Church to Go Solar with City of Chicago Grant

Almost all content on this blog is written by me. On rare occasions, I have hosted a guest writer when I decided it was appropriate. In this case, I am sharing an announcement from my own church, which is entering an agreement with the City of Chicago for a grant to support installing a solar energy system on its roof. I am elated to share this news and my own role as both grant writer and primary contact for an administrative team that will work with the city to implement this dynamic project.

 

Jim Schwab

 

Augustana Solar Project Announcement

March 5, 2024

Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park Receives Major Grant for

Transformational Solar Energy Project

In February 2024, the City of Chicago awarded Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park and Lutheran Campus Ministry a $233,880 Chicago Recovery Plan (CRP) grant. The grant, a part of the CRP’s Climate Infrastructure Fund, will support the cost of a solar project to transform Augustana’s energy use. Funding for the CRP came partially from the federal American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

With a two-year implementation window, the grant will underwrite re-roofing a portion of Augustana’s building followed by the installation of 102 solar panels on top of the new roofing. As a part of the solar installation, new electrical work in the building will allow the congregation to use the panels to power its electricity needs.

According to the Rev. Nancy Goede, Augustana’s parish pastor, “Christians are called to be stewards in every aspect of life, both at church and at home. We’re also called to care for the created world. This project is a great way to connect our desire to be wise stewards of our facility with moving in a new direction to reduce energy consumption and counter climate change. It allows us to move away from fossil fuels, and to demonstrate to other religious communities and our neighbors that this is possible.”

Augustana’s grant proposal arose from discussions within its Green Team. Led by co-chairs Elizabeth Roma and Shirley Wilson-Sigler, the Green Team is a working group dedicated to connecting the congregation’s spiritual practices and traditions with solutions for climate change and environmental justice issues.

Green Team member Jim Schwab led the effort to develop and write the proposal. According to Schwab, “Solar energy is one of several renewable energy technologies that are critical in moving communities and nations away from reliance on fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas that add greenhouse gases to the Earth’s atmosphere. Solar rooftops are an ideal way also of decentralizing energy production. In the event of a grid failure during a disaster, they also allow buildings like churches, schools, and businesses to continue generating their own clean energy, enhancing community resilience in the process.”

Engineers estimate that, at times, Augustana’s solar array will produce more electricity than needed and that excess will be sold back to the grid, while at other times the congregation will continue to supplement power from the solar panels with electricity purchased from the grid. Averaged over time, the engineers predict that the energy generated will exceed Augustana’s current electrical usage.

The grant, administered by Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development, will reimburse Augustana’s costs. The congregation is securing short-term financing to bridge the gap between incurring the expenses and receiving the grant’s reimbursements, according to the congregation’s treasurer, Carolyn Rahaman.

A goal of the Climate Infrastructure Fund is to support projects that serve as examples for the community. “We pray that this project will offer an urgent yet hopeful message to our neighbors,” according to Augustana’s campus pastor, the Rev. Matthew Stuhlmuller. “Earth’s climate is changing, and all of us need to reimagine our use of the earth’s resources. Both religious and civic organizations can play a key role in modeling sustainable practices for the whole community to follow. Solar energy is only one piece in a much larger puzzle, but together, our combined efforts can generate an outsized impact for generations to come.”

For more information, contact:

Parish and Facilities Administrator

Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park and Lutheran Campus Ministry

5500 S. Woodlawn Avenue

Chicago, Illinois 60637

773.493.6451

office@augustanahydepark.org

The War Against Hope

“Let no joyful voice be heard! Let no man look to the sky with hope in his eyes!” says Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest as his captives slave away on his ship. “And let this day be forever cursed by we who ready to wake…the Kraken!”

Alexei Navalny, 2011 photo from Wikipedia.

This well-known quote from a surreal character in a popular movie is a remarkable fit for the mood unleashed in Russia by President Vladimir Putin with the death of 47-year-old Alexei Navalny, an unparalleled advocate of Russian democracy, who suffered for his commitment with confinement in an Arctic prison after repeated attempts to end his life with poison. Putin, who has no apparent compunction about eliminating his opponents in any way possible, seems determined to become not only the Davy Jones of Russia, but of the world. If there were any doubt that his minions operate across the globe, consider that just yesterday (February 19), Maxim Kuzminov, a Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine with his Mi-8 helicopter last August, was found shot to death in Alicante, Spain. There is a long history of such assassinations by Russian agents of known dissidents abroad.

But the most compelling visions of his intended dystopia are those of the arrests of hundreds of Russians doing nothing more than laying flowers at memorials for Navalny. They are not even allowed to mourn their dead in peace because that would allow them to look to the dreary Russian winter sky with hope.

