November/December 1985 RAIN Page 7 and real estate packaging, that it did not have before. The city also developed a program where the neighborhoods are intimately involved in overseeing development policy within their borders, and they are involved in some of the capital improvement budgeting programs of the city. The city also developed an integrated energy policy in 1979-1980, which culminated in a number of specific programs, the largest of which is the largest hot water district heating system in the country. That was completed last year, a year ahead of schedule. So the city had been moving toward a unifying principle for several years. I crossed paths with Mayor Latimer in the late 1970s, and he was intrigued by the concept of the self-reliant city, and especially the “new city states." He invited the Institute for Local Self-Reliance to work with the city to conceptualize a development strategy based on that concept and establish development criteria that would be used to evaluate new ventures. The last few months I've been here full time. Tm here to help make the metaphor of the city as nation one that is as widespread as possible among the residents of St. Paul. RAIN: Can you give me examples of some of the kinds of self-reliant industries that you're trying to promote there? Morris: Yes, but it isn't just industries. There are many different parts of the concept of local self-reliance. For example, there's a program to encourage invention in the local school system in St. Paul. The feeling is that wealth is created primarily by invention. Most entrepre- neurialism creates a new business that might funnel money into that business that would have otherwise gone in another direction. That doesn't necessarily create new wealth for the community. But invention, especially where it means doing something with more efficiency, is really the root of creating new wealth. Inventions themselves become important exports from an economy. So what we're trying to do is teach the concept of invention to school kids and then also to encourage invention throughout the city as whole. The city is encouraging invention inside the city government by supporting city employees who come up with new products, to help them get patented and help begin marketing them at the same time as the city is helping to expand the invention program in the elementary school system. So that's one example of self-reliance. Another example is the matter of import subsitution for energy, through both a major conservation program and a major substitution of local resources for imported resources. The city has a shared savings program for multifamily rental housing which has already invested three quarters of a million dollars. Shared savings means that a third party agency comes in and does the conservation work needed for a building at no risk to the owner of the building. We are expanding it this coming year—with all private financing—to over a million dollars. The district heating system I mentioned before was a way of increasing the efficiency of energy consumption in downtown St. Paul by about 30 percent. It substituted coal for gas—coal is cheaper than gas and therefore the system is cheaper, but coal itself is obviously imported into Minnesota as well, so the next step is to substitute wood for coal. The twin cities suffer from Dutch Elm, and about 40,000 tons of waste wood are cut each year and then dumped. There's a quarter of a million dollar disposal cost attached to that, so what the city is doing now is chipping the wood and buying a fluidized bed combustion boiler which can burn both coal and wood. The hope is to replace from 10 percent to 40 percent of the coal with wood. This would reduce disposal costs by WHERE DO OUR INCOMES GO? dollars per capita 1800 1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 I FROM: The Homegrown Economy: A Prescription for St. Paul's Future /
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