2003 ASPH Pre-Conference Workshop on Impacts of Sprawl and Community
Design on Public Health
Mark Robson : Welcome and Introduction
Well, good morning and welcome to our pre-conference. Hi, I'm Mark Robson and I'm the
incoming Chair of the Environmental Occupational Health Council and we're awfully pleased
that you're up here so early this morning in this beautiful building in this beautiful part of the
country. And I know I had many of you on the bus this morning you looked a little sleepy.
You're starting to come to life and that's a good thing. The presentations today will certainly
bring us into focus. We're very grateful to our sponsors this morning: EPA in whose building we
are housed; our colleagues at NIHS, ATSDR, CDC, HERSA, and, of course, ASPH. And our ASPH
colleagues make it very easy for all of us who are faculty and participants because of the
enormous energy and effort they put into planning and executing these and I just want to
recognize five folks real quickly: Nancy Tousa, Jenny Louis, Amanda Cash, Mary Stickley, and
Allison Foster. Mary is sort of like the room mother for this cohort and it really is a cohort that
requires a lot of oversight. I don't know how many times emails went out telling you that you
had to bring an ID and then you'd see an email go back, "Do we have to bring an ID?" And I'm
inclined to say, "No, you can stand out there and try to get in without one." But as a faculty
member myself, I tend to figure the rules are for everybody but for me and I see I'm not alone.
And that's a good thing. Today's pre-conference to discuss flaws is so very appropriate and it
also blends real well with the conference that starts tomorrow; Children's Environmental
Health and Looking at the Future. Because, as you know, one of the great challenges, one of
the pressures that children face, of course, is living in an environment that's going to
continually develop and the pressure of sprawl, the risks associated with it. Bernie Goldstein,
who many of you know, who's the Dean at Pitt and is registered for the conference but I don't
see him in here, used to give a great talk when he was in New Jersey. He was my boss for
many years and he put a couple slides up starting with the famous chemical control fire in
Elizabeth, New Jersey, and which was one of the catalyst for things like the super fund
regulations and he always started out the talk with, "There's a New Jersey in your future." And
coming from New Jersey and being a New Jersey native, I used to think that was a little harsh.
But, in fact, New Jersey is very much a laboratory for the rest of the country, good or bad, it
really is. And so in driving to the airport the other day I was thinking about, "How can I relate
that to sprawl and give just one personal example?" I live next to the farm that I grew up on in
central New Jersey and I went to Rutgers 31 years ago as a freshman and still work on that
campus now at the School of Public Health. As a freshman driving from our farm to campus,
there were six traffic lights to get all the way to New Brunswick--37 miles. That same stretch
of road, which I drive every day, now has 54. So if that's any kind of an indicator--and I don't
know how many Home Depots and Wawas, I'd be afraid to count them. I do know how many
Dunkin Donuts because, as you can see, I don't get all the way to work without a little stop.
But what's kind of interesting is that even in that little example we find ourselves really looking
at what sprawl can mean and the risks associated with the traffic incidents, vehicle miles
traveled, and this extraordinary group of folks that we have assembled today will share a lot of
that information with us.
Laura Jackson : Welcome and Introduction
I'm here to welcome you on behalf of EPA's Office of Research and Development. Tomorrow
you'll hear a lot about our beautiful new building. There are several design features which will
facilitate public health like all of our natural lighting to ward off depression, our two-mile
hiking trail around the lake, which has multiple benefits for health. There are also a myriad of
environmental benefits to this building. We have solar lighting along our street entry in,
almost a mile or, I think, almost a half-mile I'm told, of solar lighting. We have composting in
the cafeteria of all unused foods and, I think the building is made up of something like 80
percent recycled materials. All that is truly wonderful. I'm sure you've noticed, though, that
the layout of this research park here is not exactly mixed-use and everybody who works here
pretty much drives probably 30 to 45 minutes to work every morning and the same back again
every evening. This is a very low-density area; we have a lot of problems with sprawl and the
last national list that I've seen on ranking cities for sprawl put Raleigh-Durham at the very top
so we do have a lot of work to do in terms of larger-scale design for both human and
environmental health. I've been asked to greet you today because my research had evolved
into looking at design as a driver of poor human health at the neighborhood and regional
scales. This is a somewhat challenging issue for EPA because these issues are not generally
mandated at the federal level, as you know. We don't like to get involved in local and state
jurisdiction types of issues, but it is getting to the point where we are having difficulty
fulfilling our environmental protection mandate without looking at some of these smaller-scale
issues of planning and design. And perhaps it may surprise you that there actually is a lot of
work going on across EPA on the issue of smart growth. There we are planning a role more of
technology transfer, methods development and funding for community scale grants. We have a
very large Brownfields program that is emphasizing smart growth redesign in the
redevelopment of infield sites. There's also a large community clean-air transportation grant
program that promotes mass transit and alternative designs to reduce vehicle emissions. There
is money that goes out partially in coordination with the CDC to develop alternative building
codes that are more oriented to smart growth and higher-density living and working,
alternative school designs, and also the development of zoning codes that will provide people
with pre-written alternative codes to use in place of the ones that have been standard for so
many years. Finally, efforts that I'm aware of include looking at our regulations that are meant
to protect air and water but actually have the indirect effect of promoting sprawl. So we are
trying to get at issues of the built environment where it's appropriate for our agency. And we
also recently have had some higher-level directives that I think are going to be very helpful in
continuing our work in this area and that includes a study done by the General Accounting
Office that recommends that EPA provide more support to local communities and states on the
smart-growth issue. And also a parting memo from our former administrator, Christine
Whitman, directing the political appointees that worked under her to support smart-growth
efforts in their organizations, including out in their regional offices. So I'm really excited about
participating with you all today. I'll be here all day and I do hope that folks will come up and
introduce themselves if you'd like to hear more about these activities in EPA, and I'm hoping to
learn a lot today as well and I'll turn the podium back over to continue the agenda. Thank you
very much.