Hope for those with love in their souls, and passion in their hearts, is forbidden in today’s Russia.

If you have any doubt on that point, consider the position of Metropolitan Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, who has supported Putin in his quest for conquest of Ukraine and once described Putin’s rule as “a miracle of God.” The church has actively suppressed opposition to the war against Ukraine among its own priests, recently expelling one for his refusal to read a prayer for Russia’s success and for his anti-war remarks. The position of the Russian Orthodox leadership, securing its own comfort from oppression through complicit support for Putin, denies spiritual solace to those who seek a better day in their homeland and whose consciences are troubled by the unnecessary death and destruction he has unleashed. The church has sold its soul in a historical quest for sovereignty under an evil regime. (There are echoes of such behavior among certain churches in the United States that have aligned with Donald Trump as a matter of transactional convenience, but let’s save that discussion for another day.) In this sorry role, the Russian Orthodox Church has degenerated into a mere arm of the state, enforcing social conformity in the face of powerful demands for a voice of conscience to lift the morale of the Russian people.

Image from Shutterstock

It remains for courageous advocates like Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, to brave the foul winds spreading from Russia and keep the candle burning. It remains for the rest of us outside Russia to recognize and confront the dangers posed not only by Putin, but by the “useful idiots” who continue to justify autocracy.

Jim Schwab

Filming on the Texas Gulf Coast

It has been a couple of months since I last posted a video of our progress in filming for Planning to Turn the Tide. That last article summarized our film efforts in Jacksonville, Florida, in September 2023, but we had another trip in the offing then, to the Texas Gulf Coast. In between, as noted in a January 1 post, I underwent prostate surgery on September 29, which required at least a month of rest and inactivity at home before venturing out again, in order to ensure successful recovery. But on November 7, I met up with videographer David Taylor at Houston Hobby Airport and we drove to Corpus Christi, where the annual conference of the Texas Chapter of the American Planning Association was getting underway. The new blog video presented here was filmed there but edited and produced later.

Devastation in the Bolivar Peninsula from Hurricane Ike, 2009

Despite my own challenges, what compelled this schedule was that conference at the American Bank Center in Corpus Christi because it allowed us to interview eight Texas planners who have been prominently involved in efforts to confront and address resilience issues along the Gulf Coast, where coastal storms and flooding remain major concerns. Hurricane Harvey, which struck in the fall of 2017, may be the most famous, and famously expensive, disaster of recent history in the area but is certainly not unique. People with a longer memory can cite Tropical Storm Allison, which struck Houston in 2001, and Hurricane Ike, which devastated Galveston in 2008, as part of the long parade of such events.

It is easy enough to cite shortcomings of the past that made destruction in such storms worse than it needed to be, but it is also important to note the resources that Texas has created to tackle those problems, including Texas Target Communities, a program at Texas A&M University that aids resource-challenged communities. These groups were present at the Texas APA conference, and we interviewed both Jaimie Masterson, the director of Texas Target Communities, and Shannon Van Zandt, a professor of urban planning at the Texas A&M School of Architecture, who has long researched and advocated for better affordable housing solutions in disaster recovery.

Tornado impacts in Van Zandt County, Texas, April 2017. Seven tornadoes struck the area in one evening.

I should also note that disaster resilience has been a consistent theme of the Texas Chapter. Back in November 2017, I spent time in Texas at the behest of the chapter, which asked me to facilitate and keynote a recovery workshop in Canton, Texas, following a series of tornadoes there, but I also worked with their Harvey Recovery Task Force well into 2020. The film trip grew out of that partnership, which extends even further back to my speaking at chapter conferences in El Paso and Galveston after Hurricane Ike. We want to thank the Texas Chapter for their logistical and promotional support during the conference.

Peer exchange workshop in Rockport, February 2020, involving Harvey and Sandy recovery planners. Kim Mickelson, of Houston, with microphone, is moderating this session.

Following our time in Corpus Christi, we drove up the coast to Rockport, the site of the first landfall of Hurricane Harvey, where we interviewed four community leaders, including a city council member, the local newspaper editor, the public works director, and a former president of the local chamber of commerce, about Rockport’s experience in recovery. I have learned a great deal in recent years about Rockport, in large part because of my work with Amanda Torres, the former city planner there, now working for the Corpus Christi Planning Department, and Carol Barrett, a veteran planner now living in Austin, who led APA’s Community Planning Assistance Team in Rockport in 2019. They helped me design the Rockport case study for an interactive workshop, including both graduate students and practicing planners, that is part of a course I teach for the University of Iowa School of Planning and Public Affairs.

