National Trust for Historic Preservation Head to Retire

5 November 2009 - 11:00am

Richard Moe, longtime president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has announced his retirement. His tenure brought about a major change in the way the group interacts with the federal government to preserve the nation's historic sites.

"When Moe came to the trust in 1993, it had an annual budget of $29.2 million, a substantial portion of which came from the federal government. After watching the organization's time and resources consumed in regular battles to preserve that money -- Tom DeLay led a failed effort to zero out the trust's appropriation in 1995 -- Moe decided to wean his group from federal support. It was a bold move, and it signaled a larger cultural change.

'We are now much more creative, much more entrepreneurial,' says Moe, who broke the news officially to his staff Tuesday afternoon. Despite the loss of $7 million in annual government funding, the trust's budget grew, to $55 million, and Moe spearheaded two capital campaigns that saw the trust's endowment rise from $33 million to $232 million at the height of the economic boom in 2007."

Source: The Washington Post, November 4, 2009
Bookmark and Share
If hundreds of people in your community raised reasonable concerns about a planning program you developed, how would you respond? Perhaps you might call a community meeting, or ask community elected officials to reach out to community leaders.