met Council couple folks at min dot about getting them getting signs up to let truckers know that. No, you got to you got to follow the local ordinance which says that you if there's a nearby truck route, you got to take it. And so we're working on getting signage up to let them know kind of a multi prong approach where we can have signs. We've got some folks working on some tech to kind of track when the busy parts of the trucks rolling down here are and then kind of bring that data to second precinct so that once the signs are up, maybe we can start doing some ticketing to you know, let folks know that Yeah, we really got to take the truck routes and in the in the interim, I'm working on a little lob, you know, just like a one page handout that has a map of the truck routes, the ordinance that says yeah, you got to take those and just kind of encourage the truckers to let their what you call them like their their route coordinators or if they're independent truckers just to spread the word amongst themselves that Yeah, you keep rolling down here, you're gonna get ticketed, and if you're speeding, you're looking at I don't know, it's like around 350 350 bucks and point or two off your, your CDL commercial driver's license. So I just want to kind of take a you know, a reasonable approach because I am feeling somewhat reasonable now. Not always, but you know, just just to work with these folks to let them know that you're doing it. Like you're not supposed to be doing it and encourage the change in that behavior. So that's been kind of the big focus recently of the task force. But also the amazing work that Michelle I think that was you and back you were blocked by somebody. I don't know if that was you. We've got a survey that I think I'm going to bring this up with the group. I'm thinking about a soft rollout. Just kind of throw it up on the AMA website. And we can start gathering feedback if people stumble across it and then really do a a big pay. We've got this this survey ready to go at the wingding and let people know and encourage folks to put their feedback in and use that as a starting point. we think that there would be a redesign, so the repayment seems to be to be back in its normal 15 or 20 year cycle thing long period of time, like every six years to complete, like, roughly like the road the roads are is going to be repaved so many times before this one is that right now. Right so even if they resurface it, and this is what I don't know. I think there's a limited lifespan even if they resurface. resurfacing keeps trucks off the market who can surface those trust funds through the intersection down there and it can ruin it

Deborah Brister

Audubon Spring Festival updates May 7 Saturday from 10 until two here at the Audubon Park Rec Center. We are interested in volunteers and so we have a sign up sheet here and if you're interested in volunteering Our theme is sustainable and healthy living so we've got a number of organizations and nonprofits and government organizations as well to provide a lot of good information and it's, it's gonna be a great event. So if you don't want to volunteer, that's fine, but at the very least, come out and spread the word.

Michelle Spangler

Discussed Audubon Farmers Market update. We are moving the market from its past location of a customer's office parking lot and we're actually going to be moving it up to the parking lot at the coffee shop northeast. So in that parking lot there I won't take up the whole parking lot. There will still be some parking for the shop there at the Johnson street merchants. It allows us to have a little more flexibility, bring a little bit more business once again to our local businesses and kind of partner with them a little bit more. Discussion on the power of produce program. That is a program that benefits our kids and so each kid that shops gets a little $2 token that they go and get to spend and buy the produce that that they want to pick out my kids usually pile theirs together and get the blueberries because that's their their favorite thing. So they have to share him. But it's a really great way to generate excitement among the little kids about firstly vegetables and it gets them feeling a little empowered about what they want to pick out. And I know I can also do a lot with bringing in an incentive for families to shop there and spend a little money there on on the produce. And so um, we are always looking for sponsorships for that program. Because it it does rely on people in their communities, you know, sponsoring that and raising funds for that. So if you or someone you know is interested in that, go ahead and think for right now. Unknown 1:11:51

Dates for market are June 9 through September 29. And we will be operating every Thursday from four to seven. Very excited.

Deborah Brister

Discussion on Audubon Home and Business Grant and Loan Program. Center for Energy in the environment. They are the administrators for our home and business grants and loan programs, of which we still have most of the programs still available. I know on our Autobahn neighborhood website, it's my fault I need to take down the current links CES has created some new links and some new graphics. So I'll get those up. I promise to get those up to speed. And if you if you do need more information again, you can email me I can forward your information, but you're trying really hard to get the Audubon Neighborhood Association website as soon as possible. And so please go to that site as our neighborhood resource. You know, aside from the loan programs, actually, I just created a web page for the emergency preparedness and community resilience topics that we've been talking about tonight with a number of links and they are the sections are going to be divided into home preparedness, business preparedness, community preparedness and and resilience. So, in the in the coming weeks and months, we'll be having updated expanded sections on that Audubon neighborhood. website. So please go there. For more information.

Discussion on vacant lot on 28th and Johnson. Possible opportunity to temporarily grow food and get our NE Emergency Food Growers Network involved. the City of Minneapolis owns that property is slated for affordable housing as we know it and I've been in conversations with councilmember Payne and and really trying to determine how fast the City wants to move that into affordable housing. And these are so these are questions that we need to geThere are opportunities for bioremediation of contaminated soil So, again if you're interested let me know, email me, give me a call. And, and we can talk and we can we can formulate an organized because that's what we're good at. We're we're a neighborhood association

Anne Bechtel

June 6. is going to be the next community meeting. Okay,

Adjourned 8:30