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Urban Greenspaces Board of Directors and Staff
Front row, left to right: Bob Wilson, Ruth Roth, Mike Houck. Second row, left to right: Mike
Faha, Kelly Punteney, Jim Rapp, Goody Cable, M J Cody, Ignacio Mares, Tom
Liptan
Board of Directors
Officers
 M J Cody, Chair
M.J. Cody is the co-editor of Wild in the City, A Guide to Portland's Natural Areas (Oregon Historical Society Press), and author of Our Portland, a coffee table style book with photographer Rick Schafer (Voyageur Press). She is a regular contributor to The Oregonian, with her column on lodging in the Travel Section, "Sleeping Around the Northwest." She also writes features for several magazines including NW Palate Magazine, Travel Oregon, Horizon Air, Audubon Magazine, and other publications. She has produced two audio driving tour CDs where she advocates the importance of protecting Oregon's rural landscapes from urban sprawl. An Oregon native, M.J. grew up in Estacada on the Clackamas River where "green" was not a concept but a certainty. After thirteen years in L.A. writing for television, M.J. returned to Oregon with a fervent understanding of the need for wildness in a city.
 Goody Cable, Vice-Chair
Gudrun (Goody) Cable has lived in Portland all of her life, noting how the city has expanded and the woods and fields where she played as a child have shrunk and in some cases disappeared. She is committed to the Institute's mission because it provides a vehicle for defending and supporting the importance of wildlife and wilderness area in the cities. She owns a small coffee house in SE Portland, the Rimsky-Korsakoffee House, and co-owns a hotel for booklovers on the Oregon Coast, the Sylvia Beach Hotel. Goody also served on the Oregon Progress Board's Environmental Committee and participated in writing the State of the Environment Report for the State of Oregon for five years.
 Bob Wilson, Secretary/Treasurer
Bob Wilson has been a supporter of urban greenspaces for over 20 years. The issue of greening our cities was what drew him to the Portland Audubon Society, where he spent the last two decades supporting the society's work of "inspiring people to love and protect nature". During that time he served on the editorial board of The Urban Naturalist, Portland Audubon Society's seminal urban greenspaces journal. He also had a hand in producing other urban naturalist publications such as Wild in the City, A Guide to Portland's Natural Areas and Wild on the Willamette, Exploring the Lower Willamette River. Bob continues to work toward making Portland America's greenest and most livable city through his contributions to the Urban Greenspaces Institute and other local NGOs working on urban greenspace issues.
Board Members
 Mike Faha
Mike Faha is a registered landscape architect and founding Principal of GreenWorks. He is a Registered Landscape Architect, an Oregon
L.E.E.D. Accredited Professional and a U.S. Green Building Council member. Mike's primary professional interest is in creating livable, sustainable communities that balance economic, ecological, and social needs. Towards that end, Mike leads planning and design project teams which integrate urban ecology, and green development practices on site development and urban design projects. These include civic and institutional; corporate; recreation and open space; public infrastructure; housing and mixed used; and urban revitalization. He works a variety of stakeholders in creating projects with broad support. His prior employment with engineering, ecological and landscape architectural firms helped to propel him into a leadership role that integrates various professional disciplines, and helps clients meet broad-based community design objectives. Mike earned his Bachelor of Science degree from Oregon State University.
Mike has professionally been performing environmental planning and landscape architectural design for a variety of urban design projects that includes the following categories: Commercial and Industrial; urban habitat creation and enhancement; housing and mixed use development; interpretive displays and signage; port facilities; recreational; stormwater facilities; transportation; urban design and planning; water and wastewater projects; and waterfront development.
 Ignacio Mares
Ignacio Mares studied at the National Polytechnic Institute in his hometown of Mexico City, majoring first in Mechanical Engineering and later in Anthroplogy. He later obtained a degree in Tourism and was a tour guide out of Mexico City for four years. After moving to the United States in 1979 he worked at local automotive repair businesses and attended Portland Community College where he received a degree in Business Administration and Marketing in 1987 and established his own automotive repair business, I'm Service in 1988.
Ignacio has been actively involved in community affairs in the Portland region, including the annual Explorando el Columbia Slough celebration, an environmental outreach program for the Hispanic community in the Columbia Slough watershed. He also assisted with creating a Spanish language translation of Exploring the Columbia Slough brochure. Ignacio has worked with affordable housing programs in Aloha and Hillsboro, providing information on cultural differences between U. S. and Mexican holiday celebrations and assisted the Ballet Folklorico develop programs for exhibitions around the state of Oregon. His personal goal is to promote the integration and social development of the Hispanic community in their new homeland, while maintaining their cultural identity. He joined the Institute's board because he's also dedicated to connecting the Hispanic community to parks and nature in the city.
