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News and
Resources for
Inspired Leadership
February
2006 |
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In this
Issue
Events
Transit Oriented Development
Webcast
Development Report Card
Funding
13 Regions Awarded DOL Funding
Sustainable
Development
New EPA Reports Cover Smart Growth
Practices
Malls into
Mainstreets
Brookings' Housing and Transportation
Affordability Index
How Big is Your Faceprint?
Measuring McMansions
Public
Policy
New Resource for Forward-Thinking
Public Managers
Citizen Engagement & Transparency
in Government: Florida County Residents Get Lesson in Road Costs at
Planning Exercises
North Carolina
Bank Limits Lending for Eminent Domain
Projects
Results that
Matter: Improving Communities by Engaging Citizens, Measuring Performance,
and Getting Things Done
Current Poll
If there were a
Connecticut
Center for Sustainable Development, what would you want it to do for
you?
Click here and share
your ideas.
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January
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2005
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2005
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2005
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February 2005
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2004
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Events |
Transit-Oriented
Development 101: Putting the Pieces Together
Looking for a primer on
Transit Oriented Development? Log in to the LISC webcast for a
discussion of the basic principles of TOD, an overview of tools &
techniques for planning and financing them, and design considerations and
other success factors. March 2, 2 - 3:30. More
CFED's
Development Report Card for the States
Missed the online
discussion but want to learn more about the development report cards that
everyone's been talking about? You can, with KnowledgePlex's
archived webcast. The live meeting discussion covers
the DRC's 68 economic and social measures to compare the 50
states' economies. Unlike other report cards, the DRC takes a wide view of
the components needed to create a successful economy -
although state & local governments'
primary tactics for recruiting business are still based on substantial
public incentives. The DRC can be a powerful research
and advocacy tool - all raw data are publicly available, searchable, and
free. More
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Funding |
13 US Regions Awarded $195
Million in DOL Funding for WIRED Initiative
The U.S. Department of
Labor recently awarded $195 million in grants from the Workforce
Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) program to 13 regions
across the nation. Winners were chosen from 100 applicants for
having ideal public and private business partnerships. Each of the
13 regions will receive about $15 million in funding over three years to
stimulate innovation and education in the tech sector. Funding will
strategy development, regional network formulation and plan
implementation.
The regions receiving grants include
Coastal Maine; Northeast Pennsylvania; Upstate New York; Piedmont Triad
North Carolina; Central Michigan; Western Michigan; the Florida Panhandle;
Western Alabama and Eastern Mississippi; North Central Indiana; Greater
Kansas City; Denver Metro Region; Central and Eastern Montana; and the
California Coast. Connecticut submitted three WIRED proposals
broadly covering Eastern Connecticut and Southern Rhode Island, the
Bridgeport, Norwalk and Stamford area, and a third targeting the Northwest
and North Central regions of the state, along the I-91 and I-84
corridors.
See http://www.doleta.gov/ for more
information about WIRED, including project summaries for the winning
regions. See also INC.
magazine.
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Sustainable Development |
New EPA Reports Cover Smart Growth Practices
The EPA has released four new
reports on the relationship of smart growth practices to resource use.
According to "Protecting Water Resources with Higher-Density
Development," higher-density development may better protect water
quality and watershed scale. "Using Smart Growth Techniques as Stormwater Best Management
Practices" reviews nine common smart growth techniques and examines
how they can be used to prevent or manage stormwater runoff. "Growing Toward More Efficient Water Use: Linking Development,
Infrastructure, and Drinking Water Policies," shows how large-lot,
dispersed development patterns cost more to serve with water and use more
water. "Parking Spaces/Community Places: Finding the Balance through
Smart Growth Solutions" highlights a range of supply management,
demand management, and pricing strategies as solutions for our oversupply
of unnecessary parking which, according to the latter report, wastes money
and creates places that degrade water quality and encourage excess driving
and air emissions.
Malls into Mainstreets
Malls Into
Mainstreets, the third installment in the Congress for the
New Urbanism’s greyfield mall series, reveals what makes a greyfield
revitalization project successful. The guide provides
lessons-learned from six case studies where an underutilized shopping
center was turned into a viable, mixed-use neighborhood development.
More
Brookings' Housing and Transportation Affordability Index
The Brookings Institution's Housing and Transportation
Affordability Index integrates housing and transportation costs into a
single measure, "correcting a pervasive information gap" to help local and
regional planners understand the housing costs and costs of building
housing and transportation at specific locations. More
How Big is Your Faceprint? Measuring
McMansions
If there's anything wrong with replacing older small
houses with newer big ones, how big is too big? Some teardowns and
increase in house size are reasonable, but some new houses are wildly out
of scale, writes Otis White in Governing online. Atlanta, which
commissioned a study by two Georgia Tech professors to establish a
measurement of neighborhood scale, is the latest city to debate the
McMansions issue. The professors suggest two new measures for
scale: the faceprint (how large the building appears in a photo
taken from the curb), and the observed building height (how tall it
appears from the same perspective). They also suggest a way to make
McMansions less objectionable: make them narrow and deep, not tall and
wide. More (scroll down to
1/24/06 entry). See also MSNBC's Neighborhoods Combat
McMansion Trend.
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Public Policy |
New Resource for
Forward-Thinking Public Managers
Harvard University's Government Innovators
Network has developed a new website
dedicated to the discussion and study of modern
governance. This online
resource will feature weekly
columns authored by the country's
pre-eminent thinkers in the field of public management and will be
produced in collaboration with Governing.com. More
Citizen Engagement &
Transparency in Government: Florida County Residents Get Lesson in
Road Costs at Planning Exercises
Manatee
County, Florida, officials use public forums to introduce citizens to the
complexity and constraints of transportation planning and let county
officials hear back from the public. When they hear more about
cost-benefit analyses of various projects and the limits of the county
budget, citizens participating in the strategy sessions realize the
difficulty of setting priorities and are more inclined to understand the
necessity of a tax increase and/or the delay in
some infrastructure projects. More
North
Carolina Bank Limits
Lending for Eminent Domain Projects
BB&T
Corp., a North Carolina-based bank, came out yesterday against the use of
eminent domain for private commercial development, saying in a written
statement that the bank would not lend its funds to such projects. The
statement specifically mentions last June's controversial decision by the
U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the taking of private homeowners' land for a
development in New London. More
Results
that Matter: Improving Communities by Engaging Citizens, Measuring
Performance, and Getting Things Done
This new book, co-authored
by CRCOG Executive Director Lyle Wray, along with Paul Epstein, Paul M.
Coates and David Swain, provides a new governance framework, promising practices for
effective communities, and new roles for citizens, community leaders, and
managers. The benefits and practicality of the framework and related
practices are reinforced with cases from 25 communities across the
country. More
>top |
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2005
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