Professional

Currently National and International Planning Consultant.

Previously, Director of: Planning, City and County of Denver, Colorado; Community Development, Fort Collins, Colorado; Planning Department, Jersey City, NJ.

APA Colorado Chapter: Vice-President, Secretary-Treasurer.

APA Chairperson: City Planning and Management Division; Awards Committee; served on three national conference host committees.

Chairperson: Colorado Municipal League Planning Officials; Metropolitan Denver Wastewater Reclamation District; Denver Regional COG Transportation Advisory Committee; Urban Consortium’s Community and Economic Development Committee; Advisory Committees on Housing and on State and Local Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau. Professional Advisory Committee, University of Colorado.

My 40 years of planning experience will bring a broad, practical perspective to the AICP Commission to keep AICP focused on its core mission of certification, accreditation, ethics, and continuing education. AICP needs to apply effective, practical planning principles to its own governance.

Consider recent efforts to force mandatory continuing education on us in order to retain our AICP membership. The Commission didn’t conduct any research to ascertain whether mandatory continuing education actually improves professional competence (in fact, there is no evidence that it does). The Commission ignored all the scientific AICP member surveys finding that we, particularly in our region, favor top-notch, affordable, and accessible voluntary continuing education, not mandatory.

Instead AICP should concentrate on providing consistently high quality, affordable, and accessible continuing education at the regional, state, and local levels. The huge distances here in the West require that high quality continuing education be delivered electronically and in print — not just by in-person courses and workshops.

There’s just no substitute for planning experience for effectively educating new generations of planners. AICP should use its role in planning school accreditation to bring more practical planning experience into the planning school classroom. AICP and the Planning Accreditation Board should institute an “exchange program” that enables lifelong academicians to get practical planning experience by trading places with municipal and regional planners for a year or two. Planning schools should recruit AICP Fellows as adjunct professors and frequent speakers.

The AICP Commission should persuade APA to initiate public relations and lobbying efforts to start building a climate in which planners are free to practice ethical, inclusionary planning. Both AICP and APA need to adequately fund and staff the joint “Planners Support Committee” to really assist planners whose jobs are threatened for planning ethically.

Let’s keep AICP focused on what really counts: improving the quality of planning practice and education, and promoting ethical planning practices.