 Tom Liptan
Tom Liptan is a registered Landscape Architect and Environmental Specialist for the City of Portland, OR, Bureau of Environmental Services, Sustainable Stormwater Management Program. Tom has had a large impact on the research and development of new urban design techniques, codes and policies in the city. The success and recognition of these approaches has spread internationally, largely due to his lecturing at conferences in Sweden, Denmark, England, New Zealand and many cities throughout North America. In 2004 the U.S. Embassy in Denmark sponsored his participation at the Union of Baltic Cities Environmental Workshops, for cities preparing to enter the European Union. Liptan has assisted numerous municipalities, developers, consultants, multi-state corporations and government agencies with acceptance of Ecoroofs and other Landscape Approaches used for stormwater management and healthy city development. He has presented papers at several universities and symposiums, including Harvard University, School of Design and UCLA Department of Environmental Engineering. His work has been recognized in various media, and he has received several achievement awards. He is contributor of; Handbook of Water Sensitive Planning and Design, Robert France ed. (Lewis Publishers, 2002) and Green Roofs, Ecological Design and Construction, Earth Pledge, Siena Chrisman, ed. (Schiffer Publishing Ltd. 2005).
 Kelly Punteney
Kelly Punteney served for nearly 36 years as the parks, trails and greenways planner/developer for the Vancouver-Clark Parks and Recreation Department. A graduate of the University of Oregon with degrees in Landscape Architecture and Parks & Recreation Management & Planning, he spent his final year studying urban trails and greenways in Western Europe. He was employed by the City of Vancouver in 1971 as an intern landscape architect and planner and was assigned to design, plan and manage many notable programs including the Columbia River Waterfront Renaissance Vision Plan which won the National Waterfront Centers Planning Award in 1993 and led to a nationally renowned waterfront trail. More recently he coordinated the completion of the Burnt Bridge Creek Greenway including eight miles of urban trail.
In the early 1990s he joined a team of professionals in designing and building 34 new or remodeled schools in the Vancouver School District. In 1997 Kelly was named Cultural Division Manager for the Vancouver-Clark Parks and Recreation Department, directing the historic and arts program for the city and county. He was also part of the team that developed the Fort Vancouver National Historic Reserve Partnership. During that time he managed the O. O. Howard House reconstruction on Officers Row.
In 2000 he turned his attention to the city and county trails and greenways programs and from 2003-05 supervised the City of Vancouver Urban Forestry Program. The latest project which he managed was the updated Clark County Regional Trail and Bikeway Systems Plan 2006, designated a "Legacy Project of the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial." In November 2005 he produced the Blazing New Trails Symposium, a community event that drew more than 300 professional landscape architects, planners and engineers to the new Vancouver Hilton Hotel and Convention Center to create a 20-year vision plan for a Clark County regional trail system. Kelly has long been a staunch supporter of historic preservation and was actively involved in the Olmsted Centennial celebration in the Portland and Seattle metro areas. Kelly brings a bi-state regional perspective to the Institute's Livable Cities Initiative.
 Jim Rapp
Jim Rapp is Environment and Resource Management Marketing Manager for the Oregon office of HDR Engineering. Jim has been closely involved in urban greenspaces issues in Oregon for over 20 years. As a Portland area city manager for over half that time, he established groundbreaking city policies for floodplain and wetlands preservation, developing a parks and open space strategy that retained 19% of the land within the city limits in natural area and outdoor recreational use, including 400 acres of riparian corridors and floodplain. Jim was also a leader in the successful effort to establish the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, worked actively on the first Metro Greenspaces bond measure, and served on the Washington County Parks Board.
Since leaving city government in 1995, Jim has continued to help further the livability of our region by consulting on open space and salmon recovery issues. He was Executive Director of For the Sake of the Salmon for five years, and has served on the boards of The Wetlands Conservancy and Friends of the Refuge, and as President of the Audubon Society of Portland. Although his birding life list stalled out at 550 species about 5 years ago, he still occasionally dusts off his binoculars; and in 2006 had the great honor of co-chairing the Grand Opening of the Tualatin River Refuge some 16 years after first championing the idea along with local citizens and elected officials
 Ruth Roth
Ruth Roth was born and raised in Portland and early on experienced the magic of Forest Park, Sauvie Island waterways, and neighborhood empty lots with tall trees to climb. She has been a long time supporter of the Coalition for a Livable Future and 1000 Friends of Oregon. Ruth has focused her community efforts to date on historic preservation, low income housing, and social services. She has been a long time board member of Friendly House and serves as the president of Downtown Housing Community Inc. She joined the Institute's board to expand her horizons by working on urban greenspace issues. Ruth has worked for the City of Portland since 1979.
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