• Increase routes: expand coverage to connect all neighborhoods with essential services. Prioritize connecting highly populated areas with providers of basic needs (like grocery stores and hospitals).
• Expand bus schedule to ensure residents aren’t stuck at home on weekends and evenings.
• Increase frequency to reduce wait times.
• Increase outreach and education around public transit options to improve ridership.

• Provide adequate funding to build and repair protected, connected, and accessible sidewalks and bike lanes.
• Reduce barriers to accessing curb-to-curb disability services by accepting residents’ existing documentation of a qualifying disability, without requiring an additional physician’s form.
• Consult with wheelchair users to improve physical bus accessibility.
• Explore city-level funding to clear snow from residential sidewalks.
  Sidewalks aren’t accessible unless they’re snow and ice-free. Ensuring sidewalks are consistently cleared would prevent residents with disabilities from feeling trapped indoors every time their neighbors can’t get to shoveling right away. Plus, it lifts a seasonal burden on residents with disabilities who have trouble shoveling snow, and provides jobs.

• Electrify 100% of city-owned light-duty vehicles by 2040, and 100% of city-owned heavy-duty vehicles by 2045.
• Install anti-idling tech in public transit and emergency response vehicles.
• Reduce unnecessary driving for city activities. Require that any use of police vehicles should be for the purpose of responding to requests for assistance. Hold meetings virtually where feasible to prevent unnecessary car trips, provide virtual participation options for any in-person community engagement meetings and events, and allow work-from-home days for city employees where possible.

Shifting growth inward—by focusing on existing neighborhoods rather than undeveloped land—delivers community benefits: shorter commutes, preserved natural habitats, better walkability, and less reliance on cars.

• Protect nearby habitats: Avoid new development in natural areas.
• Reuse before building new: Prioritize restoring and repurposing vacant or underused buildings.
• Activate underutilized spaces: Focus new projects on empty or low-density lots within the community.
• Build up (not out): Increase density by constructing taller buildings or adding floors to existing structures.
• Implement mixed-use zoning and support placement of basic needs near highly populated areas.

Support improvements in indoor air health for all rental units, including by requiring landlords to replace furnace filters at the frequency recommended by the manufacturer, and address mold issues at a tenant’s request. Address the well-documented health impacts of indoor air pollution from gas stoves through requiring landlords to replace these with electric alternatives at a tenant’s request, mandating warning labels on all locally-sold gas stoves, and providing a stackable property tax rebate for low-income homeowners (including any low-income landlords) to replace their gas stoves with electric options and install hood vents and bathroom vents.

Provide funding for MPCA-assisted placement of air quality monitors in alignment with EPA guidelines—in places within the city that are representative of the air that residents are breathing (e.g., at breathing level rather than on the roof of a building), in highly-populated locations, and in places with highest risk for air pollution).

Implement facility-level toxic release reduction strategies to prevent workers from being exposed to significant levels of toxic air pollutants (such as lead and mercury, which local facilities report emitting).

• Work with local businesses and organizations to reduce the production and sale of plastics.
• Implement local and accessible composting to ensure compostable materials can be turned into healthy soil.
• Explore more stringent right-to-repair, corporate take-back, and extended producer responsibility rules to combat planned obsolescence, protect consumers, and prevent unnecessary e-waste.