We ended our trip in Houston, which included a tour of largely Hispanic neighborhoods in the shadow of the city’s huge petrochemical complexes, where they face ongoing racially disparate environmental impacts. We were hosted on that tour by TEJAS Barrios, a local environmental justice advocacy group. We hope to return to Houston, but our challenge for now is to raise substantial money to try to complete the film project in the coming year. Fortunately, our core team has grown, with more hands on deck focused on fundraising. If you are willing to help, you can donate here or use the QR code below to contribute online at the APA website.

 

Jim Schwab

Spiritual Depth of Martin Luther King

Holidays have a way of taming and diluting the real importance of the legacies and events they are meant to commemorate. This tendency is particularly true of today’s holiday celebrating the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These efforts reflect some discomfort with the true level of sacrifice and commitment involved in fighting for freedom. Resisting this tendency requires some real thinking and soul-searching.

Sometimes, a very good author helps us regain some needed perspective on what matters. Fortunately, a few months ago, Jonathan Eig issued a new, deeply researched biography of King that helps us understand better not only what King did in his short life, but why he did it and what forces made him who he was. Admirably, Eig does not shy away from any of the ugly difficulties that kept King in danger throughout a 13-year ministry that began in 1955 at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. The son of Martin Luther King, Sr., who was then the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, outgrew his father’s legacy but also benefited enormously from his father’s self-made path from the son of Georgia sharecroppers to a prominent leader in the Black churches of the South.

Over the past two weeks, I have been leading a discussion of this remarkable book—King: A Life—in the Adult Forum of Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park, in Chicago. The participation has been lively, and people have taken turns reading passages that I thought were especially illuminating. There is not room in one blog post to cover all that territory, so I highly recommend reading the book, but I will make what I think are some salient points about the King legacy.

First, I think it is hard for many people today, especially whites, to imagine the level of intimidation that racist thugs, including but hardly limited to the Ku Klux Klan, used in the post-Reconstruction South to suppress the Black vote, Black rights, Black dignity, and thus any semblance of true democracy. Eig relates one instance of family history in 1910, in which King’s ten-year-old father, then named Michael, was kicked by a white mill owner and sent home bleeding. His mother demanded to know who did that, then marched back to attack the mill owner with her own fists when he admitted doing this to her son. But her husband had to flee when a white mob arrived at their home. Black men who fought back, Eig notes, could pay with their lives.

The father remained bitter and became alcoholic even after returning home. King Sr., however, distilled the lesson that faith in God was the way out of that trap. He gained an education at Spelman College while working as a coal shoveler for a railroad company and became a preacher, ending up at Ebenezer. Later, in a 1934 visit to Germany, he was inspired by the legacy of Martin Luther to adopt that name in place of his birth name of Michael, and changed his son’s name, forever attaching the family to the legacy of the German religious reformer. Eig notes:

“He really related to Martin Luther,” said Isaac Newton Farris Jr., King’s grandson. “He had that same fighting spirit in him.”

His son would need that fighting spirit once he became the de facto and then real leader of the bus boycott that followed the arrest of Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Just four days later, King, at the invitation of other Black leaders in the city, gave a powerful speech to an overflow rally at the Holt Street Baptist Church that ignited the spirit of the Black community. It led thousands to spend the following year walking to work instead of riding the bus.

All that made King a huge target for an increasingly angry white community, or at least that large part of the white community that was resistant to justice. The White Citizens’ Council, which included police commissioner Clyde Sellers, claimed it grew from 800 members to nearly 14,000 as a result of the boycott. King was arrested and thrown in jail following a trivial traffic stop when he picked up Black passengers as part of an effort to provide rides for Black workers at designated carpool locations. Mayor Tacky Gayle had instructed police to tail and harass Black motorists who provided such rides. On January 30, 1956, while Coretta Scott King was hosting a friend at their home, they heard footsteps on the front porch, after which a bomb exploded, damaging the front of the house. King gave a speech that is remarkable for self-restraint while nonetheless demanding justice, instructing the crowd that assembled to “love your enemies” but also noting that he did not ask to lead the movement, but “if I am stopped this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right, what we are doing is just. And God is with us.”

Reread those last five words, for I think they are key to what is often missing from people’s recollection of who King really was. How did he succeed in leading a successful nonviolent revolution for major social change in America? I think it is worth quoting a whole paragraph from Eig, in which he nails the point that is often missing from discussion of the King legacy, the fact that he was committed to a life of deep faith despite all his fears that his life could be cut short:

In years to come, journalists, historians, and biographers would speculate about what made King special, about what gave him the courage and vision to lead. Some observers have stressed the competitive nature of King’s relationship with his father. Other have focused on cultural factors, noting the guilt he felt about his middle-class upbringing and pointing out that he arrived in Montgomery when liberation battles were erupting in Africa and Asia and when radio and television made it possible for a brilliant young preacher to be seen and heard in millions of homes. But the Reverend James Lawson, one of King’s contemporaries, has argued that those interpretations miss an obvious and powerful explanation—that of King’s calling from God. “That was my case, that was King’s case,” Lawson said. “It’s not . . . boasting . . . it’s the deep-down-inside awareness that connects your life up with the life force of the universe, the God who created the heavens and the earth, to quote the Hebrew poets. So, anyone who has that kind of a calling, that’s something that profoundly alters their way of thinking and behavior.”

