Portland, Maine
Sustainable Design Assessment Team
March 30-April 1, 2010
J. Todd Scott, AIA – SDAT Team Leader
Todd is a licensed architect who specializes in historic preservation and downtown revitalization. His preservation experience includes stints with Oklahoma City, as historic preservation officer, and with King County, Washington, where he currently provides assistance for historic properties in that county and sixteen suburban and rural communities. He recently completed the intensive level survey of 175 historic barns on the Enumclaw Plateau and 200 historic residential and commercial properties in Kent, both in King County.
He has been involved in the rehabilitation of hundreds of structures in dozens of small downtowns as the state architect for Oklahoma Main Street and for DesignWorks, an arts-based design charrette program. Todd also served as community development director and assistant city manager for the city of Astoria, Oregon. He has presented at numerous state, regional, and national conferences on topics ranging from sustainability in design to mounting grass roots campaigns for endangered structures.
Todd has served on the boards of various non-profit agencies including heritage organizations, community development corporations, urban renewal authorities, and architectural foundations.
Patricia Smith, ASLA, AICP - Connectivity
Patricia Smith, ASLA, AICP has more than 20 years experience providing urban design and landscape architecture services to private and public sector clients. She specializes in streetscape improvements. With ZGF, she prepared the Master Plan for Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood which received a national AIA Urban Design Award in 2001, followed by the landscape design plans for the boulevard, including extensive median landscaping. Construction was completed in 2001. She designed and prepared construction documents for Phase 1 streetscape and landscape improvements in the Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment District around Staples Center and prepared the Streetscape Master Plan for future improvements. Pat prepared the Mission Street Specific Plan for the City of South Pasadena in 1995 and more recently prepared a Downtown Streetscape Plan and construction documents for the same area. She worked with the local community in the residential South Park community of Los Angeles to design Venice Hope Park, which includes an integrated public art component. She has prepared more than 20 landscape plans for elementary, middle and high schools, with an emphasis on replacing asphalt with play fields and planting area and providing shade through strategic tree planting.
Seleta Reynolds, AICP – Bicycle and Pedestrian Planning
Seleta Reynolds, AICP has 12 years of experience planning, funding, and implementing active transportation projects. She is the leader of Fehr & Peers's Pedestrian and Bicycle Discipline Group, meaning she is involved in most complex bicycle and pedestrian-related studies conducted by the company, and she manages the firm's Seattle office. She serves on the TRB Pedestrian Committee, the WalkScore Advisory Board, the National Complete Streets Steering Committee, and as the President of the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals. She has lectured on complete streets for Portland State University, the University of California at Berkeley, and San Jose State University. Seleta contributed to the National Safe Routes to School toolbox and the upcoming AASHTO Guide to the Development of Bikeways. Recent projects include bike design guidelines for the City of Redmond, WA; a multi-modal plan for Cal State Long Beach, CA; Safe Routes to School plans and designs for Sonoma and Santa Clara, CA; and bicycle master plans for the cities of Kent and Des Moines, WA. She has written grants totaling over $2 million for bicycle and pedestrian projects throughout the west. Prior to joining Fehr & Peers in 2001, she was the bicycle and pedestrian coordinator for the City of Oakland, California. One of her favorite recent projects done in her spare time was a civic art collaboration with Steve Lambert to create a series of posters envisioning the future of transportation unconstrained by politics, funding, or feasibility. The posters were installed in kiosks along Market Street in San Francisco, CA.
Neil Takemoto – Creative Economy/Community
Neil Takemoto is the founding director of CoolTown Beta Communities, a crowdsource-based placemaking and economic development firm codeveloping natural cultural districts with creatives.* His work over the last 14 years has been committed to the development of places with significant economic, environmental and social benefit, currently working in Syracuse, New Orleans and Washington DC.
Neil is the founder of CoolTown Studios, a ‘crowdsourcing cool places for creatives’ blog/news site that attracts 40,000 unique visitors a month. It has been featured in Architect Magazine and the ULI’s annual developers conference.
He is also the cofounder of Bubbly, a crowdsourcing web application, and Mobfuse, a crowdsourcing consulting firm. With Andres Duany, Neil co-founded the National Town Builders Association in 1997, the only business trade group of Smart Growth/New Urbanism real estate developers. Prior to that, he founded a national nonprofit educational clearinghouse for the New Urbanism field.
Richard Goll – Youth Development
Richard Goll, co-founder and principal officer of Onsite-Insights, has over 35 years of experience in the field of youth development, with the last 15 focusing on youth and adult partnerships and youth engagement. From 1973 to his retirement in 2001, Rich was Chief Executive Officer of Alternatives, Inc., a not-for-profit youth development organization in Hampton, Virginia, specializing in youth engagement and the creation of youth and adult partnerships. During this time, he guided the agency through many phases, each of which has been recognized for excellence at a local, state, and national level.
