Keynote Address for 2023 Summit Friday: Revitalizing a Rural Community - 1,000 feet at a time

 

 

Since 1997, the City of Warsaw has revitalized the community on limited financial resources.  To off set the limited finances, the community carved out a niche of writing grants and training employees to perform various construction tasks to be used as the match for the grants.  The grants, combined with city personnel, constructed an award-winning trail network that was built about 1000 feet at time to allow for quality over quantity.  These efforts lead to a successful award of a 2023 RAISE grant that will convert Warsaw’s three major roadways to Complete Streets—thereby connecting the entire community to the downtown and the trail network. 

 

 

Randy Pogue

Randy Pogue, City Administrator, City of Warsaw. Randy Pogue has been with the City of Warsaw for 26 years and has overseen all construction and revitalization efforts. He was originally hired as City Planner and Economic Developer and has written all the grants that have led the revitalization of the community. With his promotion to Administrator, he retained his original duties.

 

Before his career with the City of Warsaw in 1997, Randy had 18 years of construction experience. His constructions experience included heavy construction techniques. After his construction career, he returned to CMSU and received a degree in Tourism Planning and Development. For grant in-kind matches, he trained the city crews to perform the construction skills needed to develop the award-winning trails network.

 

Charles LePage

Charles LePage, P.E., LePage Engineering, LLC, On-Call City Engineer, City of Warsaw. Charles is the On-Call City Engineer for the City of Warsaw and assisted Randy with his RAISE Grant applications for 2023, as well as many of the previous years and versions of the major federal infrastructure grants. He is a professional civil engineer with 35 years of experience in planning, design, and management of public infrastructure projects. Charles has provided diverse engineering services for Warsaw, Missouri since 2003 and is the on-call city engineer. Previous and current projects include complete streets, trails, lighting, parking lots, retaining walls, drinking water, sanitary sewer, and stormwater improvements. Charles is president of LePage Engineering, LLC.

 

Lauren Moore

Lauren Moore is a professional engineer in the water resources field for Burns & McDonnell with 11 years of policy, planning, analysis, design, and construction experience. Her focus has been in stormwater management and green infrastructure, including the appropriate stormwater and civil infrastructure policy, design tools, and funding mechanisms to build resilient, sustainable, and maintainable systems.

 

 

Kylie Clark is an urban planner focused on implementing holistic stormwater management across policies and projects for municipalities and other agencies. In Kylie’s time with Burns & McDonnell, her work has included policy writing, development code review, grant writing, MS4 permit compliance, and green infrastructure planning from the project level to the watershed scale. Kylie holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies and a master’s in urban planning, both from the University of Kansas.