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Preservation Month Webinars 1: Legal Preservation Overview

Our first webinar in our Preservation Month series focuses on legal basics.
May 2, 2018, 1pm – Legal Preservation Overview
The strongest defense commissions and review boards have against accusations of arbitrary and capricious decisions is to consistently follow established review procedures. This webinar will cover the legal basis for commission operations. We’ll cover an overview of procedural due process, takings, appeals, property rights, and economic hardship. Participants will learn about common preservation legal issues and acquire tools to improve decision-making and build a defensible record.
Participants will:
1) Distinguish between how the law enables and how the law constrains
2) Be familiar with common preservation legal issues
3) Acquire tools to improve decision-making
4) Acquire tools to build a defensible record

About our speaker, William Cook: As an attorney at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Will has helped challenge federal agency approval of the world’s largest wind farm in the middle of Nantucket Sound, a traditional cultural property, as well as argued successfully for the reinstatement of Mount Taylor’s recognition as a 400,000-acre traditional cultural property in New Mexico. In addition to teaching preservation law at Columbia University, Will lectures regularly to national audiences on issues related to property, land use, and heritage conservation, and is the author of Preserving Native American Places: A Guide to Federal Laws and Policies that Help Protect Cultural Resources and Sacred Sites.
AIA and AICP credits pending. You can register here.

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Preservation Month Webinars 5: Public Support & Community Outreach

Our fifth webinar in our Preservation Month Series focuses on Public Support & Community Outreach
May 30, 2018, 1pm – Public Support & Community Outreach
Historic preservation commissions tend to get bogged down in the day-to-day administration of their local ordinances and forget that one of the major responsibilities is to be effective spokespeople for historic preservation in the community. This webinar will help attendees communicate effectively with a wide range of audiences, build support for designations, defend sometimes unpopular decisions, and deal with reluctant elected officials. We’ll also offer creative suggestions for promoting historic preservation in the community.
Participants will learn skills to:
1) Communicate effectively with various audiences, such as elected officials, property owners, tenants, business interests, etc
2) Speak knowledgeably about their own preservation program, including the application review process, ordinance review standards, and benefits and responsibilities of designation
3) Identify and capitalize on opportunities to promote historic preservation in their community
About our speaker, Wade Broadhead: Wade Broadhead is currently the Planning Director of Florence, Colorado, working on development and preservation issues. He was most recently a land use planner and staff to the City of Pueblo’s Historic Preservation Commission where he worked from 2005-2014. Prior to his career in planning and preservation Wade worked as an archaeologist and GIS supervisor conducting consulting work across the southwestern United States. In Pueblo, Wade helped spearhead an engaging neighborhood-based historic context approach which surveyed most historic neighborhoods as well as its Post-War resources. He volunteered to serve as a grant reviewer for the State Historical Fund from 2010-2011; he was an Endangered Places Reviewer from 2009-2011; and, he presented papers at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, NAPC Forum, APA, and Saving Places Conferences over the past two years. Wade has a passion for Mid-Century Modern Architecture and social history as well as citizen engagement. He especially enjoys revitalization efforts in Right Sizing Cities and working with minority populations and low income neighborhoods to make preservation relevant. Wade is currently establishing a commission and applying for CLG status in Florence Colorado, population, 3800. Wade has four small budding preservationists under the age of 13.
AIA and AICP credits pending. You can register here.

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Preservation Month Webinars 4: Preservation Planning

