Across the country, state governments incentivize development of green energy, often without consideration for local impacts. When companies seek to site wind turbines, solar panels and other green energy infrastructure, the authority of local governments and state governments often remains unclear. Attorneys from Mid-Atlantic states will discuss the legal issues impacting land use planners in the siting of green energy infrastructure, including the limits of local government authority.

Planners write thousands of staff reports every year in response to applications for rezonings, plan amendments, site plans, etc. The reports go to citizens, applicants, advisory boards, and governing bodies who make decisions impacting the very fabric of our communities, yet how often do we assess the report itself? Let alone think creatively about it? Hear the story of how the traditional staff report was turned avant-garde through fashion thinking and inspiration from works of art. Fashion designers create avant-garde pieces of clothing that may not be very wearable in hopes of rethinking ready-to-wear. Inspired by fashion and works of art, we created avant-garde staff reports seeking to break the usual mold for staff reports. We used style boards (images of actual staff reports compiled into a poster), mood boards (images compiled into a poster to create a certain ambiance, but also to boost fresh, lateral thinking), and prototypes of avant-garde staff reports to open our eyes to other ways of thinking. The avant-garde staff reports (videos, game board, newsletters, collage, mobile, and e-book) were tested with planning commissioners and planners in Georgia, California, Kansas, Missouri, Utah, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and New York. This session includes the process and shares the results of the commissioners’ and planners’ assessments. Take-aways are creative (yet practical) improvements to staff reports and the value of “fashion thinking” to advance communication and collaboration. In addition to research results, the City of Topeka, Kansas’ Planning and Development Director will talk about taking his Planning Commission through the avant-garde process and how his staff is modernizing their staff reports.

With COVID-19, the rural divide just became bigger. The presence of adequate broadband impacts distance learning K-12 in Higher Education, economic development and many other aspects of land use planning. This session discusses how planners can impact broadband distribution through telecommunications ordinances, comprehensive plans and other local ordinances and policies. The discussion will include the uncertainties surrounding small cells and 5G technology.

The sixth annual Jersey Water Works Conference is a multi-day virtual event that will bring together more than 300 state and local decision-makers, practitioners and stakeholders to amplify the importance of addressing New Jersey’s water infrastructure, explore innovative solutions and celebrate the Jersey Water Works collaborative as an effective, comprehensive approach to achieving statewide impact.

This online program has been designed to help individuals better understand how economic activity – and the programmatic decisions it drives – may impact the health of the environment and society. The course will examine how and why natural resources are often undervalued or ignored completely by traditional accounting practices and economic data. It also will discuss why natural assets, such as clean air and water, tend to be abused precisely because they are the "common property" of society at large.

This second presentation in a two-part series will begin post-installation. We will look at best practices and federal and state laws pertaining to the maintenance and conservation of public art works. The presentation will focus on how communities and public art programs address issues of retaining, repairing, relocating, and removing public art. From current court cases challenging the application of the Visual Artists Rights Act to street art, to the heated debates raging over the removal of monuments, we will explore the hot topics challenging public art programs and making newspaper headlines. The presentation will last approximately one hour with at least 30 minutes for questions and answers.

The premiere downtown economic development event of the year, the annual New Jersey Downtown Conference hosts industry experts who provide insights into downtown management best practices, as well as development, business, and retail market trends.

Integrating qualitative practices into planning work also can help support more inclusive planmaking and account for important and persistent inequities present in quantitative data by surfacing the rich, unique, and varied lived experiences of marginalized communities, who in addition to being undercounted in quantitative data, are often excluded from formal decision-making structures and institutions. Ineffective collection and analysis of community feedback can lead to biased conclusions and alienate community members. Adopting a qualitative methodology in your project can help you address these risks, improve your work, and nurture stronger relationships with stakeholders. In this session, the speakers will present an overview of a qualitative methodology for planning and share tools for developing a coherent and practical methodology to collect, analyze, and incorporate qualitative data into your projects. This session’s speakers will draw on their extensive experience with community-based qualitative practices, as well as their diverse personal and professional backgrounds, to share how they approach working with a qualitative methodology in their own work and the impact it has on their projects. Attendees will leave this session understanding how to incorporate a qualitative methodology into their work and projects.