PVP Democrats Monthly Meeting

Date/Time: Sunday, May 15th @ 2:30pm

Social time: 2:00pm

Location: PVP Library, Community Room

Topics:

Paying the Freight:  The Current Crisis in Transportation Finance and What to Do About It

by Martin Wachs, PhD

Martin Wachs retired as a professor of civil and environmental engineering and professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, where he also served as director of the Institute of Transportation Studies. Prior to this, he spent 25 years at UCLA, where he served as chairman of the Department of Urban Planning. He retired as senior principal researcher and director of the Transportation, Space and Technology Program at the RAND Corporation.

Dr. Wachs is the author of 160 articles and four books on subjects related to relationships between transportation, land use, and air quality; transportation systems; and the use of performance measurement in transportation planning. His research addresses issues of equity in transportation policy, problems of crime in public transit systems, and the response of transportation systems to natural disasters, including earthquakes. His most recent work focuses on transportation finance in relation to planning and policy.

He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a UCLA Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award, the Pyke Johnson Award for the best paper presented at an annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB), and the Carey Award for service to the TRB.

Explaining the Water Replenishment District

by Jim Kennedy, Candidate for WRD, Div 2

The Water Replenishment District manages groundwater for 43 cities in LA County and has been designated as part of the California Statewide Groundwater Elevation Monitoring (CASGEM) Program, which makes groundwater information available. Mr. Kennedy helped build community support for water conservation for the Water Replenishment District’s Groundwater Reliability Improvement Program.  He has been involved in building community support for public works projects through policy formulation, project advocacy, and by facilitating dialogue to expand public engagement in project development and implementation. His brief presentation will describe how our various water agencies all fit together and will bring us up to date on our current water situation.  

Mr. Kennedy has a background in business development and has degrees in economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science and the College of William & Mary.  He has worked on several local, state, and federal campaigns, since 2006 has been a California Democratic Party State Central Committee Delegate and served on the Board of the Los Angeles County Young Democrats from 2005-2007. Since 2007, Jim has been an active Board member of the Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters; and in 2014, Jim joined the Board of the Friends of Ballona Wetlands. In addition, Jim has served as a volunteer mediator in the Dispute Resolution Program of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office.