News

Attendees:

• Greg LeRoy – Good Jobs First
• Mary Kyle McCurdy – 1000 Friends of Oregon
• April Putney – Futurewise
• Carrie Dolwick – Transportation Choices Coalition
• Rachel DiResto – Center for Planning Excellence
• Adam Garcia – Greenbelt Alliance
• Stephanie Thomas – Colorado Environmental Coalition
• Andrew Austin – Transportation Choices Coalition
• Katy Hartnett, Jeri Mintzer, Melissa Schreiber-Stahl, Rayla Bellis, Neha Bhatt, Elisa Ortiz – SGA

Federal Policy Update (Katy Hartnett)

• The Senate Appropriations Committee voted to preserve funding for the HUD Office of Sustainable Communities ($90 million) and DOT’s TIGER program ($550 million), both of which were zeroed out in the House bill.
• Current fiscal year ends tomorrow, and a 1 week CR was passed. We expect Congress to follow the work of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, which will follow the following dates:
• 11/23 – Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction votes on proposals to reduce the deficit by 1.5 trillion over 10 years
• 12/23 – Congress must pass the proposal or broad cuts will be triggered across all agencies
• We may be reaching out about the Partnership for Sustainable Communities in mid November
• Senator Menendez introduced the Livable Communities Act with 17 others; similar to Dodds’ bill last year; Authorizes HUD Office of Sustainable Communities and the Regional Planning and Community Challenge grants

Good Jobs First (Greg LeRoy)

• Organzied 2 bootcamps (training conference): Paired ATU presidents with community organizing groups. There are 200,000 members of the ATU and 15 million transit riders, though the transit riders are not organized
• Transit rider organizing manual will be available later this year. Created for the first time ever a field mobilization department to help local citizen run campaigns
• Currently working on compiling an inventory of pro-transit employers with plans to establish a new 501(c)3 for transit rider organizing (to promoting best practices, etc)
• For more information on the bootcamps:
• Addressing America’s Transit Crisis (PDF)
• Organizing Union Members and Employers for Transit (PDF)
•  Subsidy Tracker: national search engine for state economic development subsidies and can map the geographic distribution of the subsidies. They have found that there is no alignment of goals between state policies for economic development and land use or long range planning. Thee silos have resulted in an encouragement of sprawl. The data is searchable and downloadable, with street address data for companies receiving subsidies in many states (AZ, CT, IL, IN, KY, LA, MI, MN, NJ, NY, ND, OK, RI, WA).
• Click here to visit Good Jobs First and here more information on the subsidy tracker.

The next coalition call is scheduled for Thursday, October 27th at 4pm eastern.