Star Tribune
The St. Paul Fire Department is adding an electric truck to its fleet — but not until 2024
The St. Paul Fire Department will be the first in Minnesota to buy a fully electric fire truck — it just won’t hit the road for a while.
The $1.8 million truck is expected to join the fleet at the end of 2024, and will be stationed at Fire Station 7 on the city’s East Side after building renovations are complete.
The purchase — which city officials started exploring in 2019 — is a step in the city’s Climate Action & Resilience Plan, which aims to reach carbon neutrality in city operations by 2030. So far, St. Paul has made investments in electrifying passenger trucks that the Parks and Recreation and Public Works departments use. The new fire truck is the first attempt at doing the same with larger vehicles, according to Chief Resilience Officer Russ Stark.
“These vehicles are the next frontier,” Stark said. “This is just the beginning of the next 10 years where we will serve the community while using clean energy.”
Fire Chief Butch Inks said there has been some skepticism toward the new vehicles among fire departments, which he chalks up to a desire to stick to tradition. He has met with other departments to talk about electric fire trucks and try to counter the pushback, he said.
In addition to energy efficiency, electric fire trucks boost the health and safety of firefighters, Inks said. Exposure to fumes from traditional diesel trucks idling in station garages is tied to increased cancer rates among firefighters, and electric trucks would help minimize that risk, he said.
“Firefighter health and wellness is a huge initiative of ours,” Inks said. “There may be some skeptics about electric vehicles, but who’s skeptical about improving the health and wellness of anybody?”
Electric fire trucks are also significantly quieter than the current vehicles, making communication easier during fire responses.
Rosenbauer, an Austrian fire truck manufacturing company, is constructing an RTX model for St. Paul that will be completed at its production plant in Wyoming, Minn. The trucks typically take 18 to 19 months to complete. The city plans to pay for the truck with a combination of city and federal money.
The price tag for an RTX fire truck is roughly double that of a diesel vehicle, but electric vehicles cost less to fuel and maintain. Electric fire trucks save about $25,000 in fuel costs each year, according to Stark.
Inks said the department is open to adding more electric fire trucks to the fleet in the future, and he hopes that other fire departments in Minnesota invest in them as well.
“Somebody has to take the leap, and that’s what we are,” Inks said. “We want to be first to prove this out, and hopefully others follow.”
Twin Amur tigers born at Como Zoo in August now have names — Marisa and Maks.
Two long-time volunteers who have worked with zookeepers to care for and teach the public about the zoo’s big cats came up with the names, the first to be born at the St. Paul zoo in more than 40 years.
Marisa, a name that the volunteers found to mean “spirited and tenacious,” call that a perfect reflection of her personality. The name also carries special significance for the Como Zoo community, as it honors a retired zookeeper of the same name who was instrumental in the care of large cats during her 43 years at the zoo, Como Zoo and Conservatory Director Michelle Furrer said.
The male cub has been named Maks, which is associated with meanings like “the greatest” or “strength and leadership.” The volunteers felt this was an apt description of the male cub’s confident demeanor and growing sense of leadership, Furrer said.
“Marisa and Maks aren’t just names; they’re a fun reminder of the passion and care that keep us committed to protecting wildlife every day,” Furrer said.
The newborns and their first-time mother, 7-year-old Bernadette, remain off view to allow for more bonding time, zoo officials said. The cubs’ father, 11-year-old Tsar, has been a Como resident since February 2019 and remains on view.
Fewer than 500 Amur tigers — also known as Siberian tigers — remain in the wild as they face critical threats from habitat loss, poaching and human-wildlife conflict, the zoo said.
Much of the wood waste in the metro area is sent to a processing site near Pig’s Eye Lake in St. Paul, where it is stored before being burned to produce energy at the St. Paul Cogeneration plant downtown.
Cogeneration provides power to about half of downtown and was originally built to manage elm-tree waste in response to Dutch elm disease. The plant burns approximately 240,000 tons of wood each year, according to Michael Auger, senior vice president of District Energy in St. Paul.
Jim Calkins, a certified landscape horticulturalist who has been involved in discussions about the problem, said he thinks using wood for energy is the most logical solution.
“The issue is, we don’t have enough facilities to be able to handle that, at least in the Twin Cities,” Calkins said. “So there has to be dollars to support transportation to get the wood to those places, or in some cases, to upgrade some of those facilities such that they are able to burn wood.”
Plans are in place to convert Koda Energy in Shakopee to burn ash wood, which could potentially handle around 40,000 tons of wood waste, but that would take around two years to establish, according to Klapperich.
In some areas of the state, cities have resorted to burning excess wood waste because they felt they had no other option. Open burning wood releases a lot of carbon into the air, Klapperich said.
Weary from the rat race nature of practicing commercial law, Danielle Miller had long dreamed of starting a new professional life as a bookstore owner. When the Lincoln, Neb., resident saw a space at St. Paul’s Union Depot, she moved to make her dream a reality. She and her husband now call the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood home.
Eye On St. Paul recently visited with Miller in her sun-drenched store, Story Line Books, to talk about what spurred her to leave the law behind and lose herself in shelves of books. This interview was edited for length.
Q: So, you’ve opened a bookstore, in Lowertown. Are you a little crazy?
A: That’s been the reaction. There’s been a lot of “Really? Lowertown?” There’s been a lot of that. It’s a little unnerving.
Q: Why decide to just up and move to St. Paul?
A: We travel a lot; we travel all over the world. And we go to bookstores. We were here visiting [my husband’s] parents in Woodbury, and we drove down Randolph because we like to eat at Due Focacceria. And we saw this building that had “For Sale” on it. It was a 900-square-foot retail spot on the bottom and an apartment above. And I was like, that is the European bookstore dream, right? I looked it up online, but it got scooped up. A week later, I was looking again and this [Union Depot space] was the first post.
I was immediately in love. The next time we were up here, we made arrangements to come and see it. And I told my husband, “You should probably get a job in St Paul.”
Q: Back up a few steps. Why this compulsion to open a bookstore when you were a working attorney?
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