There is a great deal of depth and detail in Eig’s book. Last September, at the Harold Washington Public Library in Chicago, in a program co-sponsored by the Society of Midland Authors (Eig lives in Chicago), I had the pleasure of hearing Eig speak and relate how he got turned on to working on this biography. The very next day, I acquired the book at a local store. After a major surgery two weeks later, which I related in my January 1 blog post, I had ample recuperation time to tackle a long book. I immediately turned to this biography, plowing through it day after day in rapt fascination, thinking about how I would have faced the challenges in King’s life, which ultimately ended in his assassination at age 38 in Memphis in April of 1968, an event that triggered a wide range of reactions including, unfortunately, urban riots.

In those 13 years that followed his assignment, at age 25, as pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, he not only watched the world change, but helped change it. The bus boycott ended with an NAACP victory before the U.S. Supreme Court in Browder v. Gayle, which effectively outlawed segregation in intrastate transportation. Later, he would deliver the famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., watch as President Lyndon Johnson signed major civil rights and voting rights legislation, march in the face of insults and brickbats for fair housing in Chicago, and support the garbage workers strike in Memphis that ended with his assassination. Profoundly aware of his own fears, flaws, and shortcomings, his faith nonetheless bolstered his courage and helped him refashion American democracy in a way that still enriches us today, even when we face new domestic threats to its preservation.

It is critical that we get in touch with the roots of that courage, so that we do not squander all that was won at such a high cost. It is critical that we believe that God meant us to be so much better.

Jim Schwab

Out of a Cannon

Image from Shutterstock

I have never been terribly enthusiastic about New Year’s Eve resolutions. This is not because I lack resolve, but because the start of a new year has usually struck me as a rather arbitrary time to gain such resolve or to turn over a new leaf. If one is committed to certain goals and principles in life, then almost any day will do for fashioning new objectives in serving those goals, depending on circumstances. Why January 1? I suspect that it is mostly a reminder for many people that they have not spent enough time thinking about or pursuing their goals. They may need to develop the habit on an ongoing basis rather than pretending that the start of a new year will make things different. Will power and commitment matter. Do you really want to make things different? If so, then why not make the decision on February 4, or your birthday, or even the Fourth of July? Any day of the year will do, as long as the commitment is real. That commitment may arise out of a life-changing event, but it does not have to. New Year’s resolutions often fade into the ether of our dreams because those making them have not developed an adequate habit of connecting their dreams with a determination to make them happen.

All that said, on this particular trip around the sun, New Year’s Day seems for me a perfect day to launch some resolutions, even if many are focused on unfinished business. But I don’t just want to pick up the pace in 2024. I want to be metaphorically shot out of a cannon on New Year’s Eve. I want to start the new year with a passion.

I say this not because I changed how I feel generally about new-year resolutions. It’s because, for me personally, January 1 is a remarkably convenient opportunity for reclaiming lost energy. What happens a year from now may be different.

For one thing, although I don’t want to overemphasize this, as early as April, there were signs that I was facing a reckoning with regard to a medical problem that had been dogging me in one form or another for about a dozen years. Somewhere back then, my physician referred me to a urologist because of high PSA scores. PSA refers to prostate-specific antigens, antibodies that fight cancer or infections in the prostate gland. That led to a long series of periodic biopsies to monitor the possibility of cancer serious enough to merit surgical attention or radiation treatment, but doctors found only the slightest trace of an indolent cancer and never acted on it. Over time, it became harder to take it seriously, but such monitoring at least produced reassurance nothing disastrous was happening.

But that is not the whole story. In 2012, during a flight from Chicago to Los Angeles for the annual APA National Planning Conference, I became very ill. It felt like influenza, but by the time I left the plane, my only priority was to find a taxi for a quick trip to the hotel, where I promptly became seriously ill after checking in. Only a long-distance consultation with my primary physician, followed by a visit to a nearby urgent care center, confirmed that what I thought was the flu was actually prostatitis and required a major regimen of antibiotics for the next two weeks. I spent much of the conference in bed, sweating through a fever and visiting the bathroom frequently, occasionally struggling to attend events, only to succumb again. Fortunately, the antibiotics salvaged a post-conference road trip with my wife, Jean, to visit relatives in northern California and return to LAX along the gorgeous Pacific Coast Highway.

