Estimating Community Economic Impacts from the Reuse of Contaminated Properties
A workshop organized by RFF in conjunction with Industrial Economics, Inc. (IEc) and NCEE.
Speaker's Biographical Information
Kathleen Blaha is a Senior Vice President for National Programs for the Trust for Public Land (TPL), directing research and program development on parks, greenspace and land conservation tools. Ms. Blaha has been with TPL since 1983, working on conservation real estate and services, first in the southeast as Associate Regional Manager, then as Acting Regional Manager for the Midwest Office, relocating to Washington, D.C. in 1992 to create a National Programs division for TPL. Her current research at TPL includes work on the benefits of land conservation and water quality; urban parks and economic benefits; GIS applications for local growth management programs; and conservation easements.
Before coming to TPL, Ms. Blaha worked as a water resource planner for the regional Council of Governments in Raleigh, North Carolina. Ms. Blaha has a B.A. in Geography from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and a Masters in Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She currently sits on the Boards of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association and the Capitol Hill Business Improvement District in Washington, D.C.
Robert W. Burchell, Distinguished Professor at the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University, is the author of 30 books and more than 50 articles. Professor Burchell, co-director of the Center, is an expert on fiscal impact analysis, land-use development and regulation, and housing policy. Dr. Burchell co-authored the Development Impact Assessment Handbook for ULI-The Urban Land Institute. His major publications include The Fiscal Impact Handbook, The New Practitioner's Guide to Fiscal Impact Analysis, The Adaptive Reuse Handbook, and The Environmental Impact Handbook. Dr. Burchell has served as principal investigator on more than $4 million in research spanning a thirty year career at Rutgers. One of these efforts included the Impact Assessment of the New Jersey State Development and Redevelopment Plan, an encompassing study of the growth management program adopted by the New Jersey State Planning Commission in June 1992.
Dr. Burchell's seminal work in the area of development patterns and infrastructure costs is a just completed research project for the National Academy of Sciences and the Transportation Cooperative Research Program resulting in The Costs of Sprawl Revisited and The Costs of Sprawl—2000. Other recent projects include studies of regional mobility and mortgage-lending practices for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, several studies on housing policy for Fannie Mae, and multiple analyses of transportation policy for the U.S. Department of Transportation. Dr. Burchell has also completed nationwide program evaluations for the Economic Development Administration on its public works, defense adjustment, and revolving loan fund projects. These successful evaluations led to the reauthorization of EDA in 1998 for the first time in 20 years.
Beverly Craig is a consultant for the Milwaukee Economic Development Corporation. She assists Milwaukee brownfield redevelopment efforts by seeking grants, managing cleanup efforts, and providing project management for Milwaukee brownfield redevelopment efforts. With her assistance, the City of Milwaukee has been awarded over $13.5 million in brownfields grants since 2000. Her brownfield redevelopment successes have included residential, commercial, and industrial projects and a she focuses the majority of her work on tax delinquent brownfield sites. She provides assistance to developers interested in Milwaukee brownfield redevelopment by linking them with assessment resources, acquisition advice, and financial and tax credit resources. Ms. Craig is also a member of the WI Brownfields Study Group.
Ms. Craig was formerly employed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the Design for the Environment Program. As a Presidential Management Intern she was employed at the Office of Management and Budget overseeing EPA’s budget. She earned her B.A. from the University of Southern California and her M.P.P. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Ms. Craig is Truman Scholar, a Switzer Scholar, and a volunteer for the YMCA’s One-on-one Mentoring Program.
Charlotte P. Dougherty, a Principal at Industrial Economics, Incorporated (IEc), has a Masters degree in environmental health policy and management, and 20 years of professional expertise in the areas of environmental policy and economics, hazardous waste programs, brownfields redevelopment, and land use planning. For the past 10 years Ms. Dougherty has supported EPA’s policy and program offices in the analysis of redevelopment policies and programs, and has in-depth knowledge of a wide range of EPA and state site cleanup and reuse programs. For the past four years, Ms. Dougherty has served as the Program Manager for IEc’s Metropolitan Development, Land Use, and Planning contract for EPA’s Office of Policy, Economics, and Innovation. Many of Ms. Dougherty’s recent projects focus on the development and analysis of economic impacts of redevelopment. Ms. Dougherty recently led a multi-disciplinary team in examining the economic, environmental, and community impacts of building rehabilitation, urban infill, and brownfields redevelopment. This project also included an evaluation of policies and programs aimed at encouraging redevelopment.
Past real estate-oriented projects include creating an EPA guidebook for developers seeking funding for brownfields projects and developing a framework to assist local governments in setting priorities for brownfields redevelopment. Ms. Dougherty also applies her economic analysis skills in redevelopment at the local and site levels. For the Superfund Redevelopment Initiative, she developed methods for estimating the economic impacts of site redevelopment and applied the methods at pilot sites. For a private landowner investigating redevelopment options, she applied a similar approach to estimate economic and fiscal impacts of alternative redevelopment plans. Ms. Dougherty has also developed and implemented models for estimating the fiscal and environmental costs of regional growth options; clients for these analysis have included EPA, Florida’s Monroe County, and the Berkeley Charleston Dorchester Council of Governments in South Carolina.
Marianne L. Horinko was nominated by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate on October 1, 2001 as Assistant Administrator for the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. During her tenure as Assistant Administrator, Ms. Horinko has refocused the goals of her office around six major priorities: Homeland Security; the move toward One Clean-up Program; Land Revitalization; Energy Recovery, Recycling & Waste Minimization; a Retail Environmental Initiative (the Resource Conservation Challenge) and Workforce Development. She has brought new approaches to environmental protection using partnerships, flexibility and innovation to create improvements rather than the old command and control systems of the past. The Brownfields program, signed into law by President Bush last year, is model for many of OSWER’s efforts, as it is the embodiment of these new approaches to environmental protection. Under her leadership, the budget for the Brownfields program has doubled.
