Conference President Calls for National Initiative to "Make Stronger Communities a Priority" Boise Mayor to Address More Than 2,000 Delegates at
H. Brent Coles, Mayor of Boise and President of The United States Conference of Mayors, and Mayor James Whelan of Atlantic City will be among a number of Mayors taking prominent roles in the Brownfields 2000 Conference, taking place this week (October 11-13) in Atlantic City, NJ.
Mayor Coles will deliver a keynote address at Wednesday's opening plenary session, entitled "Making Stronger Communities a Priority." Led by Mayor Coles, the Mayors have been meeting since May to develop a transition strategy to increase investment in smart growth; as part of this effort the Mayors see brownfields redevelopment as a critical component of community revitalization and investment. The Mayors have pressed Congress to enact legislation that would accelerate local efforts to redevelop brownfield properties-by providing new resources to cities for site assessments and cleanups, changing Superfund liability rules to give relief to innocent parties, and clarifying the role of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the states in brownfield sites redevelopment. The Mayors have also urged the top policy advisors to the Bush and Gore Campaigns to expand investment in brownfields redevelopment during the next Administration.
According to the Conference of Mayors' 2000 survey on the status of America's brownfields, entitled Recycling America's Land, 201 cities identified more than 81,568 acres of land that were abandoned or underutilized-an acreage nearly the same as the total land area of the cities of Minneapolis and Pittsburgh combined. And more than 180 cities said they could support additional people moving into their city without adding appreciably to their existing infrastructure. Of these, 118 respondents estimated that, collectively, they could support more than 5.8 million new people in their cities-nearly equivalent to the population of Chicago and Los Angeles combined. (The full report is available on The Conference's website at usmayors.org/uscm/news/publications.)
Coles will be speaking to these and other city revitalization issues, such as transit-oriented development and the need for a new national rail policy (which Coles has made one of his top priorities as President of The U.S. Conference of Mayors this year) before the more than 2,000 officials and activists attending the Brownfields 2000 Conference. Other Mayors presenting at the Brownfields 2000 Conference include:
The United States Conference of Mayors is the official nonpartisan organization of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. There are about 1,100 such cities in the United states today. Each city is represented in the membership of the Conference by its chief elected official, the Mayor.
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