Our fourth webinar in our Preservation Month Series focuses on Preservation Planning.
May 23, 2018, 1pm – Preservation Planning
A preservation commission is most effective when its work is a part of the larger local planning process. Good planning can also strengthen grant applications and bring in money to the community. Using successful plans from around the country, this webinar will cover the essential elements of preservation planning and how to integrate preservation as part of a broader planning effort—not just an addition to it. The webinar will involve an overview of Certified Local Government benefits and responsibilities for preservation planning. Working with various types of plans and data requirements, participants will learn innovative techniques to involve the community and stakeholders; explore successful implementation techniques to assign responsibilities; and to track performance measures.
Participants will:
1) Clarify programmatic agreement requirements for Certified Local Governments and relationship to National Park Service mandates
2) Discern which types of plans are appropriate to address desired goals and outcomes, as well as common pitfalls to avoid
3) Define data requirements for planning efforts and identify opportunities for data sharing
4) Discover innovative techniques to involve the community and stakeholders
5) Explore successful implementation techniques to assign responsibilities and track performance
About our speaker, Abigail Christman: Abigail Christman is an Associate City Planner in Landmark Preservation at the City and County of Denver. Abigail has a varied background having previously worked for consulting firms, Colorado Preservation, Inc, and the University of Colorado Denver. Her experience includes Section 106 consultation, reconnaissance and intensive-level surveys, National Register nominations, HABS/HAER/HALS documentation, neighborhood pattern books, preservation tax credit certification, interpretation, public outreach, and serving on the Denver Landmark Commission. Abigail also teaches a graduate course for CU Denver titled Historic Buildings in Context. Abigail holds a BA in History, a MA in Public History/Historic Preservation from Middle Tennessee State University, and a MA in Histories and Theories of Architecture from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, England.
AIA and AICP credits pending. You can register here.

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Preservation Month Webinars 3: Standards & Guidelines

Our third webinar in our Preservation Month Series focuses on Standards & Guidelines.
May 16, 2018, 1pm – Standards and Guidelines
This webinar will give participants an understanding of the relationship between Federal Standards and local design guidelines. We’ll guide attendees through the origin and development of a variety of preservation-based review standards and guidelines. Through case studies, participants will distinguish between the four treatments under the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards, and understand how the treatments work within the framework of local design guidelines. Participants will also compare the application and the inherent flexibility of the Secretary of the Interior’s Guidelines for Rehabilitation.
Participants will:
1) Have a working knowledge of the evolution of design guidelines in preservation theory
2) Understand the four treatments under the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards and how they can influence design guidelines
3) Learn how to apply the inherent flexibility of the Standards for Rehabilitation and understand where there is discretion
4) Discover where to locate additional design guideline resources
About our speaker, Sharon Ferraro: Sharon Ferraro has been the Historic Preservation Coordinator for 13 years in her hometown, Kalamazoo, Michigan (population 75,000 with 2,070 historic resources in 5 districts). For the past five years she has worked with the Michigan Historic Preservation Network, training historic district commissions throughout western Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. In 1999-2001, she completed a reconnaissance level historic resource survey for Kalamazoo and has also nominated the Village of Richland, the Sand Hills Light Station, the Ahmeek Streetcar station in the Keweenaw Peninsula, a winery, an 1840s farmstead, and a part of downtown Kalamazoo to the National Register of Historic Places. She is currently co-writing a National Register nomination for the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial School for the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe in Michigan. In 2003, she cofounded the Old House Network, devoted to teaching old house owners hands-on repair and rehabilitation skills through workshops and an annual Old House Expo. Sharon received her master’s degree in historic preservation from Eastern Michigan University in 1994 and worked as a consultant on a wide variety of projects including Study Committee reports for a historic district in Ann Arbor, Michigan, forensic investigation of an 1850s home in Adventist Village in Battle Creek, Michigan, and various highway projects.
AIA and AICP credits pending. You can register here.