As for my urologist back in Chicago, when I later recounted these events, his eyes widened, and he said emphatically, “People have died from infections like that.” I did not, and I think I was otherwise far too healthy for that outcome, but it was unquestionably one of the worst experiences I have had with any sort of illness. Prostatitis is simply not fun. It is a bacterial infection, not cancer, but it can drive up PSA scores to drastic levels.

Prostate cancer drives them up much more slowly. It is a grinding menace, and because I have known people who died from it, I took it seriously all along. In the meantime, however, a less potent but serious problem developed called benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). Basically, it involves the enlargement of the prostate gland, a process that is typical as men grow older, but the big question is how big and how rapid the growth. By April, one of those periodic biopsies produced very uncomfortable impacts just as I was about to undertake a full week of online teaching for the Emergency Management Institute, for which I am a certified instructor for courses related to post-disaster recovery. The biopsy occurred on Friday. I was in miserable shape on Saturday, and I was already exhausted when I logged on with the class, another instructor, and our course supervisor at 7 a.m. on Monday. Although the course supervisor said he did not notice much difference in my delivery, it was a case of only making it look easy. When the day was over, Jean could see that I was thoroughly exhausted. It got a little better later in the week, but it was still a struggle.

My new urologist, Dr. William Lin, who had performed the biopsy (the original one retired in March), chose in a follow-up visit to refer me to a specialist who was highly trained in a new surgery called HoLEP (holmium laser enucleation of the prostate), for an evaluation of my suitability for this treatment of a prostate gland that was now about three times normal size. Other than aging, I have not found any indication that the medical profession knows precisely why this happens. It was just my bad luck, I suppose. Dr. Amy Krambeck did not have an opening until August 10, but at that appointment, she and her team made clear that I was well above the threshold for the surgery, and we scheduled it for September 29 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. I also learned that she was regarded as quite possibly the best in the nation at this relatively new procedure, which basically uses laser treatment to hollow out the prostate gland, leaving the shell, thus drastically reducing bladder pressure, the main problem connected to BPH. I’ll let those interested follow the links to learn more. My focus here is still on New Year’s resolutions.

Why? Because the first thing I learned was that for at least a month afterwards, I was expected to adhere to some strict dietary limitations (mostly avoiding acidic foods and beverages) aimed at avoiding bladder irritation and allowing my internal organs to heal as well as possible. I was instructed to avoid most physical activity and not lift anything above ten pounds. The key was an intense focus on compliance, a self-discipline aimed at ensuring the best outcome.

Those who have been following the many blog video postings here in recent months will know that I spent much of my summer on trips designed to develop content for a documentary film about planning for community resilience in the face of natural disasters and climate change. By September, such travel became challenging, underscoring the real need for treatment. I had previously scheduled one more trip for early November in Texas—those blog videos are still coming—and deliberately asked Dr. Krambeck about the wisdom of its timing, which was tied to a Texas APA conference in Corpus Christi. She said I should be fine. I did get through it, but setbacks in the first week of November made me wonder as I worked with one of her assistants to determine their likely cause. They were ultimately blamed on inflammation, which could be addressed with Motrin or Ibuprofen. The trip took place, but not without its own challenges.

The reality is that recovery is often a bumpy road. Dr. Allison Shafron, who will see me on January 2 to assess my progress, texted a patient-portal welcome to “the roller coaster of recovery.” That struck me as curious because we use that same phrase in helping communities and local planners prepare for the long road to recovery after disasters. We even have a graphic slide in the EMI courses to illustrate the idea. By December, some other troubling personal matters were also seizing much of my attention, and I was feeling significant fatigue, sometimes as a result of a bit of sleep deprivation. I was also trying to rebuild strength and stamina by resuming a workout routine that I had suspended for nearly three months. I had to temper them initially to avoid overdoing it, but have gradually ramped up much of the exercise to pre-surgical levels. Some people might wonder if that might wear me out, and the answer is yes, but only temporarily. I have pursued fitness goals, on a noncompetitive basis mostly related to personal health, for years and know that the long-term benefits completely outweigh any short-term fatigue. That includes recovering from medical setbacks and injuries.

