New Partners for Smart Growth arrive in the Emerald City February 4-6, 2010

The 9th Annual New Partners for Smart Growth “Building Safe, Healthy and Livable Communities”

Conference is being held next week in Seattle. The conference will tackle the balancing of environmental, economic and livability issues in our cities and towns necessary in order for the Pacific Northwest to continue being a most desirable place to live and work. Seattle was chosen due in part to its being named one of the top 10 green cities in the U.S. by National Geographic’s “The Green Guide”, (2005). In addition, the Seattle area has a variety of healthy, walkable, bicycle and transit friendly, livable towns and cities that will are models for the rest of North America making Seattle a very desirable venue for such a conference.

Last year the conference was held in Albuquerque, New Mexico and was heralded as a huge success bringing together local elected officials, city and county staff, landscape architects, developers and builders, planners, transportation professionals and traffic engineers, public health professionals, architects, bankers, realtors, urban designers, parks and recreation professionals, school superintendents and board members and facilities staff, environmentalists and a host of civic advocates.

The conference will include “a dynamic mix of plenaries, breakouts, implementation workshops, specialized trainings, peer-to-peer learning opportunities, and coordinated networking activities”. Most exciting will be the tour of local model projects in Seattle and the greater Puget Sound Region. This tour includes cities and towns such as Kirkland, Mercer Island, Mill Creek, Snohomish, Highpoint, Bainbridge and others. Overall there will be information and examples that will interest just about everyone with close to 90 sessions and workshops, tours and a wide variety of speakers. Registration is still open for the conference.