Bridge Builders Award
Former Maryland Governor Parris Glendening and Former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman for their collaboration to create a resource, the Governors’ Institute on Community Design, that advises and guides governors and other state leaders on addressing issues of growth and development in their states.
As the region gains an increasingly important role in the global economy and as regional planning takes on new complexity, the role of states in growth and development is critical to ensuring that nonpartisan solutions are found to some of the most pressing issues of our future. With this idea in mind, former Maryland Governor Parris Glendening and former New Jersey Governor and former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman led the creation of the Governors’ Institute on Community Design (GICD) to help guide governors as they think about efficient use of their land.
Since 1986, the Mayors’ Institute on Community Design, a partnership program between the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Architectural Foundation, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors has helped mayors understand and guide planning and development in their community. Having recognized the success of the availability of this type of leadership training for elected officials, Governor Glendening, one of the founders of the smart growth movement, had the idea to create a similar program for governors. Governor Whitman was the first person he thought of as a collaborator for her leadership on issues of growth and development, and also for the potential of creating a strong nonpartisan agenda with leaders working across their differing political parties.
The two governors led the development along with their organizational partners, the Smart Growth Leadership Institute of Smart Growth America and the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland. GICD was officially inaugurated in 2005, with funding primarily from the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. During that process, the partners arrived at a new approach to leadership development, where nationally renowned experts actually go into an individual state and work with a governor and his/her cabinet for a day and a half, which has resulted in new partnerships in numerous states around the country that have overcome the institutional, historical, and cultural issues that often prevent a state’s departments from working with one another on issues.
Through this unique approach and through their extensive resources related to smart growth and common sense planning, Governors Glendening and Whitman are setting the stage for states to become new, stronger players in ensuring that communities of tomorrow are adequately addressing everything from traffic congestion to air quality to obesity to affordable housing and providing a better future for all.