You’re invited to a special forum featuring Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard and Portland Mayor Charlie Hales. Mayor Ballard and Mayor Hales will chat about sustainability topics. The event begins at 6:00 p.m. in the Eliot Center on July 31 with a social hour and continues at 7:00 with the mayors’ discussion. Mr. Len Reed from the Oregonian is moderating this event. Buy your ticket online here, or sign up to sponsor this exciting event.
Mayor Greg Ballard
http://youtu.be/xZhQXHwNJEU
Gregory A. Ballard was elected the 48th Mayor of Indianapolis on November 6, 2007 and was re-elected to a second term on November 8, 2011. Since taking office, Mayor Ballard has presided over six consecutive balanced budgets. He has tasked his administration with increasing efficiencies in city government, improving the level of service to residents and to continue growing Indianapolis as a destination for businesses and families.
Mayor Ballard is committed to creating and promoting a culture of inclusiveness for business opportunities, economic growth and sustainability for minority, women and veteran business enterprises.
Mayor Ballard’s leadership has helped to develop a more stable, affordable and pro-growth economic environment in Indianapolis. He continues to focus on attracting new businesses and encouraging existing companies to expand here. A native Hoosier, Mayor Ballard was raised on the east side of Indianapolis. After earning his undergraduate degree in economics from Indiana University, he entered the U.S. Marine Corps. During his time in the Marines, Mayor Ballard lived all around the U.S. and the world, including serving in the Persian Gulf War. Upon his retirement as a Lieutenant Colonel after 23 years of service, he was awarded the Legion of Merit. Mayor Ballard resides in Pike Township with Winnie, his wife of 30 years. Their children, Greg, Jr. and Erica, are both graduates of Indiana University.
Mayor Charlie Hales
For as long as he can remember, Charlie Hales has loved the human energy of an exciting city as well as the natural beauty of the great outdoors. Watching as the urban core, suburbs and exurbs in his native northern Virginia succumbed to haphazard planning did more than disappoint and frustrate him. It instilled Charlie with a cause that led to a career.
He earned his degree in political theory from an honors program at the University of Virginia. After graduating, he climbed in his Plymouth Valiant and pointed toward Portland. “Even in 1979 people knew this was a magical place,” he says, “an exhilarating city close to forests and fields and not far from mountains and an ocean.” Charlie went to work for the Homebuilders Association of Metropolitan Portland and raised a family in Northeast and Southwest Portland. But, both at work and in the community, he began to detect hints of the sort of shortsighted development he thought he’d left behind back East.
Charlie left office in 2002 when a nationally prominent engineering firm asked him to replicate some of his successful mass transit efforts in cities around the country. As Senior Vice President for Transit Planning at HDR, Inc., he has studied, instituted and managed projects in Cincinnati, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Sacramento, Salt Lake City and Scottsdale. He has made presentations to civic leaders and planners in Austin, Charlotte, Denver, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Providence and Taipei.
Charlie left Portland for a few years after marrying his wife, Nancy, whose two children were still in high school in Stevenson, Washington. The family couple returned to Portland where they have poured sweat equity into fixing up a Tudor home in Eastmoreland over the past four years.
Charlie is on the boards of Friends of Trees and the Portland Parks Foundation. He has been a SMART reader, volunteered at Meals on Wheels and served on the Portland Public Market Committee. His work has been honored by the Bruner Foundation for Urban Excellence, the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Oregon Chapter of the American Planning Association, the League of Oregon Cities and the Portland Bicycle Transportation Alliance. Charlie and Nancy are proud to have 5 children between them and a cat named Bogart.
Mr. Len Reed
Len shared the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing with three colleagues at The Oregonian for a series on public pension reform. He joined the newspaper’s editorial board in 2010 and specializes in environment, energy, education, and science subjects. From 1996 to 2009, Len led The Oregonian’s prize-winning environment and natural resource coverage, along the way overseeing science and sustainability news sections. Len is a former staff writer of the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Times Herald and Bergen (N.J.) Record. A graduate of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., he was a 1986-87 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University.
