BRATTLEBORO — Lawrence “Chris” Campany created farmers' markets in Baton Rouge, served as a zoning enforcement officer in Maryland, and most recently taught landscape architecture.
With genial and low-key ease, Campany, 43, described his job experiences - widely varied, yet falling under a broad umbrella of land-use planning - as an “interesting path.”
Campany began his new role as executive director of the Windham Regional Commission on Aug. 9, succeeding retiring director James Matteau of Westminster.
Campany and his wife, Tracy, a theater professional, have a “temporary abode” in Brattleboro and have begun looking to buy a house for them and their dog Quinn and their cat Henry.
The couple both grew up in Floyd, Va., a town of fewer than 500, which he describes as a “very artistic community.”
“Growing up there, one of the reasons I loved the area is the landscape,” Campany said. “The landscape looked more like Vermont than Virginia.”
Now, Campany finds himself in an another area he describes as “a beautiful and culturally rich part of the world,” in a job that lets towns and their citizens look at their past, understand their present and plan for the future.
Campany holds a bachelor degree in political science and a master of public policy and administration from Mississippi State University. In 2003, he earned a master landscape architecture degree from Louisiana State University.
He worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a program analyst, an experience that left him “somewhat disillusioned” because working at the federal level was “too far away from where the impacts took place.”
In 1996, Campany began a focus on local agriculture, serving as executive director of the Baton Rouge Economic and Agricultural Development Alliance, and in 2000 began work as federal policy coordinator for the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture.
After working in planning and zoning enforcement for Orange County, N.Y., and Calvert County, Md., respectively, Campany worked for two years as professor of landscape architecture at Mississippi State University.
There, he taught “community- and neighborhood-scale design, urban planning, site planning, community-based planning and graduate research methods.”
The commission
The Windham Regional Commission, one of 11 regional planning commissions (RPCs) in the state, serves 27 towns, including all of Windham County.
Established in 1965, the WRC operates under the auspices of the 1967 Vermont Planning and Development Act, which created planning districts as political subdivisions, similar to counties.
The commission operates under the leadership of its commissioners - two appointed by each member town, plus a number of at-large “citizen interest commissioners” with particular regional interests, including Brattleboro Development Credit Corp. (BDCC) Executive Director Jeffrey Lewis and Windham Solid Waste Management District Program Coordinator Cindy Sterling.
Campany said the WRC is working with the BDCC to “collaborate more strongly” on developing an overall economic strategy for the region and to improve the ways that business can work with the public and nonprofit sectors to “make things happen.”
According to Campany, the central role of regional planning is to help member towns ask, and answer, the questions, “What are we looking for?” and “How do we prepare for the future?”
Likening the process to a trip, Campany also said regional planning helps an area understand how the past informs the present, and how economy, geography and natural resources influence major events in an area's history.
For Campany, who has ties in Louisiana, Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill provide graphic illustrations of how planning is essential for an area “to be resilient in the face of change, all kinds of change.”
“We're not able to avoid impacts,” he said. “But we need to be aware of what these things are and how to mitigate them.”
Common good
The planning process, he said, involves working with various interests in a community to find “common interests” and determine “a common good.”
“We help convene the parties,” Campany said. “We give them opportunities to collaborate, to learn what resources are available, and to help them in a visioning process: What would this look like? What's it going to take to get there?”
To that end, the WRC staff of 10 works with towns on a variety of issues, ranging from emergency plans, mapping, zoning, transportation, housing, telecommunications and cleanup of industrial property (“brownfields”).
Regional planning commissions also have a stake in land use and development (Act 250) and Public Service Board applications, and can participate in the regulatory process for applications that fall under these state laws.
In that role, the WRC held hearings in 2008 to solicit community opinion about Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee's application for a certificate of public good for the power plant's relicensing.
In these roles, the WRC looks at applications “in the context of the regional plan,” Campany said.
The commission also provides technical assistance to communities creating town plans (see story this issue).
What kind of help the WRC provides “depends on what [the towns] need,” Campany said. “Some have a stronger planning tradition than others. There's not necessarily a blanket approach.”
“A lot of time there's serious antipathy toward it,” he said, adding that the WRC tries to encourage and cultivate “an incredibly inclusive process” to help citizens find common ground.
A challenge for change
One issue Campany faces: the role of planning commissions as a result of the state's budget crisis, which prompted the Challenges for Change reforms that Governor Jim Douglas signed into law this May.
The new law substantially changes the mechanism by which the WRC and the other state regional planning commissions receive funding. Regional planning commissions will sustain a 5-percent cut for the 2011 fiscal year, on top of the 13-percent cut the previous year.
In a provision of the new law that goes into effect in February, the commission will receive performance-based planning grant contracts from the state, instead of a cut of the property transfer tax.
“[Regional planning commissions] are a creation of the state, created by law to perform,” Campany said. “We shouldn't be treated by the state as actual contractors.”
The WRC provides “an economy of scale and expertise that towns otherwise would not have,” Campany noted.
“If we didn't exist, you'd have to re-create us.”