The reason for describing this at all is that it relates to my stated desire to be “shot out of a cannon” on New Year’s Eve. During much of 2023, I was decidedly passive about pursuing the sort of consulting work I have done in recent years because I was not confident about meeting the challenges involved while awaiting or recovering from the expected surgery. It did slow me down in ways that I am not used to. But I have also grown impatient to get on with normal life, to tackle new professional and volunteer challenges, and to achieve personal goals. These include raising money for and producing the HMDR documentary film, Planning to Turn the Tide; completing redesign of the disaster planning course I teach for the University of Iowa School of Planning and Public Affairs; possible additional course instruction for EMI; and finally, outlining and moving forward on some long-planned book projects. That is to say nothing of reinvigorating this blog with new content, as well as planning at least one personal trip to relax and see the world.

On December 20, I became only 74 years old. I expect to be around for a while, and I don’t plan to occupy a couch. For the first time in years, January 1 seems like a perfect time to fashion some resolutions that I will pursue with joyful vigor. Happy New Year, everyone!

Jim Schwab

APA Chapters Step Up to Host Film Project

Over the past few months, we have posted ten short blog videos detailing the progress of Planning to Turn the Tide, the documentary on planning for resilience against natural disasters being produced by the American Planning Association’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. In this post, we highlight the support of APA Chapters by featuring a staff member from APA Florida, Suzie Gray, who talks about her role at the APA Florida conference we visited in Jacksonville in early September.

Florida APA annual conference reception at Hyatt Regency Jacksonville

From our first interactions with Florida Chapter representatives and staff, they have been enthusiastic about supporting the project. Not only did they supply numerous contacts, suggesting people for interviews or information, but they also extended a gracious invitation for us to visit their annual conference in Jacksonville, which took place September 5-8. We have forged similar alliances with other APA chapters since then, one of which was illustrated in Colorado in July, and most recently in Texas, the subject of upcoming blog videos. These are really important opportunities for professional collaboration and support within the framework of a larger professional organization, but it also affords us an effective base of operations during a conference, especially in the use of space suitable for recorded interviews.

Click here to watch the video featuring Suzie Gray discussing her work with us under the banner of the Florida APA Chapter.

The core team of the HMDR video project wishes to thank APA Florida staff and volunteers for their wonderful assistance in putting us in touch with the best planning voices in their state and lending their credibility to what we are trying to accomplish. Our challenge would be much greater without them.

To support the HMDR film-making effort, use either the donations link here or the QR code below. We will acknowledge all donors, whose help we greatly appreciate. Make this your film too as we move forward.

Jim Schwab

Resilience Gains Traction in Florida

How does a regional planning council plan for and demonstrate local climate resilience in a state like Florida? One answer is diligence—establishing clear goals and the means of measuring progress toward achieving them, even in the face of some political skepticism and, in some cases, opposition to effective planning tools. For those of us involved in the film project of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, Planning to Turn the Tide: Creating Resilient Communities, this brought us back to Florida one more time right after Labor Day. The occasion was the annual conference of the Florida Chapter of the American Planning Association, which took place at the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville from September 5-8.

But first, I wanted to offer a short note for readers on why there has been a longer gap between posts on this blog since September. Two main factors delayed this article, which will, I hope, restore the earlier pace. The first was surgery. I was aware since last spring that medical developments would probably lead to prostate surgery, though I only learned in August what type of surgery and what it would mean. It took place on September 29, and I am still emerging from a variety of activity and dietary restrictions that followed during the recovery period. I may write about that more fully later, but it kept me out of circulation for about a month. The second was a week-long trip to Texas, for reasons similar to the Florida trips, that began with my arrival in Houston on November 7. We recorded additional blog videos in Texas, along with a dozen interviews for the movie, and you will read and hear about that in coming weeks.

Click here for a video summary of our interviews in Jacksonville.

Florida APA annual conference reception at Hyatt Regency Jacksonville

One impetus for our trip to Jacksonville was that the Florida Chapter extended a gracious invitation and welcome to our team early in the summer, encouraging us to attend and film at the conference, and providing accommodations to do so, including a press pass for our videographer, David Taylor, and a room next to the staff office for the conference in which we conducted the interviews. They were and have been fully supportive of our undertaking and helped forge a working partnership with our division that we have used as a model with other chapters subsequently. We are very grateful to Florida APA President Whit Blanton and the chapter staff for their assistance and their understanding of the value of what we are trying to accomplish.

The other primary impetus was a need to fill in the gaps in the story we had already recorded about Florida’s natural hazard challenges and struggle to confront the impacts of climate change, sea level rise, and rapid urban growth. We had learned, for instance, from staff at the Tampa Baby Regional Planning Council that they had borrowed lessons in resilience planning from the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, a four-county consortium that was the first to tackle the impacts of climate change on a multi-county regional basis. Their leadership is not surprising when one considers the high stakes of climate change, such as increased impacts of storm surge from hurricanes when coupled with sea level rise, or increased salt-water intrusion into groundwater sources, among other considerations. The potential ramifications involve billions of dollars in climate-resilient infrastructure investments over coming decades. That sort of problem, when faced realistically, absolutely demands visionary planning.

