You can find videos of Troy’s talk on “Sustainability in Small Cities” on the Ely Climate Group YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYAarZ6lKM&t=3s
You can see the CURE video, which has shots of Troy in addition to his slides, here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md-OBlvnH8M&t=3375s
This is a lightly edited transcript of the Q&A following Troy’s talk. There are some omissions where the audio was poor quality.
Q1: Have you done anything at your laundromats for reclaimed water? It’s mandatory in laundromats out West. It saves 2/3 of the water.
Troy: No, I don’t think we have. Thank you for the suggestion. I don’t know about this. I will check it out.
Q2: I’m wondering, at the initial startup of this effort, what steps you took to involve the city and get the city to be on board.
Troy: Right. So how can you involve the city as we as we started moving forward so that engagement with the city was the primary objective from the very beginning. Have meetings with the city manager and the mayor and the city council and have students go in front of the city council to talk about things that they are interested in. Find a shared project, maybe something like a movie event, where we would have the city manager come and talk before the movie and say, “Here’s things that the city is thinking about”. So that relationship building piece is actual work. It took time. And so that’s kind of where we began. There’s more to say about that. But do intentional relationship building, strategic relationship building throughout all of this, and then find small projects where we thought we could work together. And so for us, the LED lighting project was something the city manager said “That seems like a good idea”. LED lighting sounds like energy efficiency which is one of our pillars.
Q3: Is there a board within the city or county that that oversees those efforts?
Troy: Morris has the form of government that has a strong city manager, and then it has a mayor and city council. So the city manager has a lot of power. But the city council obviously has to approve things. So the goal was to court all three of those, that is the City Council, the city manager, and the mayor.
Q4: Morris has 5 thousand people. On a global scale it is insignificant. How does your plan scale up from there to 5 million or more?
Troy: Wonderful question. So this question about how does the work happening in rural small towns scale, how does the work happening in any town scale? This is a fun question that we should explore for an hour in itself. Here are a couple of points. One is that I think there’s a lot of acknowledgement that democracy is having some challenges across the United States. Coming up with a good new idea is difficult, but when the idea is out there it seems obvious. Working from the local to the global truly is the way to go. If all of us try to expand clean energy in our communities where we can, there will be a lot of benefits. If all of us tried to actually improve our zero waste in our communities that really would be good. If all of us tried to engage with our schools that would be good. But I have to brag for just a moment. My wife, who is a chemistry professor at Morris, worked on her sabbatical with the state of Minnesota on rewriting the state’s science standards. That included incorporating climate change into the curriculum. And so things have changed in the school curriculum. There are doors that are open now to having more conversation in the school about climate and climate solutions. And so I think, at every level, the development goals reflect how we can create a more flourishing community. Of course, waiting for someone else to solve the problem is not the best we can do. But at the same time, it would be naive to say that this work isn’t a systems challenge. And so it is a sandwich. We have to do the work at the community level, and policy needs to change and create that sandwich. I can tell you that the environmental space, the kind of sustainability space, has never been more exciting. I visited with some of you, prior to this talk, about some of the challenges of eco anxiety eco grief. With the inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the US passed the largest pieces of climate legislation of any industrialized nation ever in the history of the world. I don’t think people know this. We need to talk to our friends and neighbors about how policy has achieved something big. The last thing I would say is, because I love the question, our futures are interdependent so part of the topic this conversation is what can rural or small cities do to contribute to the larger whole? What I know is what happens in rural Minnesota will largely influence the health of the state of Minnesota, because that’s where we have the wind energy. The Dakotas are the Saudi Arabia of wind. Policy is challenging. So the Dakota or my Dakota friends, they’re not exactly sure what future they’re thinking about. That’s democracy, right? They’re thinking about what they want for their kids and grandkids.
Q5: I would like to thank you for bringing to this earth such an incredible force of energy. We are privileged to get to know you, your dedication and your passion is amazing. Most importantly, it’s an honor to have you being a voice for Minnesota, especially with such a delicate subject because we need to heal and the healing begins at home. I think of the situations that we’ve had here in the past, we need to reach out across the nation to these people. They don’t understand that we have loved this place for generations. And so it needs an awareness. We have to come to a reality to make a dream come true, so we can move forward. You and I have to stop being the one I was, to become the one that I want to be. We know 80% of our bodies are water and we need energy from the universe which is infinite. There are many galaxies each with many stars, one of them is our sun with the earth where we live. We are spirits having a human experience. So how we are behaving is the real challenge. And thank you for being here with us.
