Online Webinar

Members will learn the basics of energy pipeline operations and maintenance, facilities, and products transported. They will gain an understanding of the risks and benefits pipelines pose to the community. Members will learn the agencies that regulate pipelines at the Federal, State and local level. They will learn the role that local governments can play in improving pipeline safety. Additionally they will learn risk based practices for land use and development planning near transmission pipelines. They will be provided with examples of good and poor development near pipelines and well as the location of additional technical information and financial resources to support their efforts to improve safety of the community and the built environment near pipelines.

 Using 13 cases studies of the largest PHAs in the Pacific Northwest Region, this webinar outline what activities PHAs are undertaking in this devolved, market-based context, speculating about the future. PHAs make trade-offs among paths that emphasize agency survival, producing more housing for the poorest households, identification as a non-profit housing provider (rather than depending on HUD), poverty alleviation, merging with another public agency, or closing. This diversity of responses points to the under-valued attribute of public housing authorities as local organizations receiving diverse mandates from the federal government and as local housing providers.

As bike sharing systems are proliferating in cities across the US, and early systems in Boston and Washington, DC are coming of age, we examine the different metrics on which bike share programs can be evaluated. What does bike share success mean? Financial self-sufficiency, or even profitability? Improved mobility? Improved public health? Reduced GHG emissions? How can we measure the cultural impact of bike share? Or should we simply be concerned about operational success--keeping the trains running on time.

High oil and natural gas prices over the last decade, combined with new technology have ignited a fossil fuel boom across the West. Drilling for oil and natural gas is a high-impact economic activity. Today’s unconventional oil development and its effects differ in important ways from oil booms of the past. This webinar charts the new “unconventional” fossil fuel boom, tracking production, employment, and fiscal trends in an effort to better understand the pressures boomtowns face and to identify best practices for benefiting from these new unconventional fossil fuel plays.

Design guidelines are an innovative tool for controlling strip development and helping to maintain community character. This session will present case studies of design guidelines being used to control strip development in Kittery and Scarborough, Maine, Salem, New Hampshire, and Cape Cod in Massachusetts. It will illustrate how design guidelines were prepared and implemented and how they have influenced new development.

What happens when a group of six planning consultants decides to create a new consulting firm during the latest Great Recession? Hear how this group of one-time sole proprietor planning consultants chose to join forces and start a new consulting firm as the market contracted….and they succeeded. What did it take? What lessons did they learn? What tools and strategies worked best? How did sole proprietors, used to being leaders themselves, adjust to the new normal of being part of a six-person firm? Learn how to succeed and what it takes to move forward in today’s market.