Members' 25-Year Reminiscences

Gary Hennigh

Koloa, Hawaii

Twenty-five Years of APA — Wow!

Where has the time gone? It almost seems just like yesterday when I first joined AIP in the mid-70s, while working on my master's degree in urban and regional planning from Pennsylvania State University under the guidance of Professor Irving Hand. Some of you may recall that Professor Hand was one of the true early pioneers in the practice — touting the academic virtues of local and regional government planning as a major decision-making discipline.

I left Pennsylvania in 1977, thinking there just had to be "meaningful life" west of the Ohio River! I ended up in Alaska for the next 25 years. Then, with both age and experience on my side, I got real smart and traded in my snow shovel for the palm trees and sea turtles of Kauai in early 2003!

Most of my professional career has been in transportation and community planning, economic development, and city management. The planning component of my background has truly been the most challenging and rewarding.

My first planning position was with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation shortly after the landmark NEPA legislation. My Alaskan experience started as a community planner with the U.S. Department of Interior, followed with being the assistant planning manager for the Alaska Department of Transportation, a self-employed planning consultant, planning director for the cities of Valdez and Dillingham, and then 14 as the city manager/planning director for the City of King Cove.

My position in Valdez, Alaska, gave me the "privilege" to experience first hand the impacts of the Exxon Valdez oil spill crisis. The massive (and largely bogus!) clean-up of the 11 million gallons of ugly crude oil in Prince William Sound's pristine environment caused Valdez's population to triple (from 4,000 to 12,000 residents) in about three months. In turn, this had a major impact on about every man-made or human system imaginable that our rather meager planning department staff of four had to respond to.

I have two strong sentiments from this time in my professional life. First, I gave a very emotional presentation to a group of over 300 planners at the 1989 annual APA meeting in Atlanta regarding the burgeoning impacts from the oil spill that were still occurring as I spoke. I distinctly remember trembling, driven by anger and not fear, in talking about how an "avoidable" human error was causing such devastation to the pristine wilderness environment in Alaska's Prince William Sound.

Second, I still have lingering frustrations in not making enough contributions to our professional literature in documenting these unprecedented, and almost unimaginable, planning challenges that occurred during this time of environmental and human dismay.

With age and a change of geography, I have now mellowed! Starting in February of this year, I was appointed the Deputy Planning Director for the County of Kauai. I am still in the process of learning and experiencing the differences and similarities (few) in local government planning approaches and responsibilities between these two "frontier" states.

Finally, and somewhat "apropos" for this occasion, I was one of the founding members of the Alaska APA chapter. I represented the Alaska chapter at the national conference in Cincinnati in the early 1980s to officially accept being added to the larger APA "family."

Now, over 20 years later, it still seems a little peculiar for me to have just received my APA Charter Membership recognition through the Hawaii APA chapter. In retrospect, I don't believe there could be any two better states for these opportunities to have occurred in for me and my desires and ambitions.

In summary, my planning positions, challenges, and contributions have been professionally gratifying. I have experienced the satisfaction of assisting a wide variety of elected and appointed officials. I have assisted in developing realistic and insightful alternatives for making positive decisions regarding transportation and community infrastructure investments, land use regulations, and economic development ventures.

Indeed, I feel both fortunate and highly appreciative to have found "meaningful life" west of the Ohio River! And I feel particularly blessed to have had the opportunities and experience to work in both Alaska and Hawaii.