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10 Things About Us |
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1. OUR WORK 2. TED FINK Ted Fink is a certified planner with a Masters Degree in Urban Planning and Policy, a Bachelors Degree in Environmental Design, and more than three decades of planning experience. But Ted started out thinking as a planner before he was even ten. His upbringing was on "Parkside" Avenue next to Buffalo's Delaware Park. The Park, and the Zoo located there, is in the heart of the City's Frederick Law Olmsted designed park system. Every day, he would awaken to the sounds of wildlife from around the world. He watched what happened when the State built an expressway through Olmsted's Humboldt Parkway, removing the Parkway entirely and demolishing hundreds of historic homes in the process. Olmsted had called Buffalo "the best planned city in America." But what was billed as "progress," to save a few minutes commuter time, at the expense of destroying a city neighborhood and beloved park, was in his view fundamentally wrong. The State has now studied and is planning ways to convert the expressway back into a parkway, for a cost in the eight to nine figures. The next bad planning decision in Buffalo's history was to locate a new SUNY campus in a suburban wetland rather than on vacant lands downtown. Eager to find more positive solutions to these and other planning fiascos of the City and State, Ted traveled to 43 countries on six continents to observe firsthand how other cultures had planned their environments. Traveling the world on Japanese Bullet trains and Amazon dug-out canoes, open cockpit bi-planes, coal-fired steam locomotives, sailboats and rusty jeeps, he now does what he can to use what was learned to help citizens carry out their visions for a better and more sustainable future. Ted is an ardent conservationist and lover of the natural world. In his spare time he kayaks, hikes, fishes, designs and builds things out of wood, appreciates art and music, and photographs nature. He believes that if we followed the "moral sanity" of nature better, the world would be a better place. A noted naturalist, Sally Carrighar, studied wild animal behavior during the last century. She observed that animals expect each other to act in "dependable ways," to show respect for established home sites, pair bonds and "marked" property, to participate in skirmishes over boundaries "but no deadly contests," and to observe taking turns at watering sites. Society can get much better at wedding human ingenuity to the collective and timeless wisdom of the wild. Ted has been a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) since 1987. The AICP establishes qualifications for membership and maintains examination procedures for this purpose. He is a Member of the Network of Planning Advisors for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission. Ted was Listed in Who's Who in the World (22nd Edition). He is an Advisory Member, Board of Directors of the Winnakee Land Trust, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to land conservation. He was presented with an American Planning Association, Eastern Pennsylvania Chapter Merit Award for outstanding contributions to the quality of planning within the Chapter area. He has advised the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on re-drafting the SEQR Regulations. Ted's Instructional Experience includes the following:
3. MICHELE 6. BUILD-OUT STUDIES-COST OF COMMUNITY SERVICES 7. GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS) 9. PUBLICATIONS 10. GREENPLAN-IT |
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