So, we decided to identify and interview some of the best and most experienced planners addressing these issues. The Florida APA conference afforded a certain efficiency in finding many of these people in the same place at the same time, but it also let us learn that the Northeast Florida Regional Council, based in Jacksonville, is adapting its own lessons in resilience in a part of the state that once tended to see itself as immune to the sorts of major coastal storms that afflict most of Florida. Now they are seeking to confront and prepare for such eventualities. In each region that begins to adapt resilience planning to its own needs, experience with such approaches grows, and Florida gets steadily smarter in its strategies for coping with its environmental challenges, even as population growth and new urban development continue to raise the bar. The challenge is relentless, but progress is essential.

To support the HMDR film-making effort, use either the donations link here or the QR code below. We will acknowledge all donors, whose help we greatly appreciate. Make this your film too as we move forward.

Jim Schwab

Lasting Lessons in Resilience

In the latter half of June 2008, it was hard to imagine Cedar Rapids as the city it had been just one month earlier. A massive flood along the Cedar River clobbered the city with a classic double whammy: About the time existing flood crests that had already swamped upstream Cedar Falls hit Cedar Rapids, a severe thunderstorm reached the city to compound the impact. The river, which runs through downtown in this city of 130,000 people, reached a flood level of 31.2 feet, besting the all-time previous record of 20 feet, reached in 1851 and 1929.

Downtown Cedar Rapids undergoing debris removal, late June 2008

Flood waters covered 14 percent of the city, more than 10 square miles. About 10 percent of the city’s population was evacuated from the deluge. Highway ramps became inaccessible, and at one point, a bus carrying prisoners from the county jail stayed just inches ahead of the rising waters to make its escape. City Hall, unfortunately situated on Mays Island in the middle of the river, was underwater, and governmental operations were moved to high ground elsewhere. In the end, nearly 1,300 flood-damaged homes were demolished, many making way for permanent open space as the city used federal hazard mitigation grants to acquire the properties with deed restrictions. Amazingly, as city officials have often said, there were no deaths due to the flood.

Relocated Czech & Slovak National Museum following June 2008 flood, Cedar Rapids

The avoidance of loss of life can be credited to the city and Linn County’s rapid response, which was not limited to emergency management. Within days, the Cedar Rapids City Council adopted a set of recovery goals that guided planning for long-term recovery for months and years afterwards. It shifted outside consulting contracts from riverfront planning to flood recovery. And it moved forward with a litany of creative approaches to business restoration, employment stabilization, and affordable housing development. Cedar Rapids became a living laboratory for community resilience.

For that reason, we made a special point during our Colorado to Iowa road tour for the film Planning to Turn the Tide, the documentary project of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, to interview five essential city staff members on Tuesday, July 18, before closing out our trip by heading back to Chicago. These included City Manager Jeff Pomeranz and Community Development Director Jennifer Pratt.

Click here to hear two Cedar Rapids officials—Jennifer Pratt and Brenna Fall—discuss why they are supporting the HMDR film project.

These lessons have had lasting impacts in Cedar Rapids, which also suffered massive tree canopy devastation, as well as building damage, from an August 2020 derecho whose worst winds, exceeding 140 mph, swept through Linn County, including several suburbs. Taking climate change seriously, the city also last year adopted its own climate action plan. Cedar Rapids has quite probably done more to attack these problems in a forward-looking fashion than any other city in Iowa.

In coming weeks, this blog will feature new video clips from a four-day visit to the Florida APA conference in Jacksonville in early September. Meanwhile, plans are afoot for a November trip to Texas to capture additional content from the Texas APA conference in Corpus Christi, follow a mobile workshop exploring Hurricane Harvey recovery in Rockport, a Gulf Coast city where Harvey first made landfall in September 2017, and visit environmentally disadvantaged communities in the Houston area and record interviews with planners and activists there. Those posts will acknowledge the gracious support we are already receiving from several organizations and institutions in Texas.

To support the HMDR film-making effort, use either the donations link here or the QR code below. We will acknowledge all donors, whose help we greatly appreciate. Make this your film too as we move forward.

Jim Schwab

Striving for Flood Resilience in Iowa

Collapse of the CRANDIC railroad bridge during the 2008 floods in Cedar Rapids, Iowa

In 2008, much of Iowa experienced such massive floods that 10 percent of Cedar Rapids was evacuated, books were being rescued from the basement of the University of Iowa Library, and homes were under water in Cedar Falls. Dozens of other Iowa communities faced flood waters to varying degrees, all remembering that it was only 15 years earlier that they had dealt with another massive emergency in the Midwest floods of 1993. After billions of dollars of damage and thousands of lost homes, Iowans were forced to confront the fact that so-called 100-year floods might in fact be far more frequent events of the future and that climate change was a reality for the Midwest as well as coastal states.

