Secretary of Transportation Ray Lahood.

I’m attending the 9th Annual New Partners for Smart Growth Conference in Seattle and last night both Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan addressed the conference to unveil a groundbreaking new interagency partnership between their respective agencies and the EPA called Partnership for Sustainable Communities. You can read a complete description of the program in the Seattle Times here. I think this is great news. What’s it mean to Spokane? The silos of housing, transportation, and the environment are being breached at the federal level and new money is going to be made available to cities that work hard to consider how all these three aspects interact when developing new projects. Cities that are able to connect new housing, transportation, and environmental benefits will have the best shot and receiving competitive federal grants. That means wholistic planning will be rewarded. That means Spokane has a lot work to do. But this means the federal government wants to lead, not follow, on sustainable economic development. I find this pretty exciting. Making connections between the work these federal agencies do will mean there is less chance of the environmental impacts of large transportation projects being ignored or having transportation projects skip over low incoming housing–less disconnect. Some folks who feel President Obama has not been doing enough to implement the issues he was elected on may not be aware of the ground-breaking work that his cabinet secretaries are doing such as Partnership for Sustainable Communities. I’m looking forward to seeing this initiative go forward.