Business View Magazine - July 2016 43
continuing to collect more data and solicit more com-
munity input. “So, we’re doing is a lot of community-
level planning,” Van Dyk says. “We’ve been looking at
data to see where our strongest neighborhoods are,
where our opportunities for reinvestment are stron-
gest, where we get the biggest return on things like
repaving a road or fixing a pipe. We’ve also been look-
ing at our blight and vacant property. We have about
6,500 vacant properties and we know that because
we went door-to-door and looked at every single prop-
erty in the city to get a better idea of what’s where. And
those 6,500 vacant properties - we see that as an as-
set; we see that as an opportunity to use vacant land
and repurpose it for redevelopment, or for returning it
to nature and helping ease the burden on our storm-
water infrastructure. So, we’re looking at our zoning
and our land use plan to see how to merge all these
different aspects to the greatest benefit of our storm-
water infrastructure, to the greatest benefit of our eco-
nomic development opportunities, and to the greatest
benefit of the assets that we know already exist, and
at the same time, better position ourselves for the next
fifty years.”
Brenda Scott-Henry is Gary’s Director the Department
of Environmental and Green Urbanism Affairs. One of
her Department’s recently completed projects was an
assessment of the resilience of the city’s critical sys-
tems in case of an emergency or environmental disas-
ter that would affect hospitals, transit, public safety,
etc. “Kind of an approach to bouncing back after a
crisis,” she says. The plan was devised under the aus-
pices of The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Ini-
tiative, a bi-national coalition of over 120 U.S. and Ca-
nadian mayors and local officials working to advance
the protection and restoration of the Great Lakes and
St. Lawrence River.
“We’re also beginning to work on clean energy for
low-income communities,” says Scott-Henry. “The
Department of Energy (DOE) just announced us as
a partner through their Better Buildings Accelerator.”
Better Buildings is an initiative of the DOE designed
to improve the lives of the American people by driving
leadership in energy innovation. Through Better Build-
ings, DOE partners with leaders in the public and pri-
vate sectors to make the nation’s homes, commercial
buildings, and industrial plants more energy efficient
by accelerating investment and sharing of success-
ful best practices. Better Buildings Accelerators are
designed to demonstrate specific, innovative policies
and approaches; each Accelerator is a targeted, short-
term, partner-focused activity designed to address
persistent barriers that stand in the way of greater ef-
ficiency. “So we will begin a two-year program where
we will identify an action plan followed by identifying
resources in order to implement that action plan and
then roll out the activities in 2017,” she says.