Troy: First of all, thank you for the comments Mauricio, and also thank you for the emphasis on healing and humility, and this question about how do we bring people together. How do we engage in civil conversations? This is a challenge that we’re all facing. We’re looking to leaders who inspire us to be our best selves.
Q6: I noticed there’s the council and the mayor in the Morris government. There is a committee. I can’t remember if they’re appointed or not, but they serve four years. I don’t know if that’s a limited term or not. But here in Ely we have a dozen or so different Commissions where they can serve up to two years. With all these different Commissions to go through it seems like your system is simpler and I think that is so stunning.
Troy: Every week or so we need to have meetings with groups of people either online or in person. For example, we get together on a Thursday afternoon and simply sit in a room and discuss “How’s that project going?” It becomes a joke at some point “Oh that project!” but you have to keep discussing the details. Part of that is the relationship piece, building trust with each other, because things come out of that. We need to build those muscles of just being together, right? And it takes work to keep that continuity going. And then as new leaders come in, this is a big challenge. We also could talk at length about what happens when new leaders come on board. How do we try to bring leaders on board who share the vision, and how do we inculcate new leaders? How do we make them feel welcome? How do we help them get some wins early and celebrate it?
Morris does have a planning commission and they do some important work. I think your question inspires me to ask “Why have you not engaged more?” I say to myself, “Troy, it really is our team. Why have we maybe not engaged more with our planning commission?” There’s just more work to do and one of our goals right now is to widen the circle. The goal is to not be insular, to grow our core group, but also to include the 80 or so people on our email list who are connected to city government, county government and the schools who we feel are part of the Morris Model circle. You saw the pictures of some of the events, you know when we had a bunch of people in the room. The nice thing is when we ask people to show up and come to the room you know we’ll get maybe a 200 people show up and but then we have to stay engaged with them. So thank you for the challenge question.
Q7: How many full time employees are actually paid to work on this now through the city and schools, and how many were there when you started?
Troy: So a lot of progress was made without any formal group. We just got together and wrote grants to a lot of these groups I mentioned, to CERTS, to the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships, to the West Central Initiative, to anyone who would give us money. We would ask for some and say please, and but it’s been relatively recently we’ve had a Coordinator. Most of the time we did not have a Coordinator. At the macro level wouldn’t it be wonderful if many of our communities could have an organizer, young or old, but it is really fun to have young folks around. Let’s launch some new environmental professional careers and gain from intergenerational wisdom. It would be it be awesome if there was more funding to support things like this. I want to encourage you. You don’t have to have a full time coordinator or a part time coordinator to get going. A lot of the work in the beginning was relational. We could have a community event and have the beginning of the event talking about something that we think is important. But all along this path has also been really trying to strategically cultivate leaders in our team. There’s a tension in community development. We could have a longer conversation here. Do you cultivate the citizenry or do you cultivate leadership which is part of the citizenry? You should do both. But one approach that is really important is to develop real relationships with people who are in positions of leadership. That’s taken a long time, it’s very complicated and we still have a lot of work to do.
Q8: We have a zoom question. Does your website have examples of the costs and savings for some of the initiatives you’re engaged in?
Troy: The website does not have financial information about costs. I will bring this back to Griffin. That’s a wonderful idea. The report that Griffin and our German intern wrote about solar across the city has some information about savings, but across the board we have no summary. But this is a great idea. Most of the things we proposed, when they went before the city council, if they didn’t seem to have a cost break they were less interesting. Where I live, a lot of the conversation really does have to start around money but the goal isn’t to end there. The goal is to become more aspirational too.
Q9: About 15 years ago, I visited a dairy farm that was capturing the waste and generating about $2,000 a month on their electric bill as a pilot plant with a small dairy. You had mentioned you have some of the largest dairies for generating your own electricity with biogas. Is this happening?
Troy: We’ve got some large dairies in and around Morris, are they generating electricity with the biogas? What are they doing exactly? The short answer is that one of the largest dairies did use biogas and make electricity early on. But that wasn’t the business they wanted to be in. So they mothballed the biogas, the anaerobic digestion facility. But eventually an outside investor came in and said, you’ve got the anaerobic digestion system, we would love to take your gas upgraded and stick it in the pipeline. Now it’s really interesting the way the world is right, amongst friends here, I have emphasized we’re trying to use language that unites and doesn’t divide and this is hard. There are a lot of people who do not think climate change is a real thing. So how do we how do we still make progress? The way this financing works for the renewable natural gas plant to come into town, and create investment jobs is because Californians attribute value to renewable natural gas, and the federal government does too. So between renewable energy credits by Californians who want renewable natural gas and the federal government those credits go together to create a financial model that makes it work.
