Polikov, Hurley bring spirit, engagement to CNU board

Photo 1 caption: Hurley Photo 2 caption: Polikov To help members track the work of the board and realize new ways to connect with the organization as it evolves, CNU is posting the minutes of the board’s thrice-yearly meetings, along with related memos and reports, at the board section of CNU’s web site (cnu.org/board). For similar reasons, these pages in New Urban News are used to profile those who have most recently joined the board. In this issue we profile Jennifer Hurley and Scott Polikov. Jennifer Hurley Jennifer Hurley has built her career around forging consensus among stakeholders on behalf of sustainable planning principles. With nine years of professional experience, ranging from program director of a community service internship program to three years with the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, Hurley specializes in group facilitation and mediation with respect to the built environment. Her planning work across the country centers on urban revitalization, dispute resolution and community visioning, strategic planning, neighborhood planning, transportation, and land development. Hurley has worked on development of several form-based codes and is a regular speaker in the SmartCode Workshop series. She is certified as a charrette planner by the National Charrette Institute and is a past Fellow of the Knight Program in Community Building at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Hurley’s collaborative approach has helped reshape aspects of CNU’s annual Congress and the organization’s initiatives. She helped introduce and lead the growth of interactive forums that have become fixtures at each Congress; they are now known as the Open Source Congress. Sending a strong signal that CNU is not an insiders’ club, the Open Source Congress has urbanists break into groups and use self-organizing tools to turn a shared interest in an issue or a cause into plans for a project addressing that issue or advancing that cause. Hurley’s efforts at the annual Congress meshed well with the desire of board members to nurture more meaningful member engagement. Board chair Ray Gindroz in particular has identified capitalizing on member enterprise as key to the long-term vitality of the New Urbanism movement and has worked closely with Hurley and CNU staff on a better-defined process for evaluating and advancing new CNU initiatives. Members can now anticipate just what it takes — including a work plan, application, identification of funding sources, and board approval, — to turn an idea into a recognized initiative. Already, one idea launched at the Open Source Congress — Sprawl Retrofits — has been accepted, becoming the organization’s newest initiative. Not surprisingly, Hurley hopes to focus on increasing member and public involvement in CNU. “My practice tries to facilitate high-quality urban design through good group decision-making,” she says. “As a board member, I hope to encourage more member participation in CNU initiatives and support more interactive formats for the annual Congress.” Scott Polikov Scott Polikov brings experience as a practicing attorney, town planner, and entrepreneur to CNU’s board. From his early-career years at the Washington DC, power law firm Patton Boggs to the public boards and commissions he has served on since returning to his home state of Texas, Polikov has stayed in close contact with the processes that create and reform public policy — and he extends the board’s abilities in this area at a time when policy change opportunities are expanding dramatically. Settling first in Austin after leaving DC, Polikov served on the boards of the Capital Metro transit authority and the regional metropolitan planning organization (MPO), where seeing the MPO being asked to approve a multibillion-dollar regional transportation plan that paid scant attention to development patterns and urban form was an eye-opener. Polikov became president of Gateway Planning Group, a national planning practice based in Fort Worth, which focuses on the marriage of place-making and the economics of transportation, as well as downtown redevelopment. Today Polikov works principally with fast-growing communities and developers to harness growth into walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. “The key to the success of the New Urbanism is scalability,” he says. “We must work with the finance, insurance, and building industries to figure out how to implement good urbanism on a much larger scale.“ Gateway’s awards include one of the inaugural Driehaus Award recognizing the nation’s best form-based codes. Before joining the board, Polikov invited CNU President and CEO John Norquist to join him on a Texas Transportation Commission committee that got the CNU-ITE context-sensitive urban thoroughfares manual formally recognized as a resource for the Texas Department of Transportation. Since joining the board in June, he has provided energetic and skilled leadership in advancing CNU’s policy goals federally, including the Sustainable Communities Partnership. “At a time when the country is literally rewriting the rules of the new economy …,” Polikov says he “will focus on CNU being at the table as the banks, the development industry and the federal government figure out those new rules.”