Donna Gerber

Donna Gerber retired in 2009 after a long and varied career. Donna graduated from UC Santa Barbara in sociology and started her career as a social worker. She later worked for several labor unions as an advocate, contract negotiator, and educator for Registered Nurses and healthcare workers. Donna was elected as County Supervisor to the Contra Costa Board of Supervisors in 1996 and again in 2000. In 2016 she was appointed to the California Board of Registered Nursing by the Speaker of the California State Assembly.

In addition to worker advocacy, Donna Gerber distinguished herself as one of the most effective leaders in the Bay Area on issues as diverse as smart growth, environmental conservation, quality health care and “Zero Tolerance” policies against domestic violence. She is currently on the Board of Directors of Greenbelt Alliance, a non-profit organization in the San Francisco Bay Area that promotes mixed use urban development and rural conservation through urban growth boundaries. Donna also served on the Board of the National Charrette Institute, a national non-profit organization that provides specialized training to elected officials, professional consultants and community leaders.

Marla Hollander

Marla Hollander currently serves as the National Partnership Manager for Voices for Healthy Kids— a joint initiative of the American Heart Association and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to reverse the epidemic of youth obesity in the US. She has worked with hundreds of local and national organizations to support a wide variety of community-based initiatives and national health-oriented projects. Her work focuses on creating healthy places, spaces and policies that “make the healthy choice the easy choice.”

Marla was the founding director of Active Living Leadership, a multi-million dollar national initiative that supports elected and appointed officials at both the state and local level as they advance healthy community design policies to enable more healthy lifestyles. As a former member of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program team, she was a primary developer of the Active Living concept and supported the creation of the initial Active Living grant portfolio in excess of $100 million dollars. Marla has also held positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Cancer Society. 

Prior to her health-specific work, she was a project manager at a social marketing and communications firm.  Marla has volunteered with many not-for profit organizations, including Healthy School Food Maryland, Sarasota’s Community Health Improvement Partnership (CHIP), Move San Diego (now called Circulate San Diego), the regional planning stakeholders group for San Diego’s Regional Planning Agency (SANDAG) and the California Commission on Aging. 

Marla Hollander received her BS in business management and marketing from Tulane University and her MPH in behavioral sciences/health education from Emory University.  She was raised in Princeton, New Jersey and currently resides in the Washington, DC area with her family.

Peter Katz

Peter Katz is the founder and CEO of SmartGO. In this role he oversees the organization’s programs, operations and policy initiatives.

Prior to launching SmartGO, Peter was instrumental in the formation of the New Urbanism movement, which the New York Times called “the most important phenomenon to emerge in American architecture in the post-Cold War era.” Katz served as founding executive director of the Congress for the New Urbanism, an organization that recently convened its twenty-seventh annual meeting.  He’s also author of a seminal book on the subject—The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (McGraw-Hill, 1994).

Peter was the lead advisor on the Contra Costa Centre Transit Village, a Transit Oriented Development in Northern California. The project, stalled for twenty years due to NIMBY opposition, employed a range of new urbanism best practices and gained municipal approval in just 18 months. It received the American Planning Association’s 2012 National Award for Implementation.

Peter Katz has served in several public-sector planning roles. He worked as a senior planner in Oceanside, California, as Director of Smart Growth and Urban Planning in Sarasota County, Florida and as Director of Planning in Arlington County, Virginia. That work has given him a unique perspective on the challenges faced by local government as it attempts to accommodate new preferences in community planning using decades-old policy guidance and regulatory approaches.

Dan Reed

Dan Reed is an urban planner, writer, and advocate for stronger, more sustainable communities. Trained in architecture and planning, he has helped communities across the US turn existing streets into safer, more attractive and enjoyable public spaces.

Dan’s work spans both the public and private sectors, including advising an at-large elected official in Montgomery County, Maryland on land-use and transportation matters and working for several years as a planning consultant. In the latter role, Dan developed design guidelines for the Grand Rapids, Michigan, Vital Streets Plan. That plan was recognized by the American Planning Association, receiving its National Planning Achievement Award in 2018. He has also participated in multiple design charrettes and workshops. In that capacity Dan headed up the urban design component for a proposed transit center in Oneonta, New York and conducted a street design demonstration in Miami, Florida that set the stage for implementation of a road diet in that community.

As a commentator on urban planning and design issues, Dan Reed has written for national publications including the New York Times, Architect, and City Lab (Atlantic), as well as regional media outlets including Greater Greater Washington, and Washingtonian Magazine, where his "Cityscape" column appears monthly.

A resident of Montgomery County, Maryland, Dan is active in the community through his blog Just up the Pike and on the board of Action Committee for Transit, an organization that was instrumental in advancing the Purple Line, a 16-mile light-rail line currently under construction. In 2018, Dan received the Community Hero Award from the Coalition for Smarter Growth for more than a decade of civic activism and engagement.

Dan is licensed to practice real estate in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. He received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Maryland, and a Master of City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael Replogle

Michael Replogle, a senior advisor to governments and corporations, is globally recognized as a leading transportation expert. He is founder, director emeritus, and past president of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), which promotes sustainable and equitable cities worldwide. He is campaigning to reform America’s broken transportation planning and project approval process by seeking more honest analysis and disclosure of investment impacts on environmental justice, climate, and health. Replogle advises Earthjustice on transportation agency action to respond to the climate crisis. He advises an electric vehicle charging start-up, itselectric, as they roll out on-street chargers powered by buildings in diverse urban neighborhoods. Recently Replogle served as an expert witness in support of thirteen youth plaintiffs who won a historic legal settlement with Hawaii’s Department of Transportation to ensure more timely progress in decarbonizing transportation by 2045.

From 2015-21, Replogle was Deputy Commissioner for Policy for the New York City Department of Transportation. There, his Vision Zero work cut pedestrian deaths by 40%. His decentralized, scalable Open Restaurants program design repurposed 10,000 parking spaces and saved 100,000 restaurant industry jobs during COVID. He oversaw CitiBike program expansion from 6,000 to 40,000 shared bikes and developed innovative freight, micromobility, carsharing, and electrification initiatives and plans.

In 2012, as co-founder and chair of the Partnership on Sustainable Low Carbon Transportation, he won a $175 billion 10-year commitment for more sustainable transport from the 8 largest multilateral development banks with reporting and monitoring. In 17 years as Transportation Director for the Environmental Defense Fund, Replogle managed campaigns to shift investment from roads to transit, walking, cycling, and Smart Growth and to help cities including New York, Portland (Oregon), Denver, Washington, DC, Mexico City, and Beijing enhance transportation planning and development of Bus Rapid Transit and congestion pricing. He spent a decade as transportation coordinator for Montgomery County, Maryland, pioneering sustainable transport scenario planning and innovations in transportation models. He has graduate civil and urban engineering and sociology degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He recently served as an Assistant Professor at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School for Public Service and as a Visiting Professor at the China Academy of Transportation Sciences in Beijing.