Terry O’Day —
President
Environment Now
Terry O’Day is Executive Director of Environment Now, a foundation dedicated to preserving and restoring California’s environment. Founded by the family of Frank and Luanne Wells in 1989, Environment Now is a recognized leader in the environmental movement in California, having supported such successful organizations as BayKeepers and CoastKeepers, Sequoia ForestKeeper, and Energy Independence Now. Its previous two Executive Directors have accepted cabinet positions with the past two California governors.
Mr. O’Day is also past president of EV Rental Cars, a company he co-founded in 1998. It is the only rental company in the United States that offers only environmental vehicles, such as hybrid, natural gas, and electric cars to the general public. The company served over fourteen airports, over 100,000 customers with over 600 cars and earned awards from the Coalition for Clean Air, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Council on Economic Priorities, and Calstart for their work. Prior to founding EV Rental Cars, Terry was responsible for business development and strategic planning for Edison Enterprises, a subsidiary of Edison International.
Terry holds an MBA from The UCLA Anderson School of Management, and completed the Coro Public Affairs Fellows Program in Los Angeles in 1996. He received a Bachelor of Arts with honors in Public Policy at Stanford University, with a thesis proposing to raise the U.S. personal savings rate by applying techniques used in demand management of electricity.
Terry lives with his wife, Tiffany O’Day, in Santa Monica, where he serves as Vice Chair of the city’s planning commission. He is also active with Human Rights Watch and serves as the Board Chairperson of the Coalition for Clean Air, the only statewide advocate for California’s air quality.
Top of pageDiane Forte —
Secretary
Environment Now
Diane Forte is Director of Sustainability Programs at Environment Now, overseeing programs in Air, Urban and Energy. Her initial focus is the link between transportation, air quality and smart growth.
Ms. Forte developed her expertise while working to create a better built environment. As Vice President for a commercial real estate investment company in the Washington, DC area, she advised the president on financial, legal and marketing issues and established and implemented a strategic plan for 60 properties, managed renovation projects and handled all negotiations with banks, partners, attorneys and clients. Prior to this position, she was Assistant Vice President for a joint venture subsidiary of a Washington DC-area bank involved in commercial real estate development. Most recently, she was a professional comedy writer in Los Angeles.
Ms. Forte holds a Master's degree in City and Regional Planning from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics, with an additional concentration in Urban Studies, from Brown University.
Allan Alexander
Former Mayor of Beverly Hills, CA
Allan Alexander has been a long time advocate of public transit and, in particular, the extension of the Redline Subway to the Westside of Los Angeles. Most recently, he was Co-Chair of an 18 member Mass Transit Committee established by the Beverly Hills City Council which recommended to the City Council in January 2007 a route alignment and station locations in Beverly Hills for the proposed Westside extension of the Redline Subway. The Report can be seen by opening the link “City of Beverly Hills Mass Transit Committee Final Report” under Links & Resources on the Home page.
Mr. Alexander is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the School of Economics at Stanford University. Following law school and before entering the practice of law, Mr. Alexander studied at the Graduate School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley and served with the United States Peace Corps in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, S.A. working in community development and teaching law and economics at the University Gabriel Rene Moreno.
Mr. Alexander has been an attorney in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills for many years where he has practiced in business, entertainment and real estate. In addition to his legal work, Mr. Alexander engages in business and real estate enterprises and consults on business, entertainment, real estate and government matters.
Mr. Alexander was elected to the Beverly Hills City Council in April, 1988 for a four-year term. He was Mayor of Beverly Hills in 1990 and 1991. He was re-elected to the City Council in April, 1992 for a second term and served as Mayor in 1995 and 1996.
Mr. Alexander served for five years on the Beverly Hills Planning Commission, including serving as Chairman of the Commission. Mr. Alexander is one of the founders and served as the first President of The Southwest Beverly Hills Homeowners Association. Mr. Alexander currently serves on the Board of Directors and as an Executive Officer of the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce.
Mr. Alexander was a director and served as President of Public Counsel, the public interest law office of the Beverly Hills and Los Angeles Bar Associations. Mr. Alexander has been for more than 20 years a director of Economic Resources Corporation, a non-profit corporation, which owns and operates an industrial park in South Los Angeles and invests in minority owned enterprises in this region of the City. Mr. Alexander currently is a Director of New Directions, a non-profit corporation which develops, owns and operates facilities for homeless veterans in the Los Angeles area.
Additionally, Mr. Alexander served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Business Law Section of the California State Bar, past chairman of the Education Committee of the Business Law Section and a member of the Business Law Advisory Committee to the California Continuing Education of the Bar.
Mr. Alexander is currently a director and executive officer of a Beverly Hills based charitable foundation which makes contributions to organizations and projects principally in the Los Angeles area.
James Watt McCormick
Coalition for Rapid Transit
Jamie McCormick has more than 35 years of experience in developing, managing and constructing real estate. His firm, James McCormick & Company, A Public Trust Commonwealth DeveloperSM, engages in diverse projects. Mr. McCormick is a member of the Urban Land Institute. He has been honored by the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Institute of Architects with their coveted Hon. AIA award and as "Citizen Planner" by the Alumni of the UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. He was elected to membership in Lamda Alpha International, An Honorary Land Economics Society. He is a Life Member of the Sierra Club.
