This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Cosponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the International City/County Management Association (ICMA), the conference attracts more than five thousand registrants and hundreds of exhibitors. With more than 100 educational sessions, the conference offers knowledge building, networking, and business development opportunities for beginners and experienced professionals.

The educational program is a direct result of the conference’s national call for ideas and is designed to address the important issues facing brownfields practitioners, policy makers, and communities today. This year, conference organizers are particularly interested in new ideas related to green jobs, community engagement and environmental justice, the business of brownfields, green technology and emerging solutions, planning for community revitalization, and sustainability. Additionally the Brownfields 2011 Planning Committee wants to encourage more interactive educational sessions in hopes to have at least 60 percent using the always popular marketplace/roundtable format and the newly established public dialogue/debate format.

To submit your session proposal by the deadline of July 30, 2010 go to www.brownfields2011.org. For more information please contact Julie Butler (jbutler@icma.org) or see the conference website.

For the first time, the Draft Strategic Plan includes five cross-cutting fundamental strategies aimed at tangibly changing the way the Agency carries out its work, both internally and externally.  The cross-cutting fundamental strategies are:

             -Expanding the conversation on environmentalism

             -Working for environmental justice and children’s health

             -Advancing science, research, and technological innovation

             -Strengthening state, tribal, and international

             partnerships

             -Strengthening EPA’s workforce and capabilities

A Discussion Forum was launched, https://blog.epa.gov/strategicplan , to engage stakeholders in the development of the cross-cutting fundamental strategies. 

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

There may already be contacts in your community (many in Planning, Smart Growth, and Green Building programs) who are planning to apply for this funding.  The strongest applications will include cross-program collaborations with multiple partners, so please reach out to others in your community.

Please note:  Online application through Grants.gov http://grants.gov/applicants/get_registered.jsp is required and registration to use the system can take several weeks.

HUD’s Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program:
http://www.hud.gov/offices/adm/grants/nofa10/scrpg.cfm

Open date: June 24, 2010
Close date: August 23, 2010

HUD’s Community Challenge Planning Grants and DOT’s TIGER II Planning Grants
http://www.hud.gov/offices/adm/grants/nofa10/huddotnofa.cfm

Open date: June 24, 2010
Close date: July 26, 2010

A note from the Federal Register for the Community Challenge/TIGER II grants:

“The Community Challenge Planning Grant Program differs from HUD’s Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program, a $100 million program also created in the FY2010 Appropriations Act. While the latter program is designed to support regional planning efforts, the Community Challenge Planning Grant Program focuses on individual jurisdictions and more localized planning.”

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

The Agency’s Strategic Plan, prepared as part of their update under the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA), identifies the measurable environmental and human health outcomes the public can expect over the next five years and describes how they intend to achieve those results. It is the EPA’s aim to produce a streamlined, executive-level Strategic Plan that we will use routinely as a management tool to advance the Administrator’s priorities and their statutory mission. To this end, the EPA has sharpened it’s strategic goals and objectives and intend to pursue them as One EPA, through genuine collaboration across the Agency. Further, they have offered a focused set of strategic measures that will better inform their understanding of progress and challenges alike in managing our programs. Their new cross-cutting fundamental strategies are directed at improving the way they carry out their work. They anticipate that this approach will foster a renewed commitment to accountability, transparency, and inclusion.

The EPA will use your feedback, along with input from other Agency stakeholders and partners and the general public, later this summer as they prepare the final FY 2011-2015 EPA Strategic Plan for release on September 30, 2010. The full-text draft of the Plan is accessible through the following web site:http://www.regulations.gov/ (Docket ID: EPA-HQ-OA-2010-0486).This web site also provides a link through which you are encouraged to submit comments to them electronically.If you have general questions about the full-text draft or require a hard copy, please contact Vivian Daub in the Office of Planning, Analysis, and Accountability, Office of the Chief Financial Officer (202-564-6790), or

Strategic_Plan@epa.gov.