Announcing the recipients of Smart Growth America's 2013 free technical assistance


Downtown Missoula, Montana, in Missoula County, one of 2013’s free technical assistance recipients. Photo by Marc Moss, via Flickr.

Smart Growth America is pleased to announce the 22 communities selected to receive a free workshop in 2013 as part of our free technical assistance program.

Each year, Smart Growth America makes a limited number of technical assistance workshops available to interested communities for zero cost. This competitive award gives communities a chance to understand the technical aspects of smart growth development through a one- or two-day workshop on a subject of their choosing.

Technical assistance

A workshop helps Eastport, Maine find ways to reduce heating costs

A view of downtown Eastport, ME. Photo by The Indestructible Enforcer via Flickr.

Eastport, Maine is a charming rural community vying for its survival.

An island off Maine’s northern coast, Eastport is actively working to reduce the town’s increasingly substantial winter heating costs. To help in this effort, the community applied for and received a 2012 free technical assistance workshop from Smart Growth America and Otak, made possible by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities program.

Eastport depends almost entirely on fossil fuels for winter heating, and pays more for them as compared to the rest of the country. And while all of Maine has severe winters and high heating costs, Eastport is a rural community that serves a primarily low-income and older population, making these obstacles even more challenging. The cost of heating has implications for Eastport residents’ disposable income, the region’s economy, and even home foreclosure trends. The city recognized that it needed to find a more sustainable, efficient, and affordable way to heat buildings.

Technical assistance

Smart Growth Stories: A region collaborates in Southern Maine

Balancing development with environmental and economic concerns is one of the biggest challenges facing Southern Maine today.

“Maine has a lot going for it: its sense of place, its scenery, its quality of life,” says Carol Morris, President of Morris Communications and lead consultant for Sustain Southern Maine, a regional partnership of organizations, communities and businesses working to make Maine’s economy, environment and sense of community stronger. “If we lose that, we’ll never get it back, and people understand that, so there’s a fair amount of local support for balancing it all together.”

Sustain Southern Maine is addressing these important challenges with a multi-faceted, comprehensive approach to planning. Aided by a Regional Planning grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the partnership is working to make sure development in small, rural communities as well as larger urban areas like Portland – Maine’s biggest city – will benefit the communities and economies of the entire region.

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Partnership in the News: Cincinnati approves comprehensive plan for city

Last month, the Cincinnati City Planning Commission approved Plan Cincinnati, a comprehensive, community-based approach to future development. Part of this plan was funded by a multi-million dollar HUD Community Challenge grant intended to help the city to streamline its land use codes, facilitating future development.

The Plan is an opportunity to strengthen what people love about the city, what works and what needs more attention, says Katherine Keough-Jurs, senior city planner and project manager.

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Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick introduces new workforce housing initiatives, adopts GICD recommendations

The following is crossposted from the Governors’ Institute on Community Design.

In July 2012, the Governors’ Institute on Community Design met with Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and his Administration to identify policies and tool to meet the State’s housing needs. Last week, Governor Patrick announced an ambitious housing policy initiative that builds on those strategies.

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Walkability increasingly drives developers and real estate market

What makes a town or city desirable? What makes a neighborhood a great place to raise a family or start a new job? And what characteristics drive local economic growth and drive the real estate market? It all starts with walkability, according to a recent Washington Post story. A Texas native, Rogers put a premium … Continued

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Smart Growth America staff, partners, developers, local leaders and allies discuss implementing transit in Middle Tennessee


From right: Smart Growth America’s Geoff Anderson with Ken Rose, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Mitchell Silver, American Planning Association; and Arthur Guzzetti, American Public Transportation Association. Photo courtesy of the Nashville Area MPO.  

In 2010 Middle Tennessee’s mayors agreed on a milestone, ten-county vision for transit. Last month, leaders in the region met to talk about how to make those plans a reality.

More than 250 political leaders, transportation and land use planners, transit agency partners, developers, architects, engineers, academics, and non-profit advocates came together on October 25 and 26, 2012 in downtown Nashville to discuss the first steps of implementing the region’s innovative transit plan. The event was organized by the Nashville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization and the Transit Alliance of Middle Tennessee, and sponsored by Transportation for America, a joint project of Smart Growth America and Reconnecting America.

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Upcoming webinar: "The Innovative DOT" with the Federal Highway Administration

State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) have ambitious goals: improve safety, reduce congestion, enhance economic opportunity, improve reliability, preserve system assets, accelerate project delivery, and help to create healthier, more livable neighborhoods, just to name a few. These goals would be challenging even if money were no object, but dwindling conventional federal and state transportation funding makes these goals even harder to achieve.

The Innovative DOT: A handbook of policy and practice, published earlier this year by Smart Growth America and the State Smart Transportation Initiative, lays out 31 tools transportation officials can use as they position their agencies for success in the new economy.

On December 12, from 3:00-4:30 PM EST, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) will host a webinar about the report and its recommendations. FHWA is partnering with the Project for Public Spaces and INDUS Corporation to present this free event.

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Speak out to renew the federal Brownfields Tax Incentive

Developers working to clean-up and redevelop brownfields could soon lose a major federal aid – unless advocates work together to save it.

Originally signed into law in 1997 and extended through December 31, 2011, Section 198’s Brownfields Tax Incentive is a tax deduction intended to encourage the cleanup and revitalization of brownfield properties. Under the incentive environmental cleanup costs are fully deductible in the year incurred, rather than capitalized and spread over time. Improvements in 2006 expanded the Incentive to include petroleum cleanup.

The incentive is scheduled to expire at the end of the year, but there’s a chance to save it. The National Brownfields Coalition is asking Congress to extend the Incentive as part of the Family and Business Tax Cut Certainty Act of 2012, more commonly known as the “tax extenders” bill.

Join the call to make brownfields cleanup easier: send a letter to your members of Congress today.

The Incentive is already helping towns put contaminated land back in to productive reuse. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for example, the Incentive helped make possible the redevelopment of a former industrial site in the city’s historic Martin Luther King Drive Business Improvement District. The site is now home to new commercial and residential space, and has greatly added momentum to efforts within the Business Improvement District.

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