City Council Agendas and One Alderman’s Comments

The City of Minot City Council Committee of the Whole will meet Tuesday and Wednesday at 4:15 at City Hall to consider items on the agendas below.  Below you’ll find full agenda items along with links to staff-provided supporting documents. In red, you have the chance to take a peak inside the thinking of one

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Details on Deer Season

While North Dakota’s 2018 deer gun season continues through Nov. 25, it still generates a fair amount of questions and conversation preseason, midseason and postseason. First off, this year’s deer hunting season did open later than what a lot of people think is normal. The traditional deer opener for more than three decades has been

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My Year Below Average Part III

Recap: I dared myself to see if we could keep our home energy consumption below an average of 500 kwh for an entire year.  Our house was pretty well-designed for a project like this, and the first few months turned out to be pretty easy.  When we finally crunched the numbers in the early part

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My Year Below Average Part II

Let’s take a moment to recap in case you missed the last column: I am pretty average.  I was bored and felt inspired to do something to combat global climate change and I found a whole bunch of cool stats about home energy consumption by state on a website call EnergyLocal.  I set a goal

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My Year Below Average Part I

I would say that I am a pretty average person.  The two exceptions might be my intense love of Star Trek and my strong inability to bowl above a 180.  (I fully accept that those two things might be correlated…) This last year I set out on a quest to be decidedly below average in

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Are capricious state regulators contributing to ND’s child care shortage?

Childcare is and has been a continuing challenge in our communities. From a labor perspective, we’ve got a shortage of workers, and one key to entering the workforce is having confidence in where we leave our kids. In this commentary in the Grand Forks Herald, Rob Port argues that the State’s licensing and regulatory agency

Read & Share   sourced from: Grand Forks Herald

How America Will Turn Itself Around?

While a growing minority of us pick which side of the line (on any given issue) to stand on, there’s another group of people losing trust in all of it. Perhaps instead of choosing sides and, thus, who to distrust, we start listening to those who are watching our larger trends? What they’re seeing is

Read & Share   sourced from: MPR

A Quiet, Country Life in the Middle of the City?

A home in the country — it’s a long-standing commonly held goal among many of us. We want the peace, tranquility, privacy. But it’s a desire in conflict with another common goal — vibrant, engaged, communities. It’s hard to have both. But in Savannah, Georgia, a set of colliding circumstances created a place that captures

Read & Share   sourced from: Strong Towns

The Case for Small Commercial Spaces

What type of land development fosters an entrepreneurial ecosystem? If we think in terms of the biological ecosystem, we don’t have sustainability unless there are species at every level of the food chain. That metaphor speaks to a start-small mentality; this commentary from Strong Towns does also.

Read & Share   sourced from: Strong Towns

The Rise and Fall of the Family-Vacation Road Trip

Things change. Sometimes they change so slowly we don’t see them happening. Such is the fate with a former staple of the American experience — the family road trip. Ashley Fetters with the Atlantic has the story on a new book and the author’s thoughts on what happened.

Read & Share   sourced from: The Atlantic

#GoodTalking Minot Flood Protection & History

The Wednesday editions of #GoodTalkMinot featured two keystone conversations — one focused on our future, the other, our past. Watch below as Jonah Lantto and I discuss the status of the region’s flood protection efforts with SRJB and Mouse River Plan Project Administrator, Ryan Ackerman. And for our afternoon session, we were joined be long-time

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More Recycling Won’t Solve Plastic Pollution

Many residents in Minot want to see citywide recycling, but before we invest big in the facilities and equipment, perhaps we should ask — what problem is it we’re trying to solve? One answer we’d expect to hear is we need to reduce the amount of plastic entering the environment. If that’s the case, then Matt

Read & Share   sourced from: Scientific American

We Need to Design the Learning Ecosystem of the Future

How do you train someone for a job that doesn’t exist yet? Whether educators know it or not, this is their job. The world is changing and pace that’s increasing exponentially, and our students will need the tools and the know how to retool on the fly. Michelle Weise writing for EdSurge shares her thoughts

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An Illustrated Celebration of Jane Jacobs and Her Legacy of Livable Cities

What makes a place remarkable? Maria Popova explores the question through an exploration of Jane Jacobs life. Her conclusion: “Out of this arises the awareness that a city, like a niche in nature, is an ecosystem. The synergy of its various human and nonhuman components — neighborhoods, parks, stores, streets, sidewalks — is what makes

Read & Share   sourced from: Brain Pickings

The recycling game is rigged against consumers

Minot recycling has been a contentious topic of late, and for those who support the effort, there are few reasons worthy of a delay. But circumstances far beyond Minot are wreaking havoc on the pillar of American environmentalism and forcing environmentalists to think differently about the practice. And one problem that’s been identified may surprise

Read & Share   sourced from: Bloomberg

Change makes sense for Corps of Engineers

Few places have had more experience with the Corps of Engineers and flood protection than Minot, but Southern Lousiana is one place that can probably make the claim. And with experience, comes the opportunity to be constructively critical. Check out this editorial from the Daily Comet calling for a reorganization of the Corps interior related

Read & Share   sourced from: Daily Comet