Prior to joining EPA, Ms. Horinko was President of Clay Associates, Inc., a national environmental policy consulting firm. She was responsible for launching the RCRA Policy Forum, a membership organization comprised of federal and state governments, environmental groups, Hill staff, and industries interested in furthering constructive dialogue to improve the nation's waste programs. During the first Bush Administration, Ms. Horinko was Attorney Advisor to Don Clay, EPA's Assistant Administrator for Solid Waste and Emergency Response. In that capacity she was responsible for RCRA regulatory issues and Superfund reauthorization. Before joining EPA, Ms. Horinko was an attorney at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, involved in the areas of pesticides and hazardous waste counseling, Clean Water Act and Superfund litigation, and environmental audits in connection with business transactions. Ms. Horinko is an alumna of the University of Maryland, College Park (B.S. in analytical chemistry, 1982) and Georgetown University Law School (J.D., 1986).
Maureen Kennedy, a California-based public policy consultant specializing in housing, economic development and welfare issues, graduated from Mount Holyoke College (’79—Political Science) and Harvard University (’88—MPA2, housing finance emphasis). Ms. Kennedy has worked to ensure that research commissioned by the Ford Foundation on rural poverty was useful to non-profits working on the issue in the field; she has lobbied Congress on affordable housing issues for community development corporations and LISC while at Rapoza Associates; and after her stints as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at HUD and at the White House in the early ‘90s, she managed the Rural Housing Service’s $4 billion annual budget and 5,000-member nationwide staff as Administrator of the agency. Since moving to California in 1996, Kennedy ran Redefining Progress, a San Francisco-based environmental economics research and advocacy organization, and then opened her consulting firm.
Each of the firm’s projects combines research and practice in ways that usefully inform the work of community-based organizations, foundations, public sector organizations, and the private sector. Recent clients include: The State of California (management of the negotiations to reform the state’s housing element, which requires localities to plan for and build affordable housing); The City of Fort Worth, TX (development of the Housing Department’s housing strategies); Stone and Youngberg (a primer on land-secured financing for municipal utilities in newly developing areas); the Enterprise Foundation (case studies for a meeting comprised of national-caliber private sector affordable housing developers held in May, 2003); and the Brookings Institution (metropolitan case studies on CRA activity since passage of the Gramm/Leach/Bliley legislation; welfare reform in cities; a strategic plan for the newly merged city and county surrounding Louisville, Kentucky; and, together with PolicyLink, Dealing with Neighborhood Change: A Primer on Gentrification and Policy Choices).
Katherine A. Kiel has been an Associate Professor in Economics at the College of the Holy Cross since 2001. She received my A.B. from Occidental College in 1982 and her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at San Diego in 1989 where she did research on housing appreciation rates. She is a board member for the New England Economic Project, a non-profit organization that provides objective economic analyses and forecasts for the New England area.
Her current research examines the impact of various kinds of pollution on house prices, with some of this research being funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Kiel has published in the areas of real estate price indices, racial discrimination in the housing market, and on the demand for environmental quality in the U.S. She has published papers in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Land Economics, the Journal of Urban Economics and other peer-reviewed journals.
Gerrit Knaap is Professor of Urban Studies and Planning and Director of the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland. He earned his B.S. from Willamette University, his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Oregon, and received post-doctoral training at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, all in economics. Dr. Knaap's research interests include the economics and politics of land use planning, the efficacy of economic development instruments, and the impacts of environmental policy. On these subjects, he has published articles in journals which include the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Urban Economics, Land Economics, Policy Analysis and Management; and State and Local Government Review. He received the Chester Rapkin award for the best paper published in Volume 10 of the Journal of Planning Education and Research, and with Greg Lindsey, he received the 1998 best of ACSP award.
Funding for Dr. Knaap’s research, in excess of $4.0 million, has been provided by the National Science Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and numerous other federal, state, and local government agencies. Dr. Knaap is the co-author or co-editor of four books: Land Market Monitoring for Smart Urban Growth, The Regulated Landscape: Lessons on State Land Use Planning from Oregon, Spatial Development in Indonesia: Review and Prospects, and Environmental Program Evaluation: A Primer. He serves on the Science and Technical Advisory Committee to the Chesapeake Bay Commission.
Peter B. Meyer, PhD (Economics), is Director, Center for Environmental Policy and Management and Professor of Urban Policy and Economics, University of Louisville. He also directs the EPA Region 4 Environmental Finance Center at the University. He directed the Local Economic Development Assistance Center at The Pennsylvania State University from 1978 through 1987. A specialist in community and local economic development, Dr. Meyer is actively engaged in land revitalization studies, including two projects with Dr. Kristen Yount of Northern Kentucky University, a two-year project on “Expediting Public Sector Acquisition of Brownfields Insurance” and a five year effort on “Accelerating Brownfields Cleanup and Redevelopment with Innovative Uses of Environmental Insurance,” and a third for NCER, with collaborators from RFF and the University of Maryland, “Urban Regeneration through Environmental Remediation: Valuing Market-Based Incentives for Brownfields Development.”
Dr. Meyer’s policy contributions include project reports for EPA: Financing Small-scale Urban Redevelopment Projects — a Sourcebook for Borrowers Reusing Environmentally Suspect Sites (1997), Factors Affecting Municipal Pursuit of Environmental Insurance as a Brownfields Redevelopment Strategy (1999), and Models of Government-Led Brownfield Insurance Programs (2002), for HUD: Environmental Insurance for Urban Redevelopment: A Feasibility Study (1998) and An Assessment of State Brownfield Initiatives (2000), and for the Economic Development Administratio