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Preservation Month Webinars 2: Meeting Procedures

Our second webinar in our Preservation Month Series focuses on Meeting Procedures.
May 9, 2018, 1pm – Meeting Procedures
How commissions and review boards conduct their meetings is critical to maintaining credibility and reputation. It is also critical for avoiding legal challenges. In this webinar, participants will learn to work within a legal framework of state law and local statutes and how to establish clear rules of procedure to ensure a defensible decision-making process. Beyond legal considerations, participants will learn how professionalism, courtesy, and consistency build support for the commission and its work.
Participants will gain skills to:
1) Operate a meeting consistent with state and local statutes, ordinances, and regulations which govern meetings procedures in their community
2) Conduct meetings with professionalism, consistency, and courtesy to all persons involved to maintain the reputation and credibility of their community’s preservation program
3) Adopt, adhere to, and amend as needed, rules of procedure to accomplish a clear and defensible decision-making process
4) Recognize the need for regular reevaluation of their commission’s meeting procedures
About our speaker, Robin Zeigler: Robin Zeigler is the historic zoning administrator for the Nashville-Davidson County Metropolitan Historic Zoning Commission. Previously, she served as senior historic preservation officer for the Planning Division of the Salt Lake City Corporation, and the preservation planner for the City of Bowling Green in Kentucky. While in Kentucky, she served as vice-chairperson of the statewide non-profit, Preservation Kentucky, and was an adjunct professor at Western Kentucky University. She is a graduate of Middle Tennessee State University’s Public History Program where she worked for the Center for Historic Preservation and the Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area.
AIA and AICP credits pending. You can register here.
 
 
 
 
 

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Wonderful Wood Windows!

Here in central Ohio we’ve had our first real blast of winter over the last couple of days…snow flurries, temperatures in the 20s, teeth-chattering winds, the whole nine yards. And, if you live in an old house with wood windows (like I do), you’ve likely felt that wintry reminder when passing by one of those windows.
So, maybe it was just a wintertime coincidence (or destiny) that one of the first emails from a concerned Ohioan to Heritage Ohio in 2016 brought a plea for help, requesting assistance to convince the owner of a historic building not to dump their original wood windows.
As you can imagine, this is one of the most common email discussion roads we go down. Too often, this is what we find: building owners ready to toss their original sash because they don’t function. The sash are painted shut; the sash, if opened, don’t stay up (the sash cords broke long ago); or, as in my case, when you walk by the window in the dead of winter, you can feel the breeze inside the building. In that case, weatherstripping is the issue.
While solving any of these window issues isn’t especially difficult, too often, the owner freezes once that thought, “the hassle of repair,” goes through their mind, and they reach for their tablet to google “window replacement.”
There has been a lot of marketing from the replacement window industry extolling the virtue of replacement windows. When it comes to windows, we’ve gone through a good 40 years of purging the word “maintenance” from our collective consciousness, while the window replacement industry has trained people to believe that the “hassle” of repair is a fate worse than death.
To counter this, we preservationists have begun promoting the value of preserving original windows with groups such as the Window Preservation Alliance. And the National Trust has recently put a greater focus on quantifying the value of wood windows, why preserve, and how best to preserve. Their report, Saving Windows, Saving Money, has been especially helpful for us. The report quantifies the energy savings, cost, and return on investment for a variety of window treatments, including weatherstripping, installing an exterior storm, and installing a new high performance replacement window. And guess what they found? DIY weatherstripping offers an average 31% return on investment, while DIY high performance replacement windows offer a 3% return on investment.

That shiny stuff Rebecca Torsell is nailing onto the jamb may be bronze, but when it comes to energy efficiency, it's worth its weatherstripping weight in gold.

That shiny stuff Rebecca Torsell is nailing onto the jamb may be bronze, but when it comes to energy efficiency, it’s worth its weatherstripping weight in gold.


And this is exactly why YOP offering their hands-on window repair training last year in Columbus was so valuable: giving homeowners the skills to tackle DIY projects such as window repair and weatherstripping SAVES MONEY, while saving the architectural integrity of their homes, while saving money on the heating bill.
Now if only we had the billion dollar marketing budget to get THAT message out!

