William Klein
Bill has over four decades of experience as a planning consultant (5 years), as Nantucket’s planning director (17 years), and as APA’s director of research and advisory services (22 years). His career brought him into close contact with the real world challenges that planners face every day in cities, towns, counties, and regions across the country. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners. Bill began a self-imposed sabbatical, aka retirement, in May 2013.
1991 to 2013, Director of Research and Advisory Services, American Planning Association, Chicago, Illinois
Bill’s years at APA gave him a national perspective on best practices in urban and regional planning, sustainable development, community resilience, and smart growth. He supervised a staff of 10 to 20 professionals on 80 sponsored research projects involving over $17 million in outside funding. He supervised the Planning Advisory Service, which served many hundreds of planning agencies and consultants across the country. He supervised the managers of APA’s Green Communities Research Center, the Planning and Community Health Research Center, and the Hazards Research Center–all components of the National Centers for Planning. Bill developed and ran the New Directors Institute and Managers Institute offered at APA’s National Planning Conference. He also co-managed the Big City Planning Directors Institute with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He served as executive editor of Planning and Urban Design Standards, published by John Wiley & Sons, arguably the most definitive, comprehensive sourcebook on planning practice in the U.S. He provided overall direction for the City Parks Forum, a $2.5 million effort to educate mayors about city parks, and the Growing Smart Project, a seven-year, $2.5 million effort to develop a guidebook on how best to modernize the state statutes that govern how planning is done in the U.S.
1974 to 1991, Director, Nantucket Planning & Economic Development Commission, Nantucket Island, Massachusetts
For 17 years Bill was director of one of Massachusetts’ 13 regional planning agencies, a county and town located 30 miles at sea due south of Cape Cod. During those years, Nantucket Island experienced rampant growth due to second home development as a result of its popularity as a summer resort. It’s year-round population faced serious problems of housing affordability, jobs, infrastructure, and cost of living. It was, and still is, a place with extremely fragile natural, historic, and human resources. Bill ran an aggressive community engagement process that resulted in a number of nationally-recognized and innovative implementation tools. He developed and implemented the Nantucket Sound Islands Land Bank Act–first-of-its-kind state legislation empowering an elected Land Bank Commission to shape the settlement pattern, protect fragile environmental resources, and provide public access to the shore. Funded by a two percent real estate transfer tax, the measure has raised over a third of a billion dollars to date for open space preservation. He was also responsible for the initial planning of the Island’s first-ever bus service, a shore-to-shore bike path system, and substantial improvements to the community’s services and facilities, public sewerage, affordable housing, aquifer protection, and growth management systems. Mr. Klein left this position to pursue a Loeb Fellowship in Advanced Environmental Studies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
1969 to 1974, Director of Community Development, Local Government Research Corporation (LGR), State College, Pennsylvania
As a planning consultant with LGR, Bill directly assisted municipalities, councils of government, and counties in preparing plans, impact studies, and growth management tools, such as zoning, subdivision ordinances, and planned unit development ordinances, throughout Pennsylvania. He was also assigned to teams working on multi-county solid waste management plans, park and recreation plans, school bus routing, and nuclear power plant impoundment area planning. This was Bill’s first job right out of graduate school and it proved to be formative. Almost everything that he learned about tackling the unknown and saying yes to the impossible happened because of being thrown into the deep end of the pool at LGR. He found himself directing a community development staff of five when he was in his early twenties. After five years with LGR learning an incredible amount on the job–and driving 40,000 miles a year–Bill thought it was time to go public.