From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Rich was responsible for the development and implementation of substance abuse treatment and prevention services in Maine, New York, and Virginia. In 1985, Alternatives, Inc. was recognized as the premier school-based substance abuse prevention service in the country. Also during this time, Rich co-founded and was a president of the Virginia Association of Drug and Alcohol Programs. He was instrumental in the development of the original certification process for Virginia's substance abuse counselors and served on a White House Commission studying national policy governing substance abuse services for youth.
In the early 1990s he guided the organization from substance abuse specific work into the field of youth development. He also was one of the chief architects for the youth civic engagement initiative in Hampton. This initiative was recently awarded Harvard's 2005 Innovations in American Government Award. When he retired, Alternatives Inc. was providing 34 different services that served as laboratories and research efforts for determining the most effective youth development, youth and adult partnership or youth engagement practices.
Currently he speaks and trains across the country on topics including youth master planning, youth
engagement, youth and adult partnerships and organizational visioning and culture. He serves as a trainer and curriculum specialist for Search Institute, and consults with school districts, city governments, foundations and commissions, as well as local, regional, state, and national service organizations. He has authored or assisted in the development and publication of numerous articles, manuals, and curricula.
Reemberto Rodriguez, Housing/Neighborhood Revitalization
Reemberto Rodriguez recently became the Director of the Silver Spring Regional Center. In this appointed position he is responsible for the efficient and effective delivery of public services and policy development for a major unincorporated area in Montgomery County, Maryland. Previously, he was the Training Manager for the Community Building and Organizing Professional Certificate Program at NeighborWorks America's Training Institutes. He coordinated the curriculum for this Program as well as the curriculum for the Community Leadership Institutes, a regular convening of residents, volunteers, and partners of NeighborWorks Network member organizations. He has worked for NeighborWorks America's Organizational Assessment Division and Field Offices. Reemberto's background includes community organizing, leadership development, civic participation, community design, urban planning, and teaching at the graduate level. He was an active member in his neighborhood in Atlanta for over 30 years before moving with his family to the Washington D.C. area three years ago. Reemberto holds Masters degrees in Architecture and Community Development; and is a graduate from the Development Training Institute fellowship program. He lives near downtown Silver Spring with his wife and two sons.
Dave Rodgers, Green Infrastructure
Dave Rodgers, PE, LEED® AP is a principal civil engineer at SvR Design Company, a Seattle-based landscape architecture and civil engineering firm specializing in integrated and environmentally responsible design. SvR’s areas of practice include green infrastructure, complete streets, civic and community centers, mixed-use development, housing, parks and recreation, and environmental restoration. Dave has worked on a variety of projects from affordable housing redevelopments, to infill housing and living buildings, to parks and arterials. He also has extensive experience with low impact drainage design including natural drainage systems. He led the design of the third phase of the 102-acre HOPE VI New Holly Housing Redevelopment and has led the design for a number of community oriented streetscapes, parks and trails, including the implementation of the Seattle Bicycle Master Plan. Dave is a professional engineer with 17 years of experience; he holds a degree in Civil/Environmental Engineering from Clarkson University.
AIA STAFF:
Erin Simmons
Erin Simmons is the Director of Design Assistance at the Center for Communities by Design at the American Institute of Architects in Washington, DC. Her primary role at the AIA is to provide process expertise, facilitation and support for the Center’s Sustainable Design Assistance Team (SDAT) and Regional and Urban Design Assistance Team (R/UDAT) programs. In this capacity, she works with AIA components, members, partner organizations and community members to provide technical design assistance to communities across the country. To date, Erin has served as staff lead on over 20 design assistance teams. Prior to joining the AIA, Erin worked as senior historic preservationist and architectural historian for an environmental and engineering firm in Georgia, where she practiced preservation planning, created historic district design guidelines and zoning ordinances, conducted historic resource surveys, and wrote property nominations for the National Register of Historic Places. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Florida State University and a Master’s degree in Historic Preservation from the University of Georgia.
Joel Mills
Joel Mills serves as Director of the Center for Communities by Design at the American Institute of Architects. He provides process expertise, facilitation and support for the Center’s Sustainable Design Assistance Team (SDAT) and Regional and Urban Design Assistance Team (R/UDAT) programs. In this capacity, he works with AIA components, members and partner organizations to provide technical assistance to communities across the country on sustainability and urban design. His expertise is in civic health. His experience includes community-based technical assistance, process design, facilitation and training across a number of fields including juvenile justice reform, local government, education, family strengthening, civic media and emergency management. During the 1990s, Mr. Mills spent several years supporting international democratization initiatives by providing technical assistance to parliaments, political parties, local governments, civic and international organizations. His scope of work included constitutional design and governing systems, voter and civic education, election monitoring and administration, political party training and campaign strategy, collaborative governance, human rights and civil society capacity building. He maintains active memberships in the International Association of Facilitators (IAF), the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2), and the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD). He also serves on several public and private boards. His work has been featured on ABC World News Tonight, Nightline, CNN, The Next American City, Smart City Radio, The Washington Post, and other major media sources.
