Generally you have like ten people,
and it might be a particular city or issue, like Grand Forks, North Dakota
wanted to rebuild their downtown, re-plan it after the Red River floods.
A lot of times it's just a private development but a lot of times it's a downtown
where you come in and you're there for a week, you've got background material, you have interviews.
So I've chaired I think it's a total of twenty-I didn't chair the first two-
but the most important ones were in New Orleans after Katrina.
That was in '05
and that was a larger panel and much more-.
That was real stuff we were doing.
It was very controversial. There was no series of recommendations that wouldn't be controversial,
Actually we recommended basically a lot of recommendations but the major one
had to do with where to rebuild and when and what should go first.
The area that was really a flood-prone area,
that probably from the beginning probably would not be able to be built on,
but we didn't say never.
But we said three areas:
One get started right now,
the second one took some planning, and the third one, you know, we said different patterns of development.
That was-we had a map, not with exact streets
but general, and it was very controversial.
It doesn't sound like it would be
but on the one hand the more environmentally
structured entities would say never develop this area.
The folks that lived there, most of whom were
disadvantaged in terms of income,
would say we want to build there tomorrow.
There's a big difference between "never" and "tomorrow."
So we didn't necessarily try to bridge that gap other than to say
that it took a lot of planning.
When it was redone maybe it would be built with some more cluster development,
maybe you'd have to do some more earthwork grading,
elevation changes, but there were a lot of other recommendations too,
how to organize.
But it was very much a challenge because we normally have ten people
and in this case we had during the course of the week like forty people
that were on the panel.
some of them were very key like,
I can't remember her name, but I guess the top elected official in Manhattan
that had dealt with the World Trade Center issues.
She was on the panel.
She couldn't stay the whole week but we wanted her to be part of the presentation
because of credibility. She's an African American woman.
She was very respected.
So that was very difficult but I think we did a good job,
and they followed a lot of the guidelines,
but it's very difficult.
That was a big challenge
but I think having been chairman of ULI
and mayor of a city, and particularly a city that-.
North Carolina is culturally probably closer to New Orleans
than say Detroit,
so I think they felt comfortable with me as a personality.