Part II 2000

Part III 2000-2001

Part IV 2000-2001

Part V 2003 Into Future

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As a life-long professional planner, Osgood has taught and practiced planning for almost 50 years nationally. He has degrees from Michigan State and Georgia Tech and taught at Iowa State.He worked as a planning consultant in Los Angeles in the 1980's and lived there since the early 1990's.

Based on experiences on a number of regional studies, Osgood has outlined several messages in his book, REGION AROUSED:

l. Public policies and private lives are invariably intertwined.

2. Many public policies depend for success on how well they're linked to other public policies, especially between housing, jobs and transportation, but also environmental protection, economic revitalization and social
equity.

3. The involvement of increasing numbers of well-informed "regional citizens" is essential to bringing issues into the open and promoting solutions that are in the public interest.

4. Dedicated media can be major contributors to good public policy.

5. An open, creative, and well-staffed regional council of governments can be a major asset to successul regional planning.

REVIEWS

In a book review appearing in the American Planning Association's August/September 2004 issue of PLANNING, Bruce McDowell, FAICP, and fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration in Washington, D.C., makes the following observations about Osgood's book, REGION AROUSED:

"Osgood has taken his voluminous notes from hundreds of meetings, combined them with source documents and painstaking research, and produced a very readable narrative that transports the reader through all the stages of the planning process from October 1999 to September 2001. He especially wants to reach regional citizens and community-based leaders, because he is convinced that without them the public agencies have an almost impossible job. The region is incomprehensively complex, governmentally and otherwise, and its planning is subject to extreme decision-making gridlock."

"Based on his experiences as member, vice-chair and chair of the Southern California Association of Governments, Regional Advisory Council when the plan was being revised, he decided to develop a story with dialogue, intrigue and drama, rather than a technical report on things happening." As McDowell covers in his book review, Osgood "follows several key characters through the planning process, shows how their roles--state legislator, regional council chair, prominent newspaper reporter, citizen activist, lobbyist, businessman--interact, as do their private and public lives."

He goes on to say that "the result is a comprehensive retelling of the regional planning drama that produced the 2001 regional plan." Or put another way a professional account of the planning process by an insider.

"...Anyone interested in regional planning--anywhere in the U.S." should read this book. "Osgood intends to create a whole new generation of regional citizen."

ORDERING REGION AROUSED:

REGION AROUSED is 302 pages priced at $26.00 and can be purchased:

Other inquiries can be made by contacting the author, Frank Osgood.

Related Link: http://www.rosedogbooks.com/

For more information contact:

Frank Osgood
c/o Rosedog Books, Publisher

USA

Email: [email protected]