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Mentoring visits

Last week, Jeff and I had the opportunity to visit the preservation statewides in Indiana and Michigan—Indiana Landmarks and Michigan Historic Preservation Network. We were able to travel thanks to a grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, through its Brink Fund. This fund provides mentoring dollars to cover travel costs so preservation organizations such as Heritage Ohio can learn about successful programs in other states.
For Heritage Ohio, we’ve established our Save Ohio’s Treasures program with seed funding from the Turner Foundation and from the 1772 Foundation, and we’re in the “gathering information” phase. Visits to neighboring statewides will help prepare us as we investigate how best to create and formally launch Save Ohio’s Treasures.
In many ways, Indiana has the statewide organization that many other statewides aspire to become. With a multi-use headquarters, 40+ full-time staff stationed throughout the state, and an endangered fund program that has saved hundreds of historic buildings over the fund’s 40 years of existence, Indiana Landmarks shows what top-notch staff paired with generous donors can achieve. Their Efroymson Family Endangered Places Fund operates throughout the state, and Landmarks uses fund dollars to make strategic investments.
Michigan’s statewide has taken an innovative approach to raising funds by creating a subsidiary company to serve as a tax credit syndicator. They have used the fees generated from syndicating to capitalize their Intervention Loan Fund.
While their respective programs represent different ends of the endangered properties fund spectrum, we came away with critical insights from each that we can apply to our unique situation in Ohio. Here are some of the highlights of what we learned:
-Mission-related investments, unlike business-related investments, aren’t necessarily designed as much to make money as they are to save buildings (hence, we may invest in a project to save a building, when we know from the start that we’ll lose a portion of that investment)
-Making grants from an endangered fund, while attractive to the recipient, mean that once the money is disbursed, it’s gone, while loans from a fund (theoretically) come back to the fund and replenish the fund, making fund dollars go further
-Accepting program dollars with strings attached, when raising funds to build the corpus of the endangered places fund, may be ok (depending on what those strings are)
-It’s critical to think through the approach of how funds are loaned: do you spread a lot of minimal dollar amounts, or do you target larger dollar amounts for focused efforts, at the expense of overall impact
-It’s also critical to establish benchmarks about just how “historic” a building has to be to qualify for funding help (for example, should we consider strategic investment to help preserve properties not listed in the National Register of Historic Places?)
It has been exciting to work on building Save Ohio’s Treasures from the ground up for us, especially since we see the need and the potential for a fund devoted to helping to save our heritage.
As we sift through these important topics, we’re working with a team of consultants to complete an implementation plan toward the end of the year. We’ll take the lessons learned and insights gained from Indiana and Michigan to help us create a plan that sets up Save Ohio’s Treasures for success.

My intense week of learning

In June I was in Newport, Rhode Island, on the campus of Salve Regina University, to complete the second part of the Historic Real Estate Finance class put on by the National Development Council, with support from the 1772 Foundation and the National Trust for Historic Preservation (you can see pretty pictures of the Newport homes here and here).
The first class was intense. We spent the week learning developer math (calculating debt service, net operating income, market caps, and debt coverage ratios), cranking out pro forma sheets for actual projects, and plugging incentives such as the rehabilitation tax credits into project problems. What we learned early on as a class is that development, especially when it comes to historic buildings, carries a great deal of risk. While one project that goes right means positive cash flow to a developer, a project that goes wrong can put a developer under.
We also learned that revenues post-rehabilitation rarely match expenses going in pre-rehabilitation; hence, the need for incentives to help close the financing gap.
The first class was intense. The second class was brain damage, as the instructors mixed the math and story problems with a generous helping of New Markets Tax Credits learning (although, to the instructors’ credit, I left this class truly understanding, for the first time, how NMTCs work and why they can be so powerful to make projects go) *and* case studies that took problem solving to new heights of depth and complexity. (Here’s Dartmoor. I had an especially good time with the Dartmoor case study, as we tried to translate subjective qualities of the players into objective dollars and cents outputs.)
Going through these two classes, I have a new-found appreciation for the tough job of being a developer of historic properties, no matter how big or small the project, and just how big a risk people take sometimes to preserve the heritage that makes all of our lives richer for having it. Thank you to the National Development Council, the 1772 Foundation, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, for making such a valuable learning experience accessible, challenging, and thoroughly enjoyable!