It was in this environment of concern about how Iowa would cope with future flood emergencies and disasters that the Iowa Legislature decided in 2009 to establish the Iowa Flood Center (IFC). Born of cooperative discussions between IIHR—Hydroscience and Engineering at the University of Iowa and state leaders, the Iowa Flood Center became a leading model for state technical outreach to communities regarding flood mitigation, flood awareness, and warning systems, including an extensive system of stream gauges. Centered at the Stanley Hydraulics Laboratory along the Iowa River, the Center manages the Iowa Flood Information System, a platform that gives communities across the state easy access to inundation maps, alerts, and real-time data on stream conditions.

Over intervening years, I have occasionally worked with staff at the Iowa Flood Center. In addition to their collaborative work in one flood recovery consulting project for the Iowa Economic Development Authority in which I participated, I also have hosted Associate Director Nate Young as a guest speaker in my University of Iowa School of Planning and Public Affairs class, “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery.” In every instance I have seen, IFC has been a class act. Visitors from other states have been intrigued with the Center as a model for their own states.

It should be no surprise at this point that I decided early on that our film project, Planning to Turn the Tide, needed to include some content about the work of the Iowa Flood Center and the changes it has introduced to flood preparation and recovery in Iowa. On July 17, as David Taylor and I were making our way back east from Colorado, we stopped in Iowa City for the purpose of taping an interview with IFC Director Witold Krajewski, a veteran environmental engineer who has become intimately familiar with the hazard mitigation and planning needs of the hundreds of small communities, as well as larger cities, throughout a state that has seen more than its fair share of flood disasters. We also met with Kate Giannini, Iowa Watershed Approach Program Manager, about access for our film project to flood footage and other resources from the Iowa Flood Center that would help tell the story visually as well as in words.

Click here to watch the blog video about our visit to Iowa City.

As always, if you wish to support the Planning to Turn the Tide documentary film project, use this link or the QR code below to access our donations link on the APA website. We can use your help and will truly appreciate the support.

Jim Schwab

Who’s Gonna Watch This Movie?

The field production of Planning to Turn the Tide, the documentary film project of the American Planning Association’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery (HMDR) Planning Division, has involved dozens of local volunteers and supporters in several states spread from Florida to California. In recent blog posts, I have been sharing our progress but not always featuring some of those volunteers. That is about to change.

Some of those volunteers were interviewed for the film because we felt that their experience and expertise supported our educational objectives for the project. Others have helped us identify people who should be interviewed, and others have led us on tours or directed us to other resources we needed to know about.

Molly Mowery, the Chair-elect of HMDR, has served as all of the above and been a great supporter. She is also the executive director of the Community Wildfire Planning Center, based in Colorado, and has spent years consulting with communities about better planning strategies to address wildfire hazards. In a recorded interview you can watch here, Molly and I discussed what we hoped to achieve in the film.

Steven Williams discusses post-fire rebuilding in Superior

David Taylor and I had visited with Lisa Ritchie, currently the planning manager for the city of Erie, Colorado, but formerly with Louisville, and Steven Williams, the planning manager for Superior earlier in the day on Friday, July 14. Lisa and Steve took us on walking tours of areas in both Louisville and Superior where hundreds of homes had burned in what started as a grass fire on December 30, 2021, now known as the Marshall Fire. Lisa and Steve helped author a report published by the Urban Land Institute studying the causes and consequences of that fire, which has also been examined by Boulder County Emergency Management, and recommending policies and regulations.

Rebuilding underway in Louisville, July 2023

Later that same day, David and I also recorded an early evening interview with Lori Hodges, the emergency management director for Larimer County, a vast area north of Boulder, whose largest city is Fort Collins, the home of Colorado State University. Lori provided a highly articulate argument for coordinating emergency management with comprehensive planning and other strategic county services to achieve a more holistic approach to building community resilience. She is an exemplar of a new generation of emergency managers who apply a much wider lens to their profession than has traditionally been the case. A new day of interdisciplinary collaboration in local government is dawning. It is a day I advocated more than a decade ago in the APA report, Hazard Mitigation: Integrating Best Practices into Planning. I have long believed that all communities will be better off when city planners and emergency managers, among other local officials, are meeting at the same table to find ways to make their communities safer and more resilient. People like Lori are making it happen.

If you wish to support our efforts, please use the QR code below to make a secure donation.

Jim Schwab