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bob-graves

Bob Graves

Contributor

Bob Graves. M.S., associate director of the Governing Institute, is the designated content curator for the FutureStructure initiative and also a co-founder of e.Republic, the parent organization of Governing.  As associate director, Graves writes, presents, moderates and provides advice on smart and sustainable approaches to water, waste, energy, transportation and building systems drawing from his more than 25 years of experience working with private sector companies, nonprofits and state and local governments.

In the 1980s as a co-founder of e.Republic, Graves was instrumental in establishing the Government Technology event and publishing divisions of the company. These divisions expanded rapidly from a single Government Technology Conference in Sacramento, California (1987) to scores of regional and local conferences and print and online publications providing news, in-depth articles, and research to hundreds of governments agencies and IT companies across the country.  He also served as its Chief Administrative Officer and president, ensuring that the company's organization kept pace with its growth into new sectors of research and online publishing. 

In 2006 capitalizing on his academic training in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Graves co-founded and served as president and editor-at-large of Green Technology, a California based nonprofit publishing organization providing strategy and leadership for clean and sustainable communities. Bob helped produce three international "Governors' Global Climate Summits" with a team from then California Governor Schwarzenegger's office.  He has also headed the production of numerous conferences on green technology, moderated roundtables on high performance buildings and guided training activities for over 5,000 government building officials and design/construction professionals on CALGreen - California's new green building code.

New green certification programs give communities the flexibility to set their own goals and targets.
Interest is growing in approaches that look for redundancies to overcome infrastructure's risks and vulnerabilities.
Sales are lagging in the proving ground of California. But maybe it's too early to be keeping score.
Networked alternatives for getting around are about to redefine our cities as much as the horseless carriage did a century ago.
Planning that doesn't account for technology's exponential impact will be off the mark.
Technology is boosting the idea of a zero-waste framework in which everything is used, reused and recovered.
Legislation it passed a decade ago has produced significant gains without wrecking the state's economy. A new law holds promise for accelerating those gains.
Fights over payments and charges for rooftop solar are getting a lot of attention, but the underlying issue is deeper and broader.
We ought to be doing what many other countries are doing: making far more use of public-private partnerships for infrastructure.
Once derided as the world's least environmentally sustainable city, Phoenix is in the midst of a remarkable transformation.