Community breakfasts. Lecture series. Field trips to UMore Park.
They're all ways that the city of Rosemount can connect with its changing population and boost resident involvement, according to reports from a class at the University of Minnesota.
"Like many communities, I think the challenge in Rosemount is how to engage residents beyond those few residents that tend to show up when there's a particular development proposal they're reacting to," said Mike Greco, program manager for the Resilient Communities Project at the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs.
Rosemount is partnering with the university through the Resilient Communities Project, which each year works with one city to accomplish a set of goals across a broad range of topics. In their application, Rosemount city staff identified 40 projects, from affordable housing to youth programming to energy conservation.
Projects are matched with U courses, and students work on them for up to a full academic year. The task of figuring out how to improve communication and resident involvement was assigned to a Humphrey School class focused on community participation. The project is intended to be part of the process for creating the city's 2040 comprehensive plan, which is due to the Metropolitan Council in 2018.
Like many cities across the suburban metro, Rosemount is evolving fast. Between 2000 and 2012, its population increased nearly 50 percent, compared with 12 percent in Dakota County as a whole and 8 percent across the state.
Over that time, the city's black population increased by 150 percent and the Asian and Hispanic populations each increased by about 200 percent, according to recent U.S. Census data.
"We certainly have noticed that there's more diversity occurring in the community," said Community Development Director Kim Lindquist. "And so that is something we want to try to be more at the forefront in terms of, what are some obvious ways to be more inclusive with the city?"