Q10: Here is another way to look at a model – a country of Canada has a single player for medical costs. Also the government being single payer again, mandated no more burning coal. Less pollution saves on medical bills.
Troy: Yes. Not an energy bill.
Q11: You said your library has geothermal energy. Yep. And I would suggest you have a ground source heat pump. Yes. It’s called geothermal energy in the state of Minnesota. Absolutely. Thank you. This is correct. So geothermal energy starts at 120 degrees. Yeah. This is a ground source heat pump. So I would ask that we present that to keep what we talk about on the open up and we’re not pulling the wool over anybody’s eyes.
Troy: I appreciate the correction. Use the right language. That’s right. Thank you, sir. And also, he said something about about Canada. It’s also interesting in Minnesota in terms of progress in the present moment. We’re seeing our utilities shutting down coal plants. So in Otter Tail County, my investor owned utility is shutting down coal. We also saw one of the largest coal fired power plants in Xcel’s territory, Sherco, shutdown. So things really have changed in last 15 years. I remember 15 years ago, we had environmental groups showing up at Administrative Law Judge hearings advocating for a change in the path. We had amazing leaders like Senator Ellen Anderson, saying we could absolutely put more wind electricity on the grid. And then the Next Generation Energy Act passed which was a big deal. It was bipartisan, with Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty, and the Democratic legislature. And MN met the goal of that Act eight years early. It has paid to be ambitious. I would also mention distinctions about geothermal and ground source heat exchangers. One of the projects our German intern is working on is the role of air source heat pumps in a rural Minnesota community. Do any of you have like mini splits in your house? My parents and I drove around Babbitt today to reminisce and I had forgotten that everybody’s got a fuel oil or LP propane tank. I had forgotten that the natural gas line didn’t run there. You know, the natural gas lines also generally don’t run to Native communities either. So some of the best opportunities to do Air Source Heat Pumps financially exists in communities that don’t have a natural gas line.
Q12: We have the only Junior College system in the state of Minnesota does not have natural gas. Muffled comment.
Troy: So Vermilion (Minnesota North College, Vermilion Campus) does not have natural gas. Background noise.
Q13: We know that Morris is exceptional in every way but there are a lot of other small towns in Minnesota. Who’s number two who’s number three? Are any of the others making good progress?
Troy: Thank you for the kind words about the Morris community. What I would say is that the sustainability puzzle, the sustainability conundrum, the sustainability game is really contextual and regional. Before 2005 Morris was windy, and there were no wind turbines, and it was sunny, and there were no solar panels. And the goal was to join the resources with the tech. I will digress just for a second because I think in my community talking about the costliness of things like “that’s a bit spendy” is like a way to kind of carry some cashet in a conversation. I think it’s important to realize that VCRs were expensive, and then they weren’t and DVD players were expensive and then they weren’t, and calculators were expensive, and then they weren’t, and mobile phones were expensive and they weren’t and then it was the internet and then your camera. And wind was expensive, and then it wasn’t and then solar was expensive and then it wasn’t. Did you know energy storage is expensive, and it’s boring to me, because it’s just not going to be expensive five minutes from now. The question is will we do the process that we know works, to bring us through a cycle of innovation and adoption. Who’s pushing that? We need early adopters. You know, I’m probably not the right early adopter, but I have friends who are. I wish I was. I really admire my Vice Chancellor who is early adopting all kinds of stuff.
And we need those role models. But in terms of your question about who’s doing cool things, I think that regionally across the state, I see models that I admire but I will not name them.
Q14: Can you talk more about how you sold the campus on the composting idea what was the main benefit? The people side of that?
Troy: You know, this was a great example where the students said to our administration, they said it seems like you’re doing a lot of cool stuff on clean energy, but our zero waste game doesn’t seem very good. And that was true. We could be doing more and that precipitated that trip down to compost school, where they learned how to do it. But of course with all these things we did we did some financial analysis. We knew how much it costs to haul our waste. There’s tonnage fees, there’s tipping fees that we pay to our garbage hauler. We knew that if we could divert this much compost, this this much organics from the landfill we wouldn’t pay these fees. We could use that as fertilizer on campus. So we built a budgetary model too. Part of that was trying to say there’s environmental benefits.
