Video: National Planning Award for Governor O’Malley

This is the video the American Planning Association produced to announce the “National Planning Excellence Award for Planning Advocate” that it gave to Governor Martin O’Malley this spring. He was the first governor so honored in nearly a decade by the national professional planning organization.

Picking up an award for Governor O’Malley

Md Planning Secretary Richard E. Hall with APA award for Governor O'Malley

By Richard Eberhart Hall

I was honored yesterday to accept a national planning award on behalf of Governor Martin O’Malley at the national conference of the American Planning Association, the largest professional planning organization in the country, representing 40,000 members. The APA selected Governor O’Malley for its 2012 National Planning Leadership Award for his advocacy of green policy and smart-growth planning.

National Planning Award for Governor O’Malley

The American Planning Association today announced its national planning awards for 2012 — the “Oscars” of the planning profession — and gave Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley its National Planning Excellence Award for a Planning Advocate. Of the total 14 awards presented by the APA, only 2 went to individuals, Governor O’Malley being one. Maryland Planning Secretary Richard Eberhart Hall hailed the recognition. 

The association noted that Governor O’Malley adapted for planning some of the statistical tools he had used as mayor of Baltimore to combat crime and other problems. In 2007, the governor created a rigorous accounting program called BayStat for state agencies to ensure progress toward restoring the Chesapeake Bay. His departments of planning, natural resources and agriculture developed web-based tools called AgPrint, GreenPrint and GrowthPrint to better identify areas for growth and preservation. A proponent of Transit-Oriented Development, he has championed two light rail projects in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. areas. His administration also recently created Maryland’s first statewide growth plan, PlanMaryland.

Congratulations, Maryland!

“The Upsizing of White Flint”

This article is featured in the October 2011 issue of Planning, the magazine of the American Planning Association

Jeff Peterson, a U.S. Navy nurse, phoned his wife Kristine to describe the apartment he’d found for them and their four-year-old son, Jack, in a spot just north of Washington, D.C. They had lived for several years on the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where frills were rare. So when he explained to her that the new apartment had a large, fancy su­permarket on the ground floor, she nearly cried.

Plan for the Valleys, plan for the ages

Spiro Agnew squirmed in his chair as he listened to consultants in April 1964 describe their plan for preserving the mostly rural valleys of northern Baltimore County. They had been hired by a wealthy group of landholders to develop the strategy, and Agnew, then the head of Baltimore County government, didn’t mask his impatience with their exquisite maps and data projections.

“Gentlemen, don’t go any further,” Agnew halted the consultants, recalled Bill Roberts, one of them. “I’ve had enough.  If I honored this, everyone with a T-square and a pencil would be doing the county plan for us.”