Speakers: Paul Meuser and Sandy Vance:

Paul D. Meuser, AICP, LEED®AP

Paul is a professional Urban Designer and Planner with 20 years experience creating innovative, transit-oriented and pedestrian-friendly mixed-use communities. Striving to balance the varied goals of homebuilders, developers, land owners and public agencies, his work emphasizes the creation of interesting, livable, sustainable neighborhoods that promote and reinforce a strong sense of place. Paul’s work places a special emphasis on developing people-friendly, walkable communities that provide a wide variety of housing in close proximity to jobs, schools, recreation, retail, and public transportation. His work represents some of the most prominent and prestigious projects planned for California in recent years.

Paul’s projects range from planning small-scale urban infill sites to mid-size new towns and communities to the development of large-scale regional growth strategies. He is well-versed in the procurement of project entitlements and brings substantial experience to the writing and processing of Specific Plans, formulating Design Guidelines, facilitating Community Outreach, and managing projects from inception to approval. He is known for his ability to bring multiple stakeholders to consensus, fostering a strong sense of shared ownership in the communities he works closely with them to create.

Paul’s desire to provide for human scale, civic identity, and ecological sustainability in his projects is guided by the principles of New Urbanism, Low Impact Development (LID), and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED ®). He is an avid outdoorsman, cyclist, runner and explorer committed to making a positive contribution to the communities in which he practices.

Paul has a degree in City and Regional Planning from California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo, and is working on a graduate degree in Green Architecture at the San Francisco Institute of Architecture. He is a principal at Wood Rodgers, Inc. in Oakland.

Sandy Vance, ASLA, RLA, APA

Nobody has yet figured out how a former pitcher for the LA Dodgers possibly made the transition in life from professional sports to becoming an environmental “architect on the land.” However, as early as 1977, decades before “green” or “sustainable” were on the world’s radar screen, Sandy already had his fingers into the design and planning of environmentally friendly new towns and communities. Educated at Stanford, with a Masters from Cal Poly, Pomona, for Sandy, “green” has become a career way of life and brings with it a commitment to play a meaningful role in planning sustainable places to live, work, and play for the 21st century.

30 years of just about every conceivable kind of design on the land have taken him to places far and wide, from California to the Pacific Northwest, from New England to Florida, from Texas to Arizona. And just to keep things interesting, in recent years he has taken his love and passion for land planning to major new town projects in South Korea, Ghana, West Africa, and Moscow, Russia. From the moment a project begins to emerge as a dream in someone’s mind, as it develops and becomes initial scribbles and sketches on a drafting board, then surges into a development layout with architecture, landscaping, and engineering plans, and finally to the point where the “dream” takes shape on the ground as reality, Sandy is often there to provide his ideas and expertise. Whether it’s new homes or neighborhood parks, whether retail centers or eco-preservation of trees and creeks, new office complexes or clean lakes, creeks and rivers, Sandy is required to bring his experience and ideas to the table to insure that innovative, yet responsible and cost effective, decisions are made and compellingly presented to clients, agencies, politicians and the public.

As we enter into this new age and environment of “the environment,” Sandy and other land planners like him are being asked to understand not just designing on the land, but transportation, economic feasibility, sociological implications, landscape architecture, ecological considerations, water/sewer/hydrology, political contexts, and how to run a stakeholder workshop, just to name a few. “Smart growth,” “New Urbanism,” “LEED-certified,” “sustainable design,” “green revolution” are all buzz words that define this new era in which Sandy and his colleagues seek to find the balance between “the dream” and “the practical.”