Prospect Heights Natural Resources Commission
Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - Bob Dean
"Flooding in the Region and What You Can Do
About It”
Bob Dean has really great ideas about urban flooding. “Urban flooding is an increasingly important problem, and affects many residents of Prospect Heights. Please join us as we welcome Bob Dean for his presentation "Flooding in the Region and What You Can Do About It”.
Many communities and individual property owners struggle to address repetitive, damaging flooding. The Chicago region has quietly suffered as much flooding damage as cities that have experienced major hurricanes. Damages due to urban flooding, which occurs outside of the designated flood plain, is substantial and will continue to increase as periods of intense rain become longer and more frequent with climate change. The Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), a nonprofit organization focused on environmental sustainability and social equity, is working to respond to this threat through research, community engagement, and promotion of green infrastructure, or natural systems to help manage flooding.
Bob Dean the CEO of CNT, (Center for Neighborhood Technology) will discuss CNT’s work to analyze flood risk, create policy change, and partner with local governments to provide direct assistance to property owners to reduce local flooding.
The RainReady initiative, CNT’s program to assist property owners, is an expansion of practices already adopted by thousands of villages, towns, and cities across the country.
Landscaped sidewalks, permeable paving, green roofs, swales, French drains, rain gardens, rain barrels, and cisterns are certainly not new ideas. As more undeveloped land is paved over and rainfall patterns become less predictable, communities are starting to move beyond these simple measures and take an integrated approach to water management, ensuring that every property, street, and neighborhood is protected by a broad range of RainReady practices.
Bob Dean joined CNT in August 2018 as its Chief Executive Officer. Prior to CNT, Bob served as the Deputy Executive Director for Planning for the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP). During his 10 years with CMAP, he created and then oversaw the Local Technical Assistance program, which has offered planning assistance to local governments across the region through over 200 local planning projects. Before initiating the LTA program, Bob managed GO TO 2040, the award-winning comprehensive plan for the Chicago metropolitan area that was adopted in October 2010. After leaving CMAP in 2017, he consulted for Chicago's Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC) and RW Ventures on local governance and economic development projects during 2018.
Prior to CMAP, Bob worked in municipal government for five years, serving as a transportation and land use planner for the City of Naperville, Illinois and a transportation planning liaison for the DuPage Mayors and Managers Conference.
Bob holds a master's degree in planning from Cornell University and a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Delaware. He is originally from the Philadelphia region. He currently lives in Evanston, IL with his wife, two children, two cats, and a lizard.