Becoming an Urban Planner by Michael Bayer & Nancy Frank PhD & Jason Valerius AICP

Author:Michael Bayer & Nancy Frank, PhD & Jason Valerius, AICP
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

Planning in the Federal Government

RICHARD SUSSMAN

Former Chief, Planning and Compliance Division, National Park Service, Southeast Regional Office

Atlanta, Georgia

Your first planning job was with the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, which at the time was an agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior. Tell me about that job and how it led to your current position within the National Park Service.

I started out working on outdoor recreation plans and that got me into natural resource planning. When the agency moved into the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service (during the late 1970s), I went with it and started working on natural heritage programs in a lot of different states in the southeast. When the National Park Service absorbed the agency, I changed jobs and started to do general management plans for NPS.

How has the planning within the National Park Service changed during that time?

The mission doesn’t change because of the mission of the National Park Service doesn’t change, but the way we do planning changes somewhat. The director’s orders change. Planning standards change in the parks. The basic NEPA laws are the same, but how the laws are interpreted changes, so it’s an evolving process. But we’re always using the same basic planning principles.

Over the years, general management plans have become less site specific and more attuned to desired future conditions. We used to do more development concept plans than we do today. Policies change. But general management plans are still the basis for how a park is managed for the next 15 to 20 years.

Local planners work with local residents. Who do NPS park planners work with?

The park is our primary client, and the public at large is our client. And we have stakeholder groups in each park. Some are more engaged than others. And, of course, we work with Congress.

Most people who want to work in the National Park Service know something about the Park Service and have a visceral desire to work here. Seldom do we get people who are foreign to our mission. They usually come to the job with an interest in doing national park planning.

What do you need to do to be successful planning in the federal government?

Patience. Lots of it. You need a willingness to work with a range of stakeholders and an ability to process a wide range of information and synthesize that information in the context of a host of options or alternatives. You need to have a vision to get to an outcome. There are various ways to manage a park, not just one answer or one way to get to an outcome. You have to be open to ideas and be able to communicate in a way that’s understandable to a broad range of interests.

Planners have quite a bit of public interaction and a lot of public meetings. At least three or four times during the planning process, we like to sit down with the public, from scoping to reviewing the preliminary alternatives to the final alternatives. We make every attempt possible for the public to understand our proposed actions, so you have to be a good public speaker.

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