That reminds me of what I wanted to say to an earlier question because you brought up the question about the social cost of carbon and how do we price that in? And obviously, we’ve got groups like Citizen Climate Lobby, that have been yelling at the top of their lungs for years that we should be thinking about such things. But we still had to make the case that this was good for the bottom line. Again, everything is hard and all this was still a big pain in the butt.
So this is where like we have amazing leaders, our facilities director Lisa Harris is a total rockstar. She got our composting units that go all around campus. So no matter where you are on the Morris campus, you can put your apple core in a composting container. But someone and then had to train the custodial staff to do that, and then we had to train the community to do that. Sometimes I go to the Common Cup in town. They’ve got these signs that literally say, compost here, aluminum cans here, and it’s always messed up. So we had 100 kids the other day on the Morris campus and we were telling them everything’s compostable here, except these two things. And I stood by the garbage containers and I was telling them yep, no, yep, no, yep, no. So I did trash talking, we’ve got to do some of that. So, but many of us live our lives through little sayings and adages. And the first act of love is attention. And so we teach our kids to love things, right? To love the Boundary Waters, to love what we see. And so we need to teach our kids to pay attention. Now, by the way, we tried to run a composting program at the elementary school and the high school. Do you know where it didn’t work at the beginning? The high school. Yeah, of course. Yeah, it didn’t. So little kids were like I get it like that’s where my compost goes.
Q15: What was the final product?
Troy: The composting material made on campus was used on campus as a soil amendment.
Q16: What about a state mandate to require solar on all rooftops of new buildings?
Troy: We have never had more money or more tools to tell us whether solar is worth doing in a given spot. If there are groups that think that this is a good idea that would be something worth advocating for. For the Morris Campus we view it as something that makes sense. And the City of Morris viewed it as something that makes sense. And the School District viewed it as something that makes sense. There are other layers to the conversation that are more complicated. We have laws in the state that allow us to put solar on the roof that is under 40KW. But there are also questions, for example, what it would look like if we could put solar on top of the whole vast school complex. We did some studies on this a couple of years ago. But we need to think about the incentives, and the ability to get on the grid and grid congestion and paying to get on the grid – it needs extra study. Where it gets really interesting is in the boring stuff. And that’s why I’m thankful that there are wonderful non-profits in our state, like Fresh Energy and Great Plains and CURE that get into the nitty gritty about the policy. Minnesota is sunny and we have wind. But Minnesota has no coal, Minnesota has no oil or natural gas. We are pulling oil out of rock and dirt in the Dakotas and in the tar sands of Canada’s boreal forest. The question about energy return on investment EROI is important because when we get to the point where it takes a barrel of oil energy to get a barrel of oil out of the ground as you can guess that isn’t the time to think “Should we build a renewable future?” That is the end of society as we have experienced it.
Q17: Have you had any pushback from the big utility companies?
Troy: One of the things we have been trying to do in Morris is to build a relationship with our utilities. Going back to the LED lighting, we were talking to the utility all the time. For the electric chargers, we put electric chargers in the community – the utility did it. I want to make an important point which is that we are all responding to incentives and we can change incentives. So some of my rural friends would say “Here is what we hear from our big city friends – don’t grow corn, don’t grow soy beans, or sugar beets, don’t make ethanol plants” What do you want us to do for our livelihoods? This is hard. I don’t have any answer to this but this is part of the challenge that we have got to address together.
For the utility, their incentives are different. This is a dance. I think that sustainability is about harmonizing the tensions. We are not all going to agree and there is going to be some stuff left on the table. There is a business model that farmers operate under and a business model that utilities operate under. The utilities business model is to build equipment. My utility was going to build a 1.6 billion dollar coal fired power plant just across the Dakota border and they would have got cost recovery on that and that’s how they would have made money. But now we are in a moment of great transition, of great urgency, of disruption. What is the right model for that? This is above my pay grade. We need more conversation with the utilities and others about their incentives and what happens if the incentives change.
Talking about the charging – who has the best EV charging structure in the United States? Elon Musk. So this is a profound question – one billionaire person built out a charging network, but we think that electric charging is a backbone for driving down greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. It should be a community benefit. Rural communities are left out of the transition. The US built the highway system as an act of economic development. We know the history of rural community electrification, where rural communities were begging “May we please have electricity now?”
Who will own this future? Utilities are in the business of selling power. Is the transition something important to them and is there a sense of urgency, or is there some other player? So will it be gas stations or will it be the State of Minnesota saying this will be public infrastructure for the public good? Of course we are going to have charging stations. Will it be our regulated utilities doing this? But we need an answer now, remember one billionaire did it.
Thank you, thank you, much applause.
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