Smart Growth America recently hosted an informational webinar about this year’s round of free technical assistance workshops. Potential applicants will find in this webinar a summary of the application process, including important deadlines, eligibility requirements and where to direct further inquiries. First, Roger Millar, the Director of Smart Growth America’s Leadership Institute, provides an explanation of … Continued
In anticipation of the upcoming election season, Congress has passed a continuing resolution (CR) to extend federal spending until March 27, 2013.
Leaders in both chambers have pushed for the passage a CR in order to avoid a government shutdown so close to the November election. Funding for the current federal programs, which was scheduled to expire at the end of September, will remain unchanged until March at which point Congress will revisit budget negotiations. The resolution passed the House with overwhelming support on September 13. The Senate deliberated the measure, and eventually passed the resolution, 62-30. President Obama signed the CR late last week.
Wednesday, October 3, 2:00-3:15pm ET. Register for the NALGEP Brownfield Communities Network webinar today and gain valuable information about the recently announced grant guidelines and Request for Proposals for the EPA’s FY2013 Brownfields Area-Wide Planning Program.
Thursday, October 4, 3:00-4:00pm ET. EPA’s Office of Sustainable Communities will conduct a webinar on free technical assistance available to communities through EPA’s Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities Program.
A tugboat in Galveston, TX. Photo courtesy of flickr user BFS Man.
After receiving a HUD Regional Planning grant two years ago, the Houston Galveston Area Council (H-GAC) knew it had its work cut out. The grant region comprises 13 counties and 6 million people and a wide variety of city types, from rural to coastal, suburban and urban. Yet, in such a large and diverse region, the grant has done much to coordinate local planning efforts, says Meredith Dang, the Land Use Transportation Coordinator at H-GAC.
“As a region, we’ve done a lot of planning about individual concerns – like housing, transportation and infrastructure – but not on this holistic level, so we’re using our grant to look at how the issues interact and what sort of future the region wants to strive towards.”
The grant consortium is made up of 24 local organizations, with local governments, nonprofits, and university and research organizations involved, all groups that had not previously worked together. “The scale at which H-GAC has been able to cross the lines between government and nonprofit and education through the Consortium has created partnerships that have been really groundbreaking for our region,” Dang says.
Currently, the consortium is working together to come up with development strategies through a series of case studies. Two case studies in particular have emerged as key projects for the grant.
The first involves the city of Houston, where planners are looking to piece together a set of policy tools that encourages and incentivizes walkable, mixed-use development in a dozen business centers throughout the city as well as builds a framework that speaks to the kind of development people really want. The second is being carried out in the city of Galveston, where planners hope to develop a more complete method of cost-benefit analysis for sustainable development.
A hundred people attended a public meeting held by the Northwest Regional Planning Commission in Vermont. The meeting was an informational session about the Healthy People, Strong Communities initiative, funded by a HUD Regional Planning grant.
The initiative is a regional effort by 20 counties in the region to produce a stronger, more economically viable region. The meeting was the first step towards accomplishing this goal. Planners opened the meeting with questions to the audience intended to get them thinking about what they wanted from the initiative and to form preliminary ideas of future directions for the region.