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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.

Sprawl has obliterated much of our neighborhoods' and communities' social infrastructure. The challenge is finding a new economic model that could turn that around.
Our one-way, hub-and-spoke model for delivering electricity dates back to the days of Thomas Edison. But disruptive technologies are enabling a new model that will transform utilities as we know them.
By reusing, recycling or composting everything possible, the Canadian city of Edmonton is on its way to reaching the seemingly impossible goal of diverting 90 percent of trash from landfills.
When the state stopped picking up litter on the highways, Bakersfield, Calif., found a sustainable way to get the job done -- and help the homeless in the bargain.
The ways we produce and distribute energy are going to change, with end users empowered much as in the world of computing. What we can't predict is when that will happen.
A new rating system aims to build sustainability considerations into the entire infrastructure process, from planning to implementation.
An engineering feat more than a century ago created a host of problems for communities that depend on Lake Michigan for their water. But those problems also present opportunities.
Excellent tools are available to monitor energy use across a community. Isn't it time for cities to be benchmarked against each other?
Governments are beginning to look at energy and other life-cycle costs in their purchasing. It's about more than saving money.