For some Minnesota small businesses, it's been harder to fully recover from major events of the past two years. A state grant program has a new round of funding for capital improvements, and partners say the goal is to get the money to areas of high need.
Minnesota is in its latest phase of the Main Street Economic Revitalization Program, established last year. One partner in distributing funding is the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation, with a key focus on commercial corridors in the East Metro affected by the pandemic, civil unrest and other challenges.
Claire Thomas, economic development program manager for the East Side Neighborhood Development Company, said business owners of color have particularly struggled.
"A lot of those lifelines that were put out to businesses during the pandemic, like PPP loans, they really were able to help a lot of businesses," Thomas acknowledged. "But for a lot of micro businesses, BIPOC-owned businesses, those programs were still pretty tough to access."
Eligible businesses can apply for grants of up to $750,000 if they have had economic struggles going back to March 2020. They are required to secure matching funds, and the Foundation can assist with those needs.
State officials say in some cases around the state, the program helps Main Street corridors still reeling from events like natural disasters.
Brandon Toner, director of the office of small business partnerships for the Department of Employment and Economic Development, said while a large manufacturing plant might create a lot of jobs for a community, the impact of small businesses cannot be overlooked.
"These are places that make a city, or Main Street or a town, a place where people want to live, people want to spend money," Toner contended.
Three out of every four jobs in Minnesota are in businesses with fewer than 500 employees. In diverse communities in the East Metro, Thomas pointed out the locations have purposes which go beyond sales and service.
"So, whether it's a place for community members to gather, for them to get their basic needs met, or to be able to celebrate together," Thomas noted. "We have a lot of cultural and community centers."
Community partners are facilitating grants for targeted corridors elsewhere in Minnesota, including other parts of the Twin Cities, as well as communities like Worthington.
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By Cinnamon Janzer for Next City.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Wisconsin News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
At Madison, Wisconsin’s nine public libraries, residents can check out books of all kinds, from hardbacks and paperbacks to ebooks and audiobooks. They can check out movies as DVDs and Blu-rays. And since last year, library card holders can also check out electric bicycles.
Madison’s public libraries are part of a growing number of bike libraries in cities and towns from coast to coast. A list of U.S. bike lending libraries curated by StreetsblogMASS reporter Grecia White documents 35 such programs, from Vermont to Texas. While they all look a little different and work a little differently, they all do the same thing — increase free access to bikes.
As a 2021 report by People for Bikes notes, there are a number of social, cultural and physical barriers that keep cities across the country from creating inclusive biking communities, from unequal distribution of biking infrastructure to prevailing perceptions of cycling as an activity for white men. A study in Portland, Oregon, found that car traffic, know-how, and space needed to maintain and store a bike are among the biggest barriers to bike use.
But cost, the researchers found, gets in the way, too. Even the cheapest road bikes still cost a couple hundred dollars, and the cost can go well into the five-figure range. For those who need an extra boost, most electric bikes cost at least $1,000. Municipal bike shares can help with access issues, but their payment infrastructure doesn’t work for those who are unbanked.
Enter bike libraries. In Madison, as long as you’re one of the 62% of city residents who have a library card, you can check out an electric bike from one of the city’s libraries for free. This is thanks to a partnership with Madison BCycle, an e-bike sharing company in the city whose parent company is Trek, a bike company based in nearby Waterloo, Wisconsin.
Last year Bcycle came to the Madison Public Library Foundation with an idea for a Community Pass Program that would give library card holders access to more than 300 electric bikes across the city.
“Making bike share more accessible in our community is a top priority for us,” Madison Bcycle’s general manager Helen Bradley said in a press release for the program’s launch last September. “Launching the Community Pass Program is one way we can ensure that everyone in our community has access to bike share as a transportation option.”
Instead of requiring the use of a credit card or a smartphone to unlock an electric-assist bike from one of the city’s more than 50 docking stations, Community Pass users check out an access fob from the library instead. The fob passes can be checked out for up to a week at a time. Each of the city’s nine public libraries have two passes available. So far this season, from March 15 until the end of last month, the city’s libraries have seen 279 fob check outs.
“We have nearly two million visits a year in our nine libraries in Madison, so it’s a place where a lot of people are coming and going every day,” explains Tana Elias, Madison Public Library’s digital services and marketing manager. It’s an equity initiative she adds, noting that it gives people the chance to rent a bike if they haven’t ridden one in a while as well as the chance to choose a bike over a taxi or an Uber.
“It’s an opportunity to choose to be a little healthier in your day-to-day activity. But also, if you haven’t ridden a bike recently, it’s a good opportunity to get out there and try it without making a huge commitment.”
Because Madison Bcycle’s infrastructure was already in place, including docking stations outside several library locations, there were only a few puzzle pieces to fit into place. In the end, the waiver that riders sign is from Bcycle so they’re handling the liability. In addition to managing the check-out process, the library foundation purchased helmets to complement the program, so users can check those out too if they like.
Because some of the docking stations are older than others, the technology is different between them and sometimes users had trouble getting the fobs to work right away, but the library has solved that with an information sheet that they co-created with Bicycle that explains how to use the fobs at different docking stations. Plus, “they upgraded some of their stations and they tried a new fob. It was definitely a back and forth testing process with a lot of feedback on both sides,” Elias says.
At the Student Government Association bike library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus, the process is a bit more straightforward. The program that’s been running since roughly 2011 checks out cruiser bikes — chosen for their durability, accessibility and comfort — to the school’s students, faculty and staff.
The program has been on pause since the pandemic, but Ibrahim Akar, the SGA’s chief of staff, plans to relaunch the program next month. The key to their re-launch has been building out a waitlist and replenishing the bike supply that went from roughly 45 pre-pandemic to 11 today.
In November, Akar plans to advertise pop-up check out events online and on social media for the bikes that can be checked out for an entire semester and eventually a full year before getting an online reservation system up and running next semester. The bike library is free to use, each bike comes with a lock, and repairs are covered by an on-campus bike co-op that the SGA has partnered with.
“Working in the SGA, we work towards meeting the needs of students on campus and a lot of students would highly prefer to ride a bicycle than wait for the bus,” Akar says. “When you have a bicycle, you can leave on your own schedule and there’s a lot of fun that comes with riding a bike as well. You get to just enjoy the view and breathe in some fresh air. So obviously, if that’s something that the students want, we’re going to work as hard as we can to be able to bring that to them.”
Cinnamon Janzer wrote this article for Next City.
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