Four ‘hammered’ for planning efforts

Four University faculty have been honored with Vice President Al Gore’s Hammer Award for excellence in government.

The award recognizes their work on a community project designed to demonstrate the benefits of geographic information used in “smart-growth” planning efforts of the town of Verona in Dane County.

The honorees are: Richard Chenoweth and Bernard J. Niemann Jr., professors of urban and regional planning; Stephen Ventura, professor of soils and environmental studies, and D. David Moyer, adjunct associate professor of environmental studies.

The four researchers worked with Dane County and several federal participants. The Hammer Award recognizes the efforts of federal employee teams and their partners who have successfully reinvented a process or program in order to make government work better, cost less and get results.

The Dane County Community Demonstration Project, one of six nationwide that has been recognized by the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR), focused on the town of Verona. Dane County has applied GIS (geographic information system) maps to engage county leaders and more than 200 citizens in a smart-growth planning effort that identifies environmental corridors, farmland protection zones, and land-use densities for a projected 85,000 new county residents by 2020.

The award was presented Nov. 16 at the City-County Building in Madison.