Jamie is also the founding president of the Westside Urban Forum. Mr. McCormick is an urbanist and has written extensively on issues of urban development. In the1990’s, he, Dorothy Green and Abe Falick, as the leadership of the Coalition For Rapid Transit, sued Los Angeles County’s transportation authority to force the inclusion of the Wilshire Red Line in the environmental review for the third phase of the LA Metro project. For further information please visit www.common-wealth.net.
Gloria Ohland
Reconnecting America
Gloria Ohland is Vice President for Communications for Reconnecting America, a national nonprofit organization that works with the public and private sectors to promote best practices in development-oriented transit and transit-oriented development (TOD). Reconnecting America works in regions around the country to provide a national perspective and in-depth understanding of the challenges to building TOD and the strategies that work best to overcome them. She is co-author and co-editor of the award-winning “Street Smart: Streetcars and Cities in the 21st Century,” “The New Transit Town: Best Practices in TOD,” published by Island Press in 2004, and “Hidden in Plain Sight: Capturing the Demand for Housing Near Transit,” a national market study funded by the Federal Transit Administration and released in 2005. Previously she was a journalist, writing about everything from fashion to politics.
Mott Smith
Civic Enterprise
Mott Smith has built his career crafting original real estate solutions in both the private and public sectors. He co-founded Civic Enterprise (CE) in 2003 with Brian Albert to plan and build innovative, replicable, socially-conscious projects in emerging neighborhoods. CE’s planning practice works with municipalities, redevelopment agencies, community organizations and private companies to created higher-quality urban environments through regulatory reform and community-based infrastructure investments. Current projects include implementation of community-based parking strategies in several Los Angeles neighborhoods.
CE’s real estate development work taps innovative design and regulatory tools to create pedestrian-friendly, architecturally-rich projects that are accessible to entry-level homebuyers, moderate income families and small businesspeople. Current projects include what is anticipated to be one of the first City of Los Angeles “Townhouse Ordinance” projects—compact single family homes on fee-simple small lots—to go to market.
Immediately prior to forming Civic Enterprise, Mott was Acting Director of Planning for the Los Angeles Unified School District, where he helped launch the District's $1.6 billion Phase II school construction program. His work there expanded the application of joint-ventures, alternative construction delivery methods, mixed-use residential, and public-private real estate development models to projects in and around public schools.
Before joining LAUSD, Mott developed affordable housing and served as founding Executive Director of New Schools-Better Neighborhoods, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that develops creative, community-based solutions for school and housing development. He was earlier the editor/business manager of two industry publications, The Planning Report and Metro Investment Report. He has written extensively on development and planning, serving as a contributing author of the Solano Press publication California School Facilities Planning as well as the Congress for New Urbanism’s Los Angeles: Building the Polycentric Region. He has penned numerous articles on community development and parking for periodicals including “Planetizen.”
He is President of the Westside Urban Forum, a member of the Urban Land Institute's Los Angeles Executive Council, and sits on the boards of the Transportation & Land Use Collaborative and Hollywood Arts. Mott received a Master of Real Estate Development from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics from UCLA.
Denny Zane — Executive Director
Denny Zane is Executive Director of the Subway to the Sea and a principal at Urban Dimensions, a public affairs and strategic services company. He is formerly the Mayor of Santa Monica and Executive Director of the Coalition for Clean Air.
Denny began his advocacy career as co-manager of the Santa Monica rent control campaigns of the late 1970’s. He was elected a Santa Monica City councilmember in 1981 and mayor in 1988. During his tenure, he spearheaded the revitalization of the Third Street Promenade as well as Santa Monica’s nationally recognized urban environmental programs, in particular its alternative vehicle fleet program. He also formulated much of Santa Monica’s smart growth land use policies and its affordable housing programs. During his tenure as mayor of Santa Monica, Denny led the campaign to convince the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission to acquire the Exposition right-of-way, where the Exposition Light Rail Line is now being built.
While Executive Director at the Coalition for Clean Air, Denny initiated the successful campaign to convince the Los Angeles County MTA to stop purchasing diesel buses and to instead purchase natural gas buses. Subsequently, he founded the California Truck Working Group with the late Carl Moyer and the California Trucking Association. Together they co-created the Carl Moyer Program for financing alternatives to diesel trucks and other diesel technologies, ultimately birthed by legislation authored by then Speaker of the Assembly Antonio Villaraigosa.
As a consultant at Gladstein & Associates and Urban Dimensions, Denny designed and implemented the campaign to build a regional coalition to stop the expansion of LAX and to promote a regional airport solution for Southern California. Working with Wendy James and the Better World Group, Denny helped organize the constituency campaigns for California’s Zero Emission Vehicle program and Assemblywoman Fran Pavley’s landmark legislation to reduce greenhouse gases and retard global warming, AB 1493 and AB 32.
Denny lives in Santa Monica with his wife, Louise Mainville, and son, Justin-Alexander Zane. He holds a BA degree from Occidental College in Los Angeles.