The agency tasked with thinking big about transportatoin, environment and other challenges in the Pioneer Valley will soon undergo a leadership change. After more than four decades, Tim Brennan is retiring from the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission at the end of September.
Brennan's replacement is Kimberly Robinson, who most recently led a similar agency in Reno, Nevada.
Brennan said the PVPC's efforts on rail transit are starting to bear some fruit. Over the past year, expanded service between Springfield, Hartford and New Haven has begun, with service to Greenfield due to come online in the next few weeks.
The PVPC is also involved in a state-led study looking into finally expanding service between Boston, Springfield and Pittsfield.
Brennan feels his greatest accomplishment was developing a so-called Plan for Progress, outling ways the 43 cities and towns in Hampden and Hampshire Counties could address the region's issues.
He said he recognizes that most people don't know what planning agencies do, since their mission is to look decades into the future. But he said life in the region would be quite different without the work.
Tim Brennan, Pioneer Valley Planning Commission: To take a for instance — from my perspective — there'd be no PVTA on the ground. No transit authority that moves about 11 million people per year.
The cleanup of the Connecticut River wouldn't have happened. We've cleaned up about 50 percent, taken a number of communities off the pollution list entirely. We still have a ways to go, but have come a long way since The New York Times dubbed it the best-landscaped sewer in the country. That was the moniker in the '70s for the Connecticut River, because it was so full of pollution.
We're all about chasing problems, and if it's humanly possible, heading them off before they actually happen, or at least minimizing them if they do, and then chasing opportunities that won't fall into our lap. We really have to go after them.
So creating something like the ValleyBike Share program, which is operational for its first year, and now beginning to expand it beyond the initial set of communities — that's what's different.
But many of the things we do seem to be below the radar screen.
Kari Njiiri, NEPR: What do you feel has been your biggest accomplishment?
I can't say one, because it would be denying a long list. And I'm not trying to be sort of grandstanding here. That's just the truth of the matter, the way I feel about it.
But to your question, the biggest achievement in my legacy was the creation of something called the Plan for Progress, which came out in 1994. It was a challenge by then-Governor Weld, and he asked all the regions across the Commonwealth, [which he recognized were] a set of discrete regional economies, to put [their] own plan[s] together.
We took the challenge. We were the first ones to do that. And the governor was so impressed by the effort that he came out here to launch the plan itself, which has now been going since 1994.
It was a milestone in terms of getting the region to work together, not just to talk it, but to behave it, because collaboration is messy.
But in today's world, it's absolutely essential. And I'm proud that I think we're one of the best regions in terms of the Commonwealth, in terms of being able to work together. We can always do better. But I think we're a long way from where we were in the '70s, '80s, '90s.
What's the "messy"?
The "messy" is that we're in New England, and we always had home rule as the absolute paramount.
But as time goes on, if you try to clean up the Connecticut River, you can't do it alone. If you try to offer transit service, you can't do it alone.
And to me, as I step down, the biggest challenge for all of us — planner, non-planner alike — is climate change.
We have a clock that's running down. We need to get on this together. We have to understand what it's doing to us now and what it will be doing to us. And the key goals are all tied to 2050. That's only about 30 years away.
We need to do many, many things before then to cut this problem off before it cuts us off.
Looking over your four-decade career, what would you say about our dependency on the car? And how does this play towards addressing climate change?
Good question. Complicated answer.
We are a very auto-dependent region, but we are less over the last 30, 40 years. The creation of the PVTA was to create a public transit piece. All the rail projects we've been chasing are to give folks an alternative to the automobile. The bike share program that we launched last June — these are all projects to say: we need to get from one mode to multi-modes, and attract more people to the modes that are less polluting in their nature.
Having said that, the automobile is going to be with us a long, long time, and for good reason.
So in that regard, what we have to do is get the entire fleet to be electric within a much shorter span of time than we had thought we have the luxury of. When we do that, we're making a remarkable impact on greenhouse gases, which is about — the ones coming from transportation, about 40 percent of the total. So it's a big, big total. And it's not one that we've attacked very aggressively yet, but we absolutely have to.
