Voice

This PBS documentary explores how other cities have dealt with, and continue to deal with, transportation planning and how their choices affect their cities. There is a lot of interesting information about Denver’s beltway and Portland’s mass transit, both of which are very relevant to the conversations happening in Omaha now.

Blueprint America: Road to the Future, an original documentary part of a PBS multi-platform series on the country’s aging and changing infrastructure, goes to three very different American cities — Denver, New York and Portland, and their surrounding suburbs — to look at each as an example of the challenges and possibilities the country faces as citizens, local and federal officials, and planners struggle to manage a growing America with innovative transportation and sustainable land use policies.

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Design Alliance Omaha is hosting an event featuring Majora Carter on Thursday, February 25 at the Joslyn Art Museum. Ms. Carter was born, raised and continues to live in the South Bronx. Her career has taken her around the world in pursuit of resources and ideas to improve the quality of life in environmentally challenged communities. She founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001 after writing a $1.25M Federal Transportation grant to design the South Bronx Greenway with 11 miles of bike and pedestrian paths connecting the rivers and neighborhoods to each other, and to the rest of the city. That project secured over $20 million in funds for first phase construction and serves as alternative transportation, an economic development anchor, storm water management infrastructure as well as healthy recreation. Her accomplishments grow from the notion that self-image is influenced by surroundings—so those surroundings should be beautiful! Her vision, drive, and tenacity earned her a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. She started 2007 as one of Newsweek’s “25 To Watch”, ended the year as one of Essence Magazine’s “25 most Influential African Americans”. She has been named one of the “50 most influential women in NYC” by the NY Post for the past two years, and “NYC’s most influential environmentalist” by the BBC World Service.

daOMA Presents: Majora Carter, Environmental Advocate
Thursday, February 25, 2010
7:00 pm
Joslyn Art Museum Witherspoon Concert Hall

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As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 the Department of Energy (DOE) awarded 206 Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants to local municipalities and tribes across the country, totaling nearly $111 million. Closer to home, the City of Omaha received $4.3 million, and the City’s first step towards using that money was hiring Omaha’s first Sustainability Coordinator, Kristi Wamstad-Evans.

Evans, who was previously the National Sustainable Solutions Program Coordinator at HDR, Inc. (a common supplier of talent for Mayor Suttle), reported to City Hall for her first day on September 8, 2009 and will be paid $70,000 per year for the next three years. One of her primary objectives will be to lead the development of the City’s comprehensive sustainability strategy, which must be submitted to the